Hepworth’s “Winged Figure”: 50th anniversary

“Sculpture to me is primitive, religious, passionate and magical—always affirmative.”

So wrote Barbara Hepworth (1903–75), perhaps the finest female sculptor the world has ever seen. There are certain areas in the arts where women feel naturally at home. Some where they take over and feminize. In fiction and on the radio, for example, it is getting difficult to hear the male voice. But not in sculpture. Hepworth is a lone wolf.

Her life was in some ways typical of a person of her era, temperament and milieu: birth into a respectable family, the unelashing of an uncontrollable artistic spirit, revelatory trips to Italy and Paris, meeting with Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Moholy-Nagy, the heady politics of 1930s left-wing Hampstead, strong views on the Spanish Civil War, marriages made and marriages broken. And children. Four of them, including a set of triplets. It is no surprise that such a driven, work-obsessed, cerebral woman should have struggled. She was not a militant feminist: the maternal interested her. But still, it must have been abominably tough. Husbands in those days were not much help on the domestic front. Indomitable, ambitious and never mellowing, she ended her life alone and ill, and died in an accidental fire at her home, very probably ignited by her own cigarette.

Hepworth seems to have felt herself to be permanently mantled in the shadow of Henry Moore, her contemporary, friend and for many years a fellow apostle of Abstraction. Moore, however, found his ultimate inspiration in the human figure, which may well explain his wide appeal. Hepworth, once she had abandoned figurative forms in the 1930s, never went back—except once, in her Madonna and Child in St Ives church, a mourning piece for her eldest son, killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-three.

This month, and until November, the John Lewis department store on Oxford Street, West London, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of Hepworth’s Winged Figure, which is attached to the building’s exterior wall and is passed by hundreds of people every day. “I think one of our universal dreams,” Hepworth said, “is to move in air and water without the resistance of our human legs. I wanted to evoke this sense of freedom. If the Winged Figure in Oxford Street gives people a sense of being airborne I will be very happy.” I am not sure that it really does. It reminds me more of a scoliosis brace or a corset, something redolent of restriction and struggle, filled with the tension between the desired and the achievable. Perhaps that is entirely appropriate.

For more information about the pop-up exhibits at John Lewis, organized in conjunction with the Hepworth Wakefield, see here.

For more about Barbara Hepworth and her art, the visit the Artsy.net Hepworth page.

Tying the Knot in Urfa

Yes, but which one? The Spanish, the Persian or the Turkish? When it comes to carpets there is plenty of choice and although I spent a week at it, I am not too sure which one it was.

In the workshop with Songül and Mehmet

Carpet making has a long tradition in Turkey. It harks back to distant times when the ancestors of today’s settled and urbanised Turks were roaming the steppes with huge flocks of sheep. In a way, carpet-making is to sheep rearing what cheese and yoghurt are to milk production: a way to deal with huge surpluses—and a very successful one indeed. Even if mechanised production is the norm in the West, the old ways have not disappeared here and local municipalities are keen to preserve and encourage the tradition. That’s how I found myself knocking at the door of Urfa’s Belediye carpet workshop in the northern part of town, in an area set aside for crafts including mosaic, leather, woodwork and ceramics.

Carpet-making is a female occupation. In the long winter days when agricultural tasks are less demanding, women and girls spend months at it. They prepare the wool in the late summer/autumn, when they can be seen fully clothed, waist high in the water, beating the lanolin out of it with big sticks. Then they dry it and dye it and, come the winter, it is time to weave it. When they are done, the men step in. A van collects the production of an area and takes them off to be sold. Distant Istanbul is a favourite destination because of the size of the market. The best buyers will snap up a whole vanload at once, no questions asked. That way they can ensure a steady supply.

This does not mean that men are unable to make carpets. They run the shops and do the repairs between clients.

There are two main categories of carpet: kilims, which are woven, and the knotted variety, made of either wool or silk. In the workshop I attended I saw all of them but for practical reasons I ended up with a wool carpet. Normally, carpet-making is a one-woman job. You really need a very wide carpet to accommodate two people working side by side. Fortunately I found Songül, halfway through a huge carpet (well over 2.5m wide) destined for the foreign market, apparently Spain. She kindly agreed to be my mentor and put up with my Turkish.

It was clear from the outset that I had the wrong kind of hand: too many fingers or not enough of them to twist a strand of wool quickly and efficiently through the warp. To start with I was using both hands, which caused some hilarity: the women in the workshop could do it with just one finger, two at most. Anyway, I got better with practice and graduated to using the scissors to trim the pile after each complete run. The scissors look like an instrument of torture, which indeed they are. They are huge and heavy and have to be used with two hands, one at each end, and even then I got cramps. I was better at operating the machinery of the loom between runs. I quickly learned to pay attention to the pattern because each mistake means unpicking all the way back (I got some experience of that as well).

There must have been something like two dozen looms in the workshop, of various sizes. Some women came in for the whole day with their preschool children and we all took it in turns to mind them. Teenage girls dropped in after school to work on their projects. Whether they will want to continue making carpets later on, when they calculate their hourly rate, is an interesting point to debate. Carpet-making is a very slow process, even when you are good at it. Together with Songül we completed about four centimetres of our big carpet in five days. She was quick, very quick (my ‘contribution’ probably slowed her down); even so, she will take over a year to finish that one carpet.

So what did I learn from five days of carpet-making? Female companionship for sure. I was welcomed with unquestioning friendliness and made to feel part of the group. We shared food, laughter and silence with the occasional clanking of the looms and the ever-present Turkish (or Kurdish?) music wafting from someone’s transistor radio. Dancing around the looms even broke out at some point.

It also gave me an appreciation of the work itself. I have always been a keen carpet buyer, ready to strike a bargain, haggling and softening vendors’ hearts with my knowledge of the language. Turkish-speaking tourists are a rarity in Turkey and a source of wonder and awe.

But if I ever buy another carpet (though my small house has no clear floor space left) I will probably haggle less—or possibly not at all.

By Paola Pugsley, author of Blue Guide Eastern Turkey and Blue Guide Southeastern Turkey, available now for download.

Venice and the Politcs of Washing

W.D. Howells, Venetian Life, first published in 1866, and Polly Coles, The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice, Robert Hale, 2013.

A recent review of Polly Coles’ The Politics of Washing claimed that it was the most perceptive book on Venice since W.D. Howells’ Venetian Life. In a field that includes J.G. Links’ Venice for Pleasure and Jan (then James) Morris’ Venice, that is a bold claim for both of them but it gave me the excuse for reading Howells for the first time as well as exploring the ‘political’ challenge of how far a newly arrived resident can pull out their underwear (and which garments) on a backstreet (backcanal?) Venetian washing line.

W.D. Howells had worked for Abraham Lincoln’s campaign team and his reward was a year as consul in Venice, at that time under Austrian occupation. He is well educated and curious, but perhaps rather brash and impatient with a city where no one seems to do much. There is, for a sturdy Protestant such as himself, far too great a reliance on the Madonna breaking through the clouds and sorting out calamities and plagues. He soon settles into the routine, however, and when called upon to provide the annual report of ‘Commercial Transactions’ feels ‘a vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted tranquillity.’ None of his compatriots seems to need his help and so he is free to observe daily life and to battle with the intricate personality of Giovanna, his housekeeper, she of the capacious pockets where unwieldy keys, lumps of beeswax, pictures of the Virgin and an illegible account book jostle with each other. Giovanni’s growing power over Howells and his wife is linked to the diminishing number of hours she attends them, but so entangled are they by her family and hangers-on that it is only by moving to a completely different part of the city that they can escape her web.

Howells was writing for an American audience, for most of whom Venice must have been a fantasy, and he exaggerates the picturesque and the ruffians. Yet he has literary skill and his account of arriving in Venice by night and his evocation of the coldness of a Venetian winter are haunting. Despite some good passages and insights, however, too much of the book is a mishmash: some history, interrupted by comments on the hierarchies of society, then a discussions of gondoliers, all of it without really penetrating what makes Venice survive as a city. His best chapter is perhaps his last, written seven years later when he was back in Massachusetts, where he describes how he camped out in lodgings in part of the Palazzo Giustiniani, in a fine position on the Grand Canal. One of the delights that all the male residents enjoy is swimming in the canal when the new tide brings fresh water. There is a more measured and reflective tone in this chapter, something that is often missing in the jumble of what has gone before. Overall, I would certainly rate Howells well below Morris, who is much more sensitive to the nuances of Venetian life.

In The Politics of Washing, Polly Coles, the English partner of an Italian violin-maker, cannot escape being totally immersed in the life of the city (in more ways than one as the floods intensify). There is the education system to negotiate for a start (the couple have four children) and she finds it distant and often sterile for her lively offspring. I never knew that there was quite so much Latin and Greek in the syllabus of the liceo classico. The conventions by which parents accept responsibility for their wayward children and apologise for them even though it might be the inadequacy of their teachers that is to blame is beautifully explored.

The fresh tides here are not those from the lagoon but from the massive influxes of tourists and much of Coles’ life is spent dragging her trolley through crowded streets and missing appointments because the vaporetti are too full for the residents to fit onto them. Coles shares my own belief that it is only in the early morning that one can fully appreciate Venice today. I really enjoyed this book, not only because Coles writes so well but also because she is sensitive to the people, both native and foreign, who surround her all too closely on a daily basis. How far can one risk one’s partner’s Y-fronts fluttering down into one’s neighbour’s garden and what would be the social consequences she would have to live with if they did? What are the conventions in using ‘tu’ and ‘lei’ a) in a conversation with a friendly Italian woman 20 years her junior and b) during a blazing row with her partner when ‘lei’ seems justified to express distance and disdain but turns out to be so inappropriate that it makes him collapse into laughter?

No one should go to Venice without reading this book as it will, perhaps, make them more aware that beyond the burger bars and overpriced pasta, there are people who have known the city since birth but have now become strangers in it, as the privates spaces and the traditional shops that used to serve them dwindle. Though Coles is a newcomer herself, she acts as a sympathetic champion of those who are being pushed to the margins by the cruisers depositing their ‘See Venice in two hours’ crowds. Their social network soon tells them exactly how alta the acqua is, which passageways are still open and where one can browse books in one’s wellies (stivali impermeabili), as the less nifty tourists flounder about in the swirling waters. As the artificially contrived Carnival gets under way in Piazza San Marco, the rowing clubs set off in the opposite direction, with Coles and her friend Jane negotiating a flat-bottomed sanpierota crammed with flags and children, to what is essentially a retaliatory fancy-dress village fête for the locals.

Less visible are the other residents, those who have drifted in from the east to work as carers, and who have only each other to sustain themselves now that children and family are far away. They are the new representatives of the East, the Schiavoni of the 21st century, a reminder that Venice has always been awash with foreigners—although most now stay only long enough to buy their Carnival masks and gelati before clambering on board their cruise ships again. This is a sobering book in many ways, a narrative of a self-destructing and sclerotic city where the ancient landing-posts are all too often submerged. I am happy to place it alongside James Morris’ own memoir of living with a family in Venice in the 1950s (now reissued and updated by the author)—but what a difference sixty years has made to the magic of the city.

Reviewed by Charles Freeman