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Barbara Hepworth at Fondation Maeght in 2025

Updated: Oct 20, 2024

This year the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul De Vence, established in 1964, has marked its 60th anniversary with the unveiling of new exhibition spaces for its permanent collection.

A 500-square-meter extension was added to the existing 850 square meters of exhibition space, enabling the presentation of more ambitious projects related to the artists in the collection.

A retrospective exhibition dedicated to British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) is scheduled for the summer of 2025.

Barbara Hepworth

Figure (Walnut), 1964

bronze

Courtesy Archives Fondation Maeght


The forthcoming exhibition will mark only the third retrospective dedicated to her work by French art institutions, following the first held at Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nancy in 2006 and the second at Musée Rodin in Paris in 2019-2020. Despite her substantial influence on 20th-century art and an international career that included representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1950, as well as participating in the 5th São Paulo Biennial in 1959, Barbara Hepworth remains little known in France.


But what are the reasons for that?


Except for the Fondation Maeght, Hepworth's works have never been purchased by French museums or private foundations (whereas, instead, the MoMA in New York acquired its first Hepworth in 1936), and during her lifetime, she was likely overshadowed by more prominently promoted male colleagues in France, such as Henry Moore or Jean Arp.

In addition, as Sophie Bowness, the art historian and Hepworth's granddaughter, pointed out on the occasion of the first Parisian retrospective, "British art in the 20th century in general has been misrepresented in French collections, with a very selective representation. There are exhibitions about Hockney, Bacon, and Freud, but there are whole swathes of British art that are not known among the general museum- and gallery-visiting French public."


With their radical aesthetic, research on material and focus on the relationship between figure and landscape, man and nature, Barbara Hepworth's sculptures still resonate with a contemporary audience.


Her art market is also in very good health.

An insight published this spring by ArtPrice has reported that the British artist is steadily the second most valuable woman sculptor after Louise Bourgeois: "Barbara Hepworth’s market began to readjust around ten years ago and in 2016 she joined one of the most significant rankings in the art market, our Top 100 global artists by annual auction turnover. Since then, Hepworth’s prices have evolved fast enough to bring her close to the Top 50, a rare thing for a female artist. In 2023, she was ahead of Jean Dubuffet, Keith Haring and Richard Prince after the sale of 74 works during the year, including the famous The Family of Man: Ancestor II. At the end of 2023, the sale of her works at auction had generated $35 million compared with less than a million annually at the beginning of the 2000s. In the space of a generation, her annual turnover has therefore multiplied by 35, and the progression may well not be over."


Further details at the following link:




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