Curator Eleanor Clayton On the Race to Keep a National Treasure in Britain

July 25, 2025 / Sophie Clearwater /

Clayton says the campaign has drawn widespread support from arts institutions, artists, and thousands of individual contributors moved by the urgency of the effort. Photograph by Betty Saunders, courtesy of the Hepworth Wakefield

A West Yorkshire museum, The Hepworth Wakefield, made international headlines last month when it announced that it would launch a fundraising campaign to keep a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) in the country. Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red (1943) sold for £3.8 million at Christie’s last year to a private buyer, but the British government placed an export bar on the work, giving the institution until August to match the sum the buyer paid. The deadline approaches, but the fundraising page launched by the museum and its partner, the Art Fund, has less than £440,000 left to raise. We caught up with Eleanor Clayton, curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, to hear more about the campaign.

Your efforts to keep Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red in England are quite unique! How did this idea come about?
Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red has been in private collections since it was made by Hepworth in 1943, and opportunities for the public to view it were rare. After the sculpture was sold at Christie’s last year, it was placed under a temporary export bar by the U.K. government to give a U.K. museum the chance to acquire it, for everyone to enjoy. The export bar is only through 27 August this year, and the museum would need to raise the full sale price of £3.8 million.
The Hepworth Wakefield is the ideal home for this incredible sculpture, but we have no acquisition budget and depend entirely on philanthropy to grow the collection, so I did not think it would be a possibility for us initially. But one of Barbara Hepworth’s granddaughters wrote to encourage us to pursue it. This led to positive conversations with the Art Fund and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which were so excited by the prospect that I began to think we might be able to do it! So far, we have received major support from those organisations and others such as the Headley Trust, alongside over 2,000 donations from members of the public.

Why does this work merit such an effort? Why is it so important?
Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red is one of Hepworth’s most important and most beautiful sculptures. It is my personal favourite. It was made after Hepworth had already made a name for herself as a pioneer of abstract carving in the 1930s, becoming friends with and exhibiting alongside other great modern artists like Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian and Alexander Calder. In 1939, just as she was establishing her career—with her first solo exhibition of geometric abstract carving in 1937—World War II was declared. To escape the impending Blitz, Hepworth left London and moved to Cornwall with her family, taking just a handful of tools and the plaster prototype for this work. In the first years of the war, Hepworth had no materials or space in which to carve, and spent her days looking after her children, spending her nights drawing abstract, crystalline forms, what she called her ‘sculptures born in 2 dimensions.’
In 1942 she moved with her family into a larger house with a space for her to have a studio, and began carving and developing her ideas for sculpture with colour—both in a series of smaller works, initially in plaster, and then in wood, creating this piece Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red in 1943. This period marks the beginning of both colour and strings appearing in her work—the latter becoming something for which she is famous. She described in 1952, “the colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills,” connecting her sculpture to the experience of landscape, particularly the British coastline. These ideas would develop in the 1940s, with seminal painted stringed works such as Pelagos (Tate), and beyond.

And why do you feel it’s important to you and your supporters that it remains in England?
Hepworth is one of the most important British artists, at the forefront of several avant-garde movements in Britain and a pioneer of modern abstract art. This work, in particular, presents the engagement with the British landscape in her work. It shows her responding to the Cornish landscape, which in turn she had been drawn to through its resonance with the Yorkshire landscape in which she grew up. As she noted, “the barbaric and magical countryside of rocky hills, fertile valleys, and dynamic coastline of West Penwith has provided me with a background and a soil which compare in strength with those of my childhood in the West Riding.” She would later reflect, “perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood, and one spends the rest of one’s life trying to say it … all my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures … the hills were sculptures, the roads defined the form.”
Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red is a crucial work in relating both to Hepworth’s importance to the development of geometric abstraction in Britain—and internationally—in the 1930s and the lyrical evocation of landscape which would develop in her work during the 1940s and 50s. It also reveals her astonishing resilience and drive to work in adverse circumstances relating to British social history; the struggle of a woman (and mother) artist in the 1940s to combine art-making while juggling childcare and domestic chores, and the persistence of creativity at a time of national and global crisis. Being in a public collection will ensure that these fascinating and essential stories around the sculpture can be made visible, enabling us to fully celebrate Hepworth’s remarkable life and work, as well as making one of the most striking examples of Hepworth’s sculpture available to the public.

There’s been a vogue lately for greats of art history being revived via what the New York Times recently described as the “rediscovery industrial complex.” What’s your impression of Hepworth’s current status with curators and collectors?
Hepworth was an outlier in managing to be very successful during her lifetime in the male-dominated world of modern art and particularly modern sculpture. Despite this, she noted the challenges she constantly encountered through the sexist attitudes within key institutions, dealers and the press. For example, even as late as 1964, she was in a group show at Tate of the best art of the past decade and was one of only eight women out of 170 artists featured. She stated in 1966, “there is still a deep prejudice against women in the arts.”
Recent scholarship on Hepworth—and this is something I particularly focus on in my book Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life—acknowledges the role of her personal life, passions and interests within her work, beyond the formalist narrative that had previously been dominant. As another case in point, we are now entering a time where an artist’s childcare responsibilities—and the inspiration they can draw from this—are seen as valid subjects within the conversation around creativity. There has been a huge rise in awareness and celebration of women artists recently and an acknowledgement of the many factors that prevented many from achieving the same reputations and sale prices as their male peers, which led flourishing careers to be lost to history or to be overlooked entirely.
Hepworth is only now beginning to receive the international recognition she deserves, with a European touring exhibition “Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life” currently at Fondation Maeght and traveling to the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso in Münster in November 2025. But there has not been a monographic institutional show in North America since 1994. Perhaps this is overdue!

You’ve lined up an impressive roster of British artists to support this effort. What is making them fight for this?
We are delighted that so many contemporary artists have come out to support our campaign, from Rachel Whiteread and Anish Kapoor to Richard Deacon and Veronica Ryan. This demonstrates the significance of Hepworth within British art history and her enduring legacy, as well as the importance of this sculpture in particular. At The Hepworth Wakefield, we have a changing programme of modern and contemporary art alongside our permanent collection, and I have seen many artists engage with Hepworth—her material practice, her philosophy, the way in which she engaged with the world and translated that into her art—all these aspects continue to resonate with artists today. It would be amazing to bring Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red into this continuing conversation between past and present artistic creativity.