Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice
1970
Screenprint on paper
77.4 x 58.5 cm
Presented by the artist’s daughters, Rachel Kidd and Sarah Bowness, through the Trustees of the Barbara Hepworth Estate and the Art Fund, 2011 © Bowness. Photography Jerry Hardman-Jones

Having made her first lithograph in 1958, Hepworth was encouraged to return to printmaking in 1969 by Herbert Simon, the Director of the Curwen Press.

The popular and affordable medium of printmaking may have been a draw for Hepworth, making it possible, as Simon pointed out, ‘for people of modest means to own something by Barbara Hepworth’.

Winter Solstice is from the second complete suite that she made, called collectively ‘Opposing Forms’. The title refers to the shortest day of the year, an event celebrated by many early cultures. As Hepworth noted to Nicholson in the 1960s: ‘I’m a pagan at heart.’