Barbara Hepworth had quite a night at Christie’s in London on Wednesday. Three of her sculptures were the top-selling lots in the auction house’s modern British and Irish art evening sale, including one that set a new record for a unique work by the British artist.
The star of the evening was Sculpture with Colour (Eos), from 1946, which sold for £6.19 million ($8.3 million), within its £5 million–£8 million estimate. The sculpture, carved from a single block of pale Hopton Wood stone, takes its name from the Greek goddess of dawn. (All sale prices include buyer’s premium.)
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Two more Hepworth sculptures followed. Figure (Sunion), from 1960, brought in £4.12 million ($5.5 million), while Sea Form (Porthmeor), from 1958, sold for £1.54 million ($2.1 million). Together, the three works accounted for more than half of the evening’s £23.1 million ($30.8 million) total.
The sale was up 30 percent from the equivalent auction last year, according to Christie’s, and Hepworth wasn’t the only artist setting records. Walter Sickert’s The Horses of St Mark’s, Venice (1901) sold for £550,400 ($734,000) after more than six minutes of bidding, setting a new auction record for the painter. New records were also set for Gluck, whose Chromatic (1932) sold for £499,200 ($665,000); Euan Uglow, whose Pyramid (1993–96) fetched £793,600 ($1.06 million); and Eduardo Paolozzi, whose 9XSR (1958) brought in £204,800 ($273,000).
Hepworth made Sculpture with Colour (Eos) in 1946, seven years after moving to Cornwall, where the coastline, cliffs, and ancient stones became a major influence on her work. The sculpture is also an example of her experiments with adding color to carved forms, something that became an important part of her practice.
Earlier this year, the work appeared in “Hepworth in Colour” at London’s Courtauld Gallery, an exhibition devoted to that less familiar side of her career. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1903, Hepworth spent much of her adult life in St Ives, Cornwall. She worked from Trewyn Studio from 1949 until her death in 1975. The studio is now the Barbara Hepworth Museum, operated by Tate.
Wednesday’s sale brought Christie’s running total for its October 20th- and 21st-century auctions in London to £278.6 million ($371.4 million), with more sales scheduled in Paris this week.
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