Nearly 3,000 British art lovers and U.K. cultural funds raised £3.8 million last summer to acquire Barbara Hepworth's sculpture *Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red* (1943), which had been sold at Christie's London in March 2024 and was slated for export. The Hepworth Wakefield museum led the campaign, with support from artists Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, to keep the work of "outstanding significance" in the country. Now the piece anchors "Hepworth in Color," the first exhibition devoted to the artist's relationship with color, at London's Courtauld Gallery, running from June 12 to September 6, 2026.
The exhibition matters because it corrects a long-standing oversight in Hepworth scholarship: while her sculptures are often discussed in terms of form, tension, and space, her deliberate use of color has been "accepted but never understood," as she told her son-in-law, art historian Alan Bowness. By assembling 20 sculptures and 30 drawings from across the U.K. and beyond, the show demonstrates how Hepworth's color experiments—inspired by the Cornish landscape during World War II—were central to her practice. The rescued sculpture, a pivotal early example of her signature stringed forms, now serves as the exhibition's centerpiece, uniting six progressively larger versions of the same work for the first time.