This short essay analyses the reception of Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre in Brazil, in the context of her participation at the V Bienal de São Paulo. Her presence in the British delegation of the 1959 edition of the exhibition resulted in the acquisition of an exceptional piece, Cantate Domino, which would be interpreted by Brazilian art historian Walter Zanini in the light of Herbert Read’s book Modern Sculpture: A Concise History.

Dame Barbara Hepworth’s relationship to Brazil is here exemplified by her bronze sculpture, Cantate Domino (ed. no. 3/6), which was exhibited as a part of the British representation at the V Bienal de São Paulo in 1959 (fig. 1 and fig. 2).¹ Hepworth was awarded the “Grande Prêmio São Paulo” on this occasion, and her sculpture was acquired by the then São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM, founded in 1948), as one of the acquisition prizes for artists participating in the Bienal.² The work now belongs to the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP) that was founded on 8 April 1963, upon the dissolution of the MAM in December 1962.

The decision to select Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) to represent Great Britain at the V Bienal de São Paulo was taken very early on, even before the names of her fellow exhibitors, the painter Francis Bacon and the printmaker Stanley William Hayter, had been announced.³ A quick look through contemporary reviews of the V Bienal and the British participation in it reveals how much comment she received in the Brazilian press. She was consistently presented as the most celebrated British sculptor, “along with Henry Moore”.⁴ The binomial Hepworth/Moore seems to have furnished the basis for the Brazilian art critics’ interpretation of her work.

In addition to this, the Brazilian press also emphasized that she was a woman sculptor. Two articles published in the main local newspaper pinpointed elements of sophistication and delicacy in her work, by quoting from J. P. Hodin’s catalogue text.⁵ Hepworth was one of the international names invoked in connection with Brazilian women artists, such as the early modern women artists Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) and Anita Malfatti (1889–1964), and her contemporary, the Concrete artist, Lygia Clark (1920–1988). Here Hepworth featured as “a rival to Henry Moore”, and Brazil was praised as a country where women artists had been accorded early recognition in their own right. However, on a number of occasions over the course of a long career, Hepworth herself went out of her way to deny that her work and practice had ever been driven by any such consideration.⁶

Still, local reviews insisted on her womanly traits. This was the case in a review on the British representation that appeared in O Estado de São Paulo, signed by the artist and critic, Lisetta Levi. Here, Levi creates some associations between Hepworth’s forms and femininity, by quoting the artist herself:

Although her sculpture is abstract, from it flows life that lost terrestrial limitations, gaining cosmic traits . . . . Barbara Hepworth writes: “Perhaps the sensation of being a woman gives another facet to the sculptural idea. In some aspects, it is a way of being, instead of observing, which in sculpture must allow its own emotional development of form.”⁷

Levi ends up tracing Hepworth’s output from her depictions of mother and son, linked to curved forms. She then quotes from Herbert Read, and the issue of the vital form.

Although the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins (1894–1973),⁸ was not mentioned in this context, it might be interesting to compare her work with that of Barbara Hepworth—not least, in view of the fact that she had been the winner of the main sculpture prize at the III Bienal in 1955. Martins had been awarded the title of National Sculptor in 1955, and donated her work of 1954–55), A Soma de Nossos Dias (The Sum of our Days),⁹ to the former MAM (fig. 3). It took the form of the skeleton of a primitive animal, and for all the apparent differences, it bore certain resemblances to Hepworth’s Cantate Domino (fig. 4), as well as other pieces exhibited at the Bienal.¹⁰ Both titles suggest the fragility of human life on earth and the tense relations with nature; both works also suggest a narrative dimension, in which the idea of time is integral to their poetics; and both were the fruits of the artists’ experiments with new materials.¹¹

It is worth noting that Hepworth was being presented in a very special edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, which took place at the height of the confrontation between geometric abstract practices and the new Art Informel. This conjunction of circumstances—and the presentation of the National Painting Award to Lygia Clark at the IV Bienal de São Paulo, two years previously—took place towards the very end of the decade and followed close on the heels of the National Exhibition of Concrete Art in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (1956–57). In 1959, the invitation to Lourival Gomes Machado (1917–1967) to become the artistic director of the V Bienal was taken to mark a change of direction towards the more international trends of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, in the broader sense.¹² The V Bienal could thus be seen as the clash between this, which was then considered to be an “internationalist” fashion in the world of art, and the evolution of Concretist currents in Brazil. The vogue for the so-called Informel not only took hold of the Bienal de São Paulo, but was almost de rigueur for artists in the Venice Biennales of the 1950s. Revisionist historians of modernism have recently come to regard this as an expression of the internationalism of the art world conditioned by the politics of the Cold War; to be viewed on the US side as embodying the very essence of American culture, and by Europeans as the kind of art that was representative of European, or universal, values.¹³ In Brazil, Mário Pedrosa (1900–1981) acted as a major proponent of abstract geometric tendencies and spent these years campaigning for Brazilian Concretism and Neo-Concretism abroad, through the exhibitions he organized of some of its leading figures.¹⁴ Lygia Clark was, of course, one of these, and there could be no greater contrast than that between her Plano em superfícies modulares no. 2 (Plain in modular surfaces no. 2; 1956, industrial paint, wood, and celotex) and Hepworth’s Cantate Domino.

Both Martins and Hepworth were mentioned in Herbert Read’s famous book, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (1961), to illustrate the notion of “vitality”, taken from a statement by Henry Moore.¹⁵ One might argue that Read was trying to build a synthesis of both the Informel and abstract, geometric currents in contemporary sculpture.¹⁶ The “vital image”, he would say, was the way by which some artists sought to deal with the elements of subjectivity, the form in motion, and the numinous. Martins’s and Hepworth’s works, along with that of other sculptors, were used to illustrate this idea of the “vital image”, though in Hepworth’s case, Read seems then to have departed from his original script, by going on to talk about her rounded, pierced sculptures, and their links to Brancusi.¹⁷ The only recent sculpture by Hepworth that Read included in later editions of his book was the Single Form that she created for the Plaza in front of the UN Secretariat in New York in 1964—connected to Cantate Domino and other works of 1956–57.

By the end of the 1950s, Herbert Read had established long-standing, close relations with the Brazilian artistic milieu, dating from at least as far back as the 1953 Bienal, when he had served both as the British commissioner and as a member of the jury for the International Awards. However, it is quite surprising to see that Walter Zanini (1926–2013), the first director of the MAC USP, borrowed from Read’s Concise History of Modern Sculpture for his own comments on Hepworth’s work, in the book on modern sculpture that he published a decade later.¹⁸ Like Read, Zanini based his interpretation of Hepworth’s work on her relations with Brancusi and the Abstract groups of the 1930s, though he structured his chapters in a different way from the British critic. This created quite a dissonant effect for the reader looking at his illustration of Cantate Domino, which showed the context in which the work was displayed in a gallery in his museum.¹⁹ In contrast to Read, Zanini examined Maria Martins’s works in the chapter devoted to Surrealist experimentation with sculpture, whereas Hepworth appeared in chapter 10, which dealt with abstract practices in sculpture.²⁰ Thus he ended up using Cantate Domino to exemplify Hepworth’s relationship to Brancusi and to illustrate the abstract tendencies in her sculpture. In the process, Zanini seems to have been trying to relate her work to current Concretist tendencies and to distance it from Art Informel.²¹

The genesis of Zanini’s book had its origins in the negotiations conducted between the MAC USP and the Tate Gallery, London, to exchange a bronze cast of Umberto Boccioni’s plaster of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space for a reclining figure by Henry Moore. The exchange was made between 1970 and 1972. One year later, Ronald Alley, the Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery, made a fresh proposal, for an exchange of Boccioni’s bronze, Development of a Bottle in Space, for a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. Negotiations for this second exchange never really got off the ground, leaving Brazil in possession of what probably remains the most intimate and uncharacteristic of her works.

I would like to thank two individuals who have given me considerable assistance, both in relation to this essay and to extending my research on the work by Barbara Hepworth in our collections. Firstly, the artist’s granddaughter, Sophie Bowness, for her kindness in helping to throw light on the genesis of MAC USP’s piece; then to my MA student, Marina Barzon Silva, for her help in gathering the primary documentation on which this essay is based.