Abstracted in St Ives:

There was an exhibition of Barbara Hepworth in the Tate at St Ives � that�s in addition to her house and garden which you can visit and which are full of her work too and a better place to see her stuff than the gallery, I think.

You can get a feel for the garden at http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/hepworth.htm.

She was forcefully articulate about her work communicating her obsession and grandeur in a way that I find frankly disturbing. She talks of the emotion in the forms � forms which look deliberate and enclosed or enclosing.

Just prior to the visit I had been reading (yet another) book about US abstraction � the emergence of Pollock, Rothko, Newman and de Kooning just after the war. This was a time when Hepworth was beginning to be recognised as an artist of international stature. There was a synergy between her deeply principled humanism and the values of a swathe of institutional commissions.

I feel very much that the American work talks much more directly to the present � maybe that�s just a quirk of individual psychology. Or maybe its because the US work became embedded in an ongoing story into which you can fit a lot of major work over the next thirty years or so. Maybe there�s a story which links Hepworth and say Richard Sierra � if so it doesn�t get told as much.

Eventually I decided to read a short biography of a british abstract painter � Patrick Heron � who lived the second half of his life outside St Ives in a house called Eagle�s Nest above Zennor. Perhaps I will write about him tomorrow.