Ways to measure greatness: A retrospective of Barbara Hepworth’s work opens

As a retrospective of acclaimed artist Barbara Hepworth’s work opens at the Tate Britain, Nick Leech asks whether it’s necessary to gild her reputation.

Barbara Hepworth with the plaster of Single Form 1961-64 at the Morris Singer foundry, London, in May 1963. Photograph by Morgan-Wells.

Another week and another exhibition dedicated to a heroine of art history. This year has seen major exhibitions dedicated to Yoko Ono, Frida Kahlo, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Mona Hatoum, Marlene Dumas and Doris Salcedo, and now the woman with the questionable title of Britain’s finest female artist has also been added to the list.

Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World is the artist's first major London retrospective in almost 50 years (the last was held in the same gallery in 1968) but its curators hope the show will help secure Hepworth's place not just at the forefront of European Modernism but in the international pantheon of art history as well.

In doing so, Tate Britain is essentially repeating a formula that proved so successful last year with Late Turner – Painting Set Free, a triumphant show that confirmed JMW Turner's position in the first rank of 19th century art by linking the Briton with the later aesthetic innovations of French Impressionism.

The case for Hepworth’s international profile is relatively easy to establish. In the 1930s, the sculptor was part of an artistic milieu in London that included European émigrés such as the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo and, in the late 1950s, she was part of a wave of British artists that included her second husband, Ben Nicholson, and her friend and student contemporary Henry Moore, whose works now adorn landscapes from England to Saudi Arabia.

It was in 1961 that Hepworth was commissioned by the UN to make a memorial to its second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, who was killed in a plane accident. The gigantic sculpture, Single Form, was one of Hepworth's largest, and still stands outside the UN Secretariat in New York.

The question of how Hepworth should now be regarded, however, continues to divide art historical opinion, not least because of a nagging suspicion that, unlike Constable or Turner, her work fails to transcend the location or historical moment in which it was made.

For many critics Hepworth is simply too well-mannered to be considered alongside contemporaries such as Brancusi and Giacometti or, even, other British artists such as Bacon and Freud who are now deemed fit to make the international grade.

Is Hepworth a 20th century titan? No, but in a way that is precisely the point. Throughout her career Hepworth produced work that combined Modernism and abstraction with a profound appreciation of her environment and a dialogue with the past.

If it sits more comfortably alongside the classically-inspired paintings of Cy Twombly than those of Picasso that should not blind us to its achievement. Never monumental, Hepworth is always humane.

• Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World is on show at Tate Britain in London until October 25.

Nick Leech is a features writer at The National.