Art: Doctor’s Artist

Two years ago when angular, handsome British Sculptress-Painter Barbara Hepworth agreed to look on at a surgical operation, she was afraid she might faint. Instead she found herself “fascinated by the complete perfection of the movements, more rigid and precise than those of a ballet . . . the remarkable tension, lighting and grouping.”

Since then 46-year-old Miss Hepworth, wife of topflight Painter Ben Nicholson (TIME, Dec. 13) and mother of a 20-year-old son and 15-year-old triplets (two girls and a boy), has returned to the operating theater many times. In mask and gown she stood quietly observant behind doctors and nurses, pressing forward when one of her surgeon friends offered her a closer look. Back in her peaceful studio in St. Ives, Cornwall, she transferred her sharp-eyed observations to canvas.

This week a Manhattan gallery opened a show of Barbara Hepworth’s paintings, including 20 studies of the operating theater. In them, what the artist calls “the beauty and skill of the hands, every gesture perfectly related to the mind,” the intent eyes of doctors and nurses peering over their tightly drawn masks, were caught in delicate pencil-lines, illuminated with eerie blues, greens and yellows.