Johan Cruyff, the Dutch footballer, was my childhood hero. I was eight years old when he captained the Netherlands team in the 1974 World Cup finals. They played total football:
A revolutionary approach to the game developed by Rinus Michels, a Dutch football coach.
Michels had the ability to see and think differently. He created a system that wasn’t based around players, but around space.
So, no matter what your position on the team-sheet, you were encouraged to play anywhere you fancied on the pitch, in a co-ordinated response to the movement of your team-mates.
The result was magical. It was more than football; it was ballet — a sublime vision of beautiful shapes and elegant movement that morphed into a single abstract form.
None of which would seem remotely relevant to the artist Barbara Hepworth (1903-75), the British modernist sculptor who loathed sport and loved tranquillity.
But it is. Hepworth also had a unique way of looking at things. When she was invited by a team of surgeons to watch them operate, this is what she made of it, writing in her autobiography: “I found there was such beauty in the co-ordinated human endeavour that the composition — human in appearance — became abstract in shape. I became completely absorbed by the extraordinary beauty of purpose between human beings all dedicated to saving life; and the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work.”
Michels and Hepworth both had extraordinary spatial awareness. He applied it to football; for her, everything was sculpture. There are a series of artworks made by Hepworth over several years — all with the same name — that I think Michels would like. The title of the series is Single Form.
Each Single Form sculpture is a lopsided oblong structure shaped like a great flat rock, standing in the ground as if a shield.
In the top right-hand corner is a dimple, or in some versions a hole, like the sun in the sky.
Single Form is unquestionably abstract, yet it has an astonishing humanity.
Is it a torso, or a face in profile with only one eye visible, or hand raised in salute? I don’t know, and to an extent it doesn’t even matter.
As Hepworth says in the same publication, “working in abstract seems to release one’s personality.” You are free to roam.
Hepworth carved a version of Single Form out of sandalwood in 1937-38. It was greatly admired by her friend Dag Hammarskjöld, who went on to become the much-respected second secretary general of the UN.
In 1961 she was in the process of carving a new version out of what she considered to be the most exquisite piece of walnut when she heard the news of Hammarskjöld’s tragic death in a plane crash (a fate that had also befallen her first son).
Grief-stricken, she added a subtitle to the walnut version, calling it Single Form (September), after the month Hammarskjöld died.
She also made a 10-foot version in bronze as a way of coping with the loss, which can now be found in London’s Battersea Park.
Shortly after Hammarskjöld’s death, the United Nations decided to commission a sculpture in his memory, to be sited at the United Nations plaza in New York. They wanted a symbol of unity.
They asked Hepworth to undertake the commission; she chose to make a new version of Single Form. What wasn’t expected was the scale. She delivered to the UN her largest ever sculpture, a staggering 21-foot bronze version. Except in this sculpture the top right-hand-side is a hole not a dimple, allowing people to look up and see through it — a spotlight on heaven.
I recently visited Hepworth’s studio and garden in St Ives and became completely enthralled. It is one of the UK’s great hidden treasures. Everywhere — inside and outside — is packed with her sculptures. Some of the works are huge, others quite small, but they all share similar characteristics: The exploration of shape and texture, light and shade and most crucially, the space between them. They have perfect curves, a lightness, even a femininity.
To the side of the house, in the corner of the garden, is Hepworth’s workshop. I don’t know what I had expected, but I found it quite disconcerting. There was a ghostliness; everything was exactly as she had left it over 30 years before.
And, in complete contrast to her art, the workshop is uncompromisingly cold and tough. Inside there are great turning wheels, colossal lumps of stone, weighty hammers, rusty chisels and huge leather overcoats.
There she sat, a petite woman, working hour after hour, wielding those heavy hammers, chiselling, carving, turning, smoking. And then, somehow, a revelation.
Hepworth’s singular way of seeing was triggered by a lecture she heard on Egyptian sculpture as a seven-year-old schoolgirl. The lecture was given by her headmistress at Wakefield Girls High School and, as Hepworth put it, “fired me off.”
From then on, she wrote, everything was “forms, shapes and textures.” When her father drove her across the countryside in his car, all she saw was sculpture. The car became her hands as she “felt and touched the contours of the hills.”
I envy Barbara Hepworth. I wish that I too had benefited from a teacher who inspired me, understood me, believed in me, encouraged me.
I’m jealous that she knew from such a young age what she wanted to do, and could then spend her life happily dedicated to it. But the thing I covet most is the same thing that made me worship Johan Cruyff as a child: Their capacity to create something so beguiling, so intelligent, so mesmerisingly coherent, from the most basic raw materials. It is genuinely amazing: a sort of alchemy.
Hepworth shared a philosophy with Rinus Michels and the United Nations that bears repeating here. She put it like this: “Components fall into place and one is no longer aware of the detail except as the necessary significance of wholeness and unity.” Or, put another way, a belief in one co-ordinated single form.
