IN THIS COMMENT from her 1937 essay ‘Sculpture’, which was published in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) notes the emerging tendency in art criticism to describe abstraction in purely formal terms, as relating to the ‘outer form of a work of art’ as opposed to its content or ‘inner life’. The spiritual dimension of Hepworth’s sculpture was for many decades little-discussed even though ‘[s]piritual faith […] underpins much of [her] thinking and making’. Hepworth’s observation points to two important issues regarding the relationship between abstraction and spirituality in modernism. The first is the significant historical relationship between abstraction and spirituality in modern art and literature throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The second is that much twentieth-century art history and modernist studies has suppressed that connection and theorised abstraction in principally formalist terms.

This chapter discusses the relationship between abstraction and spirituality in the sculpture and writings of Hepworth, with some comparisons to the life and work of the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). As this chapter testifies, the connections between the history of abstract art, spirituality and gender are complex and still only partially understood. Here, I build on the work of several scholars who have argued that religious faith was central to Hepworth’s ‘sculptural vocabulary’ and a driving force of her modernism. While the consonances I draw in the final section of the chapter between Hepworth and af Klint may seem spurious, the comparison offers a productive instance of what Susan Stanford Friedman calls critical ‘collage’. Both artists attempted, if in quite different ways, a visual synthesis of the spiritual and natural worlds.