Winged Figure

The new John Lewis store on Oxford Street replaced earlier war-damaged premises. The building was designed by architects Slater & Uren in 1956 and reopened in 1961. John Lewis originally approached Jacob Epstein to create a sculpture to decorate the plain Portland stone side wall of the new store, but he declined as he was engaged on other commissions. Instead, in May 1961, John Lewis asked six other artists to propose designs. In addition to Hepworth – whose breakthrough public sculpture, Meridian, had recently been installed outside State House on Holborn – the others were Ralph Brown, Geoffrey Clarke, Tony Hollaway, Stefan Knapp, William Mitchell and Hans Tisdall. None of their initial…

The work stands 5.8 m high, resembling a boat's hull, with two wide asymmetric wings like blades rising from a small plinth, curving towards each other and linked to each other by a series of radial rods like strings that almost cross at a single point in the middle of the sculpture. Winged Figure was the first sculpture Hepworth created in her Palais de Danse studio. She made a prototype in 1962 in wood and then aluminium in St Ives, constructed from lengths of aluminium covered with aluminium sheets and linked by ten aluminium rods. The surface of the prototype was then textured with Isopon, a polyester resin filler. The aluminium prototype – the largest prototype by Hepworth still in…