Courtauld Gallery Opens a Rare Window onto Hepworth and Nicholson’s Hampstead Studio
A studio can hold more than tools and unfinished work. In the case of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, it also became a stage for artistic identity, collaboration, and self-fashioning. The Courtauld Gallery in London is now bringing that world into view with Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs, a presentation of 23 black-and-white photographs by Paul Laib made in 1932 and 1933.
The exhibition focuses on the shared Hampstead studio where Hepworth (1903-1975) and Nicholson (1894-1982) lived and worked together at 7 The Mall Studios in north London. The two artists were a couple from 1931 to 1951, and the photographs show how closely their personal relationship and creative practice were intertwined. Rather than functioning as neutral documentation, the images suggest a carefully negotiated collaboration between sitter, studio, and photographer.
Fourteen vintage prints and nine modern prints are on view. Laib, who had already photographed leading figures in British art including John Singer Sargent and John Piper, began working with Hepworth and Nicholson in 1932 and continued visiting the studio until 1936. Around 150 of his images relate specifically to the pair, preserved within the Courtauld’s archive of about 22,000 glass-plate negatives, which entered the institution in 1974 as a gift from Patrick de Laszlo.
The photographs reveal a studio that was never merely a backdrop. Hepworth’s Head appears among Nicholson’s paintings; Nicholson’s Profile is set into the room with equal care. In one image, a mirror with a Nicholson frame is placed behind Hepworth’s Figure (woman with folded hands), allowing Laib to capture the sculpture almost in the round. Elsewhere, Nicholson’s works are turned on their side, underscoring the degree to which the artists understood the photograph as an object with its own logic.
Chloe Nahum, who co-curated the exhibition with Gerlind May, has described Laib’s work here as operating in a “very different register” from his usual commissions. The artists, she noted, were effectively directing the shot. That approach reflects the visual culture of the period, including the influence of Minotaure, whose first issue in June 1933 featured Brassaï’s photographs of Picasso’s studio at Boisgeloup.
The show also accompanies the Courtauld’s larger Hepworth in Colour exhibition, which runs from 12 June to 6 September. As Sacha Gerstein has noted, the Laib archive offers a long-awaited glimpse of the creative ferment that preceded Hepworth’s later use of color. Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs is on view from 6 June to 4 October, and it restores the studio to its proper place: not as a setting, but as an active force in modern art.
