How important is public art to community and society? What is it worth and can we really put a price on it? Should we be measuring the value of art in pounds or is its worth something unquantifiable? These seem to have been the sort of questions that were being asked back in 1965 when Cornwall Council purchased an expensive sculpture from the artist, Barbara Hepworth, but they are also questions that are just as important to us now . . . perhaps even more so.

Have we lost sight of the importance of accessible art for all and the benefits of beautifying our public spaces?

Dame Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth (1903 – 1975) is one of Cornwall’s leading artistic figures and an icon of 20th century sculpture. I have long been an admirer of her work, I love visiting her old workshop and sculpture garden in St Ives and, although I would not count myself as particularly knowledgeable about art, there is something about her creations that really resonates for me, I guess you could say her work speaks to me. I suspect that it is because Hepworth took so much inspiration from the natural forms of the rocks in the Cornish landscape and from the prehistoric monuments she saw around Penwith. Like the standing stones and weather-worn boulders and tors her sculptures feel monumental, immovable, tactile, organic.

Hepworth often named her work after the places she knew in Cornwall – Curved Form (Trevalga), Curved Reclining Form (Rosewall), Sea Form (Porthmeor) and Oval Form (Trezion). She clearly felt a deep connection to her home.

In late 2025 I decided to seek out a piece of her work that I have never seen before – Rock Form (Porthcurno) – that I knew could be found hiding in the grounds of Cornwall’s County Hall in Truro. What I discovered blew me away.

Maybe it was the golden autumn light or the juxtaposition of the bronze curves of the sculpture beside the Brutalist design of the building or the fact that I could touch it without being told off! Whatever it was, this sculpture felt magical and I knew then and there that I wanted to write something about it.

To share it with other people.

The direction that my research took me in however was really not what I had expected.

A Home at New County Hall

Work had begun on the New County Hall in Truro, now called Lys Kernow, in April 1963. This three storey concrete building was designed by the Duchy Architect, Francis Kenneth Hicklin, and his successor, Alan Groves in a controversial Brutalist style and was to provide a modern home for Cornwall’s council. By 1965 the building was almost complete and the final design touches were being decided upon – what furniture, which carpets, which curtains, which works of art . . .

The courtyard in the centre of the building was landscaped by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, who had just won a CBE for his services to architecture, and it was decided that a sculpture should be installed to complete the design. The previous year, on the 11th June 1964, Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture ‘Single Form’ had been unveiled at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York.

To have a piece of her work at the new council offices must have seemed an exciting prospect!

Rock Form, (Porthcurno) is an 8ft high, cast bronze created in 1964, that had been exhibited to great acclaim in Italy, Switzerland, Holland and Germany. It was originally priced at £9000 but Hepworth was so keen for her work to be part of the new building and “to be associated permanently” with Cornwall that she offered it to the council for a significantly reduced price of £3000.

They purchased the work in November 1965 but the backlash from this decision was immediate and rolled around in the local newspaper columns for months.

Putting a Price on Art

In 1964 the average wage in the UK was just £16 per week or around £1168 per year, so, for some, spending £3000 on a work of art seemed not just extravagant but morally wrong.

One MP commented in the Cornish Guardian newspaper:

“We turned down expenditure of £1000 for rescue gear for the fire service with which to save lives: it is wrong in these days of financial crisis to spend £3000 on a Bronze sculpture.”

In a council meeting two members questioned whether that sort of money should be spent “on something from which the vast majority of ratepayers would not benefit in any way”. Councillor L.G Jermy called it “a very expensive acquisition” and said they were “crying out for toilets in schools”. He added that the council were meant “to look after people and this will not do people any good”.

The purchase was defended by the Chairman, K.G Foster, who remarked that the work would add “dignity” to the new building and that the council also needed to think about what was “best for posterity”.

It was not just certain councillors that found the price of the sculpture objectional – members of the public wrote to the papers too.

Doris Evans from Port Isaac sent a letter to the editor of the Cornish Guardian calling the council’s decision “disgusting” and Hepworth’s sculpture a “useless monstrosity”. She said that she objected to her hard-earned money being squandered and, picking up on the chairman’s statement, said that there was no dignity in elderly people not having their bins collected or children living without clean, running water in their homes.

Art for Art’s Sake

In the summer of 1966 Queen Elizabeth II and Duke of Edinburgh visited Cornwall. As well as passing through Newquay and visiting the China Clay Pits, they also came to Truro to officially open the New County Hall.

The grainy photograph below shows the Queen in the courtyard beside Rock Form and meeting its creator. We know that that day Alderman Foster presented the Queen with a small Hepworth sculpture for which she later wrote a letter thanking him for his hospitality and for the “interesting example of modern art”.

What we don’t know is what the Queen really thought of the sculpture in the gardens of the New County Hall, or in fact what she thought of the modernist design of the building itself. And, for me, that doesn’t really matter. We also cannot know whether buying the Hepworth was a vanity project for the council (the UN had one so they wanted one too) or an act of benevolence intended to beautify the space for the public. That doesn’t really matter to me either.

What matters to me here and now in 2026 is what that sculpture makes me feel.

In her letter to the paper in 1965 Doris Evans wrote that Rock Form meant nothing to working class people but I would argue that that is not entirely true. While I can completely understand the logic that the money should have been spent on other “more important” useful and eminently practical things, essentials to make people’s lives better, I would also argue that embracing art in public spaces is essential too. In recent years there has been a terrible trend (in my opinion) towards making everything as cheap and functional as possible. So, couldn’t we argue that “looking after people” and “doing people good” as Councillor Jermy argued, can also mean this? Art. We have to live and work and exist in these spaces, don’t we deserve them to contain beauty as well as serving a practical purpose?

“Art for art’s sake” is the philosophical idea that art is not meant to serve a moral, political, or utilitarian purpose and that it should be judged by its own aesthetic value alone. How it makes the viewer feel. 

Hepworth’s work was distilled from her love of Cornwall’s landscape and the beauty of the natural world and she wanted it to be enjoyed, or at least seen, by all. She is said to have said she wanted to make solid “beautiful thought”.

“Hepworth was deeply committed to rediscovering art’s civic function, and her sculptures promoted a sense of rootedness, both in nature and in our collective social environment, providing stability in an otherwise uncertain world.” – Katy Norris, ‘Barbara Hepworth’, Tate, 2024

In 1961 she gifted Epidauros II to the nation and the sculpture can still be seen in the Malakoff Gardens in St Ives to this day, and before her death Hepworth also gave a large amount of archive materials and several pieces of her work to the Tate, again so that they would always be available for the public to see. Not bought by some rich individual and squirreled away in their private gallery.

Final Thoughts

I am not here to decide whether the council should or should not have spent £3000 (roughly £55,000 in today’s money) on a bronze sculpture in the 1960s. But for reference, it was actually a pretty sound financial investment apart from anything else. Recent sales of Hepworth’s work include Ancestor II (1970) a monumental bronze from the Family of Man series that sold for £7.9 million in 2023 and Elegy III (1966), another bronze sculpture that sold for $7.2 million at Christie’s in November 2022.

What I am here to advocate however is for anyone who wants to, to seek out this beautiful sculpture – it is yours, it belongs to you! You (or your parents or grandparents) bought it.

Go and enjoy it!

Further Reading:

Max Barrett – the Wild Man of Cornish Sculpture

Captain James Williams – a Daring Smuggler of St Ives.

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