When I was little I occasionally went with my parents to visit relatives in Bergen, and what helps me from those visits was mainly the garden. Ours was like all gardens, grass and borders with a hedge. My uncle and aunt’s was wild. At the back was a studio with a glass wall.
But what really made that garden amazing for me were the statues, made by Jeanne Bijlo, my aunt. Between the wild greenery and the weathered tiles they arose, small, dark figures from another world that made themselves known in the middle of the real one, and added something of another life to it. That was art.
Years later during a trip to the studio of the British artist Barbara Hepworth in St Iveson the coast of Cornwall, I was reminded of that childhood sensation.
The shell was different but the essence the same, and it disengaged as soon as I stepped into the garden. Bamboo, ferns, whitewashed walls and in between, like shadow figures, the statues of Hepworth.
More abstract than Aunt Jeanne’s, more imposing. Of a different order. But undeniably family.
A collection of those Hepworth figures can now be seen in the gardens of the Rijksmuseum. Beautiful and distant like petrified queens, they stand there on the lawns. You see her sculptures more often, in sculpture gardens and pavilions that are actually too cared for to do full justice to their originality. That is the price of success. Go see them in their own environment and they come to life.