Hetta Empson (née Hester Henrietta Crouse) was born into a Jewish family in Kroonstad, South Africa in 1915. Trained as a sculptor in Cape Town and Munich, she created a monumental relief for Bloemfontein University and later exhibited in London, notably with the AIA and FGLC in 1941 and Sculpture in the Home in 1945. She also produced a bronze bust of Sardar Panikkar in China.
Sculptor Hetta Empson (née Hester Henrietta Crouse) was born in Kroonstad, South Africa on 18 September 1915. Brought up in the Orange Free State, she studied humanities at Bloemfontein University before moving to Cape Town to apprentice as a sculptor. Early works included busts, nudes and stone portrait heads, and—most ambitiously—a monumental relief (c. 24 feet high) created for the façade of Bloemfontein University. Determined to broaden her artistic horizons, she undertook further study in Munich, then returned to South Africa to earn her living in journalism and publicity, while becoming active in left-wing politics, organising trade-union campaigns and supporting Black and Jewish causes. With fellow émigré artist, René Graetz, she famously financed a European trip by designing and selling commemorative Great Trek ties; after stints in France and Switzerland she settled, alone, in London on the eve of the Second World War, taking on any work available.
During the war, Empson volunteered as an ARP ambulance driver in the Blitz, while Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 prompted her to answer a BBC call for Afrikaans speakers. She joined the Corporation as a propagandist and regular broadcaster (including a women’s magazine programme and pointed anti-Nazi segments), quickly becoming part of the lively wartime cultural milieu. At the BBC training unit she met the critic and poet William Empson; they became engaged within weeks and married in 1941. Empson’s London exhibition record began during the war. In November 1941 she showed as Hetta Crouse in the AIA and Free German League of Culture exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings at the FGLC's headquarters at 36 Upper Park Road. Founded in Hampstead the same year, the FGLC was a politically inspired, left-leaning organisation offering cultural support to anti-Nazi German refugees in Britain throughout the war. The AIA, a British and pro-Soviet association founded in 1933, had taken an early interest in supporting refugees from Germany and Austria and backed the work of the FGLC. At this joint exhibition, critic Jan Gordon in the Studio singled out émigré and allied artists—including Georg Ehrlich, Anna Mahler, L. Peri, Willi Soukop, Eugen Hoffmann, Paul Hamann, Renée Mendel, Roah Schorr, and René Graetz — whose contributions, he wrote, offered ‘just the right sort of stimulant’ to British art (quoted in Vinzent, p. 81). In 1945, Empson was included among the younger women sculptors in the Sculpture in the Home exhibition and served on the AIA’s Sculpture Committee which proposed the show. Organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain as a touring exhibition, it was shown at various venues across the country from 1946-47. Her participation reflected the strong presence of women in these exhibitions, often associated with small-scale, domestic-themed works executed in moderate modernist styles (Burstow 2008).
In 1947 the Empsons left London for China, where William accepted the chair of English at Peking University. Sympathetic to the Communist cause during the Civil War, Hetta Empson assisted students targeted by Nationalist purges and, during the six-week siege of Peking in late 1948, she was accredited as a correspondent for The Observer. She also pursued sculpture; notable from this period is a bronze bust of Sardar Panikkar, India’s ambassador to China. The Empsons’ five-year sojourn—during which their two elder sons became fluent in Chinese—deepened Hetta’s linguistic, political and cultural commitments and left a vivid record in letters and diaries, later preserved (via photocopy) in the Empson family papers in the University of Hull Archives. Beyond sculpture, she experimented with a variety of materials, including pottery, jewellery, marionettes, costume-making, woodcut books and colour prints. Her engagement with Chinese printmaking culminated in the co-authorship of Contemporary Chinese Woodcuts (London: Fore Publications and Collet’s Holdings Ltd., 1950), to which she contributed a foreword and an essay, ‘Notes from Peiping on aspects of North China 1948 and 1950’.
Returning to Britain in 1952, William took up a professorship at the University of Sheffield, while Hetta established the family’s London base at the capacious Studio House in Hampstead (1 Hampstead Hill Gardens) and later at Hares Creek, Shotley, Suffolk. Studio House became a renowned salon: artists, writers and political figures —among them Tambimuttu, Samekula Mulumba, Louis MacNeice and Elizabeth Smart— mingled with an ever-changing cast of lodgers who often went on to distinction. Although sculpture no longer dominated her public profile after the early 1950s, Empson’s identity as an artist remained central. Her formative practice—in South Africa and Munich; her wartime London exhibitions; and her Chinese works—reveals a sculptor adept in portraiture and relief, responsive to political and social contexts, and aligned with the moderate modernist idiom associated with domestic-scale work in mid-century Britain. Hetta Empson died in London, England on 22 December 1996. Her work is not currently represented in the UK public domain though archive material is held in the universities of Hull and Sheffield.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Hetta Empson]
Publications related to [Hetta Empson] in the Ben Uri Library