Sculptor Jacob Epstein: Time for a Reappraisal?
by Phyllis Tuchman
AUGUST 18, 2009 TAGS:
During the first decades of the 20th century, sculptor Jacob Epstein was a household name. His public projects in London, including the 18 nude statues on the British Medical Association building in the Strand as well as the bird sanctuary in Hyde Park dedicated to environmentalist W.H. Hudson, and in Paris the memorial angel on the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise cemetery, caused uproars as conservatives reviled his work. A century later, it’s the liberals who dislike his dated style.
A big man with curly hair, a high forehead, bulbous nose, and penetrating blue eyes, Epstein was talented, hearty, cultured, boisterous, a lady’s man, a skilled craftsman. His bohemian biography, replete with rancorous attacks in the press and multiple mistresses and children, including two kids his first wife raised as if they were her own offspring, is so convoluted, it’s hard to imagine a Hollywood scriptwriter concocting his story. It’s harder still picturing someone living it.
Epstein was born in New York on Nov. 10, 1880, to Orthodox Jews from Poland. With his seven siblings, he was raised at 102 Hester Street, on the Lower East Side, when it teemed with tenements, pushcarts, and kosher butchers.
By the time the sculptor died at age 78, 50 years ago, on Aug. 19, 1959, he’d become an Englishman, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and living across the street from Winston Churchill. Even though he was world renown for his public monuments, bronze portrait heads, larger-than-life marble carvings of figures from the Bible such as Adam, Jacob and the Angel, and Jesus Christ, his reputation plummeted after his death. With his loss of stature went the taste for pre-Modernist sculptors, as artists like Brancusi and Giacometti seized attention.
When he was 21, Epstein, who’d attended the Art Students League, sailed for Paris. He left with $400 he’d earned illustrating a book on the Jewish community in which he’d been reared. Twenty-six months and stints at three art academies later, the fledgling sculptor went to London. With a letter of introduction from Auguste Rodin -- at 64, the reigning sculptor of the day -- he met playwright George Bernard Shaw. In turn, the author of Pygmalion and Major Barbara sent a note to an English art dealer describing the American’s “amazing drawings of human creatures like withered trees embracing.”
However, Epstein’s career was jump-started by Charles Holden, a young architect sent to his studio by a mutual friend. For a medical association building he was designing in 1908, Holden commissioned statues symbolizing Medicine, Health and Chemical Research. Instead, Epstein, who courted controversy, carved Portland stone into “noble and heroic forms to express in sculpture the great primal facts of man and woman.” They are stark naked.
Epstein, summing up the life cycle succinctly, represented an old, haggard woman cradling a baby. An appropriately swollen-breasted mother holding her child caused a ruckus. On its front page, a London newspaper called the figure “a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man his fiancée, to see.” Sides were drawn. Epstein’s defenders won the initial skirmish. But in May 1937, a piece of the stone sculpture fell to the ground. Citing a hazardous situation, the building’s owners removed all the heads of the statues. That is how they are seen to this day.
For Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, commissioned soon afterwards, Epstein drew inspiration from the English author’s poem The Sphinx as well as from Assyrian art in the British Museum, to carve “a flying demon-angel.” About the scandal that engendered, the sculptor in 1912 wrote: “Imagine my horror when arriving at the cemetery to find that the sex parts of the figure had been swaddled in plaster! And horribly … [I was told] I must either castrate or fig leaf the monument!”
Epstein never learned to eat humble pie. Twenty-five years later, when he carved an 86-inch-tall Adam from alabaster, he gave the nude figure a penis large enough to demonstrate how the Old Testament progenitor became the father of mankind. When visiting her cousin, who owns the overpowering sculpture, Queen Elizabeth II is never photographed near this work.
At the height of Cubism and as Dada held sway, Epstein exhibited Rock Drill, his most avant-garde sculpture, in 1915. He described his horrific modern man as “visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced.” At that time, the frightening, robotic creature had a pair of legs astride an actual rock drill.
After World War I, Epstein mostly carved and modeled stylized figures. For the London Underground Electric Railways Headquarters, in 1928-29 he executed in Portland stone a set of mothers with their children in the guises of Day and Night. They can still be viewed on the building above the Westminster Underground station. For an interior courtyard of the British Trades Union Congress headquarters, near the British Museum, he reprised in 1958 a related mother mourning her dead son. Tending not to think small, the artist created a commanding work almost 10 feet high.
For a time, Epstein stored in his studio stones that weighted several tons. From these, he carved during the late 1930s and early ’40s a trio of compelling works portraying a dead Christ, Adam, and Jacob and the Angel. They were exhibited but then sold to different owners. Costly to ship because of their size and heft, they have not been reunited, as they deserve to be.
Throughout his life, Epstein had a knack for meeting people who could further his career. Like other celebrities, they posed for portraits he modeled as if they were party favors. Ironically, it is these mawkish, calcified heads that have tarnished the sculptor’s reputation. Because there are hundreds of them, they tend to be what’s suggested when someone says, “Jacob Epstein.”
Like many artists, the transplanted American had a career that can be divided into different periods. Epstein’s body of work also comprises three distinct categories: the sappy bronze portrait heads; masterful stone carvings of massive proportion based on Biblical themes; and inventive public monuments and statues, now found in London, Paris, Coventry, Philadelphia and Llandaff, Wales. Perhaps, with the current resurgence of figurative art, Epstein’s work may itself be ripe for reassessment, capable of inspiring yet again some of its former acclaim.
A big man with curly hair, a high forehead, bulbous nose, and penetrating blue eyes, Epstein was talented, hearty, cultured, boisterous, a lady’s man, a skilled craftsman. His bohemian biography, replete with rancorous attacks in the press and multiple mistresses and children, including two kids his first wife raised as if they were her own offspring, is so convoluted, it’s hard to imagine a Hollywood scriptwriter concocting his story. It’s harder still picturing someone living it. Epstein was born in New York on Nov. 10, 1880, to Orthodox Jews from Poland. With his seven siblings, he was raised at 102 Hester Street, on the Lower East Side, when it teemed with tenements, pushcarts, and kosher butchers.
By the time the sculptor died at age 78, 50 years ago, on Aug. 19, 1959, he’d become an Englishman, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and living across the street from Winston Churchill. Even though he was world renown for his public monuments, bronze portrait heads, larger-than-life marble carvings of figures from the Bible such as Adam, Jacob and the Angel, and Jesus Christ, his reputation plummeted after his death. With his loss of stature went the taste for pre-Modernist sculptors, as artists like Brancusi and Giacometti seized attention.
When he was 21, Epstein, who’d attended the Art Students League, sailed for Paris. He left with $400 he’d earned illustrating a book on the Jewish community in which he’d been reared. Twenty-six months and stints at three art academies later, the fledgling sculptor went to London. With a letter of introduction from Auguste Rodin -- at 64, the reigning sculptor of the day -- he met playwright George Bernard Shaw. In turn, the author of Pygmalion and Major Barbara sent a note to an English art dealer describing the American’s “amazing drawings of human creatures like withered trees embracing.”
However, Epstein’s career was jump-started by Charles Holden, a young architect sent to his studio by a mutual friend. For a medical association building he was designing in 1908, Holden commissioned statues symbolizing Medicine, Health and Chemical Research. Instead, Epstein, who courted controversy, carved Portland stone into “noble and heroic forms to express in sculpture the great primal facts of man and woman.” They are stark naked.
Epstein, summing up the life cycle succinctly, represented an old, haggard woman cradling a baby. An appropriately swollen-breasted mother holding her child caused a ruckus. On its front page, a London newspaper called the figure “a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man his fiancée, to see.” Sides were drawn. Epstein’s defenders won the initial skirmish. But in May 1937, a piece of the stone sculpture fell to the ground. Citing a hazardous situation, the building’s owners removed all the heads of the statues. That is how they are seen to this day.For Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, commissioned soon afterwards, Epstein drew inspiration from the English author’s poem The Sphinx as well as from Assyrian art in the British Museum, to carve “a flying demon-angel.” About the scandal that engendered, the sculptor in 1912 wrote: “Imagine my horror when arriving at the cemetery to find that the sex parts of the figure had been swaddled in plaster! And horribly … [I was told] I must either castrate or fig leaf the monument!”
Epstein never learned to eat humble pie. Twenty-five years later, when he carved an 86-inch-tall Adam from alabaster, he gave the nude figure a penis large enough to demonstrate how the Old Testament progenitor became the father of mankind. When visiting her cousin, who owns the overpowering sculpture, Queen Elizabeth II is never photographed near this work.
At the height of Cubism and as Dada held sway, Epstein exhibited Rock Drill, his most avant-garde sculpture, in 1915. He described his horrific modern man as “visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced.” At that time, the frightening, robotic creature had a pair of legs astride an actual rock drill.
After World War I, Epstein mostly carved and modeled stylized figures. For the London Underground Electric Railways Headquarters, in 1928-29 he executed in Portland stone a set of mothers with their children in the guises of Day and Night. They can still be viewed on the building above the Westminster Underground station. For an interior courtyard of the British Trades Union Congress headquarters, near the British Museum, he reprised in 1958 a related mother mourning her dead son. Tending not to think small, the artist created a commanding work almost 10 feet high.For a time, Epstein stored in his studio stones that weighted several tons. From these, he carved during the late 1930s and early ’40s a trio of compelling works portraying a dead Christ, Adam, and Jacob and the Angel. They were exhibited but then sold to different owners. Costly to ship because of their size and heft, they have not been reunited, as they deserve to be.
Throughout his life, Epstein had a knack for meeting people who could further his career. Like other celebrities, they posed for portraits he modeled as if they were party favors. Ironically, it is these mawkish, calcified heads that have tarnished the sculptor’s reputation. Because there are hundreds of them, they tend to be what’s suggested when someone says, “Jacob Epstein.”
Like many artists, the transplanted American had a career that can be divided into different periods. Epstein’s body of work also comprises three distinct categories: the sappy bronze portrait heads; masterful stone carvings of massive proportion based on Biblical themes; and inventive public monuments and statues, now found in London, Paris, Coventry, Philadelphia and Llandaff, Wales. Perhaps, with the current resurgence of figurative art, Epstein’s work may itself be ripe for reassessment, capable of inspiring yet again some of its former acclaim.
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