To many people the very name of Jacob Epstein is synonymous with controversy. He was seen as an untamed man systematically destroying all that was traditional in art. No sculpture of the twentieth century in England aroused so much interest, certainly none articulated such vehement discussion and opposition to his work. His work was such that even the most untrained were unable to see his work without a definite reaction. Eccentricity alone could not produce such an emotion. I t is the test of great art. Epsteins work imprints itself vividly on the imagination. It is disturbing. It cases the artistically lazy to readjust their values. You either like Epsteins' work, or hated it. Neutrality was out out of the question.
Born in 1880, on the East Side of New York to Polish-Jewish parents who had escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland. When the family moved to a more respectable neighbourhood, he chose to remain amongst the ‘Russian, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese’ who clustered in what was then a very unfashionable part of the city.It was here that the earliest formative influences made themselves felt on his art. He attended the School of Students League, and did modelling in the evening. His first work was a book dealing with Jewish types in New York.
In 1902, he moved to Paris, then the world capital of art. to study at the city's famous art schools/ Yet in 1905 a trip to the British museum in London, with its treasure trove of art from all parts of the globe, persuaded him to settle in Britain. The country became his home, and in 1911 he acquired British citizenship.
His first two years in London remain relatively obscure, but in 1907 the architect Charles Holden invited him to execute a major commission for the new headquarters of the British Medical Association in The Strand (now Zimbabwe House). He was given forteen months to do eighteen colossal figures. This was the first time his work was described as dangerous and immoral. the BMA apparently had envisaged decorative, allegorical figures or famous names in medical history. However Holden and Epstein were united by their enthusiasm for Walt Whitman’s poetry, and they agreed that 18 large figures celebrating the seven ages of man should be carved for the building’s façade, celebrating nakedness in the spirit of Whitman’s poems. Epstein himself announced that the scheme would celebrate ‘the great primal facts of man and woman’, and he managed to fuse the ‘medical’ side of the commission with his own most personal preoccupations: erotic delight, mortality, motherhood, virility and above all an uninhibited celebration of humanity in dignified nakedness.He was ever an outsider, as one critic described him "a sculptor in revolt."
It’s hard to track down images of the originals but above is a shot taken at the Henry Moore Institute, where the plaster casts were exhibited.
The statue representing Maternity came in for severe criticism.One Father Bernard Vaughan, a member of the moralistic National Vigilance Society, led the attack against the statues, a member of the moralistic National Vigilance Society, led the attack against the statues. ‘As a Christian citizen in a Christian city’, he pontificated in the Evening Standard, ‘I claim the right to say that I object most emphatically to such indecent and inartistic statuary being thrust upon my view’. While ‘the sacred subject of maternity has been treated a thousand time with idealistic beauty’, he complained in another article, the Strand mother (shown here) suggests ‘merely brutal commonplace’. With tabloid self-righteousness, the Evening Standard warned that Epstein had erected ‘a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see’. Inevitably, people came flocking to see it . London, declared Epstein, ‘had become sculpture-conscious’. Most people deemed them immoral, with the fact they were nude being one of the main provocations. The complaints also disliked the fact they were too sexual, but at the same time too ugly, the depictions were humans at different stages of life so it seemed that the image of sagging skin was too much to bear. The sculptor himself wanted to portray figures with realism, to have them contain deep human feeling rather than just being decoration on architecture.
He said “The Study of the human being is frightfully important.”
However an equally vehement press campaign in Epstein’s defence saved the statues from immediate demolition. Eminent artists and critics praised his innovations, and after some deliberation, the British Medical Association decided to stand by him and preserve them, but a combination of two events sealed their fates.In the 1930s The Rhodesian High Commission bought the building and were not fans of their new home’s decoration and in 1937 a section of the Portland Stone (worn by acid rain and London’s smog) fell onto the street, conveniently giving a pretext to destroy the sculptures. They could undoubtedly have been repaired, but in the reactionary political mood of the 1930s, Epstein’s Jewishess, and his reputation for outlandishness, weighed against him. The art establishment may not deliberately have persecuted him, but nonetheless, they washed their hands of him. Now to our loss,we can only see the butchered remains.
The resulting scandal damaged his reputation, discouraged potential employers, and threatened the very works themselves. It disrupted Epstein’s life, forcing the persona of provocateur on a man who preferred, as he claimed, to work in peace. Yet the volcanic eruptions of disapproval also deposited a fertile soil for the growth of a British school of avant-garde sculpture, sown with Epstein’s pioneering ideas, and sheltered by his willingness to face the critics first. His originality made sculpture newsworthy in Britain to an extent it had never been before. The vandalism still visible on the front of Zimbabwe House serves now as a prominent warning against artistic censorship, and a reproach against the British for their failure to cherish Epstein’s work.
Epstein's friends campaigned for him to become a government war artist during the First World War
This idea was rejected by the authorities and in 1917 he was
conscripted and became a private in the Jewish 38th battalion of the
Royal Fusiliers. He was discharged in 1918 without leaving England,
having suffered a mental breakdown.
The Risen Christ, produced as a result of his experiences in the war caused problems when it was exhibited in 1920. Epstein considered the figure to be an anti-war statement and declared that he would ideally like it to be remodelled and made hundreds of feet high as a "mighty symbolic warning to all lands." In his autobiography Epstein wrote :"It stands and accses the world for its grossness, inhumanity, cruelness and beastliness, for the First World War...The Jew- the Galilean - condemns our wars, and warns us that Shalom, Shalom, must still be the watchword between man and man. By pointing a finger towards the stigma on his palm, he brings the viewers attention to the idea of suffering, Neither his face, nor his body, bears any emotion. The Christ depicted here could be any human being. In a metaphorical way, the "Risen" Christ here "rises" against the cruelty of war.
The Risen Christ
The Oscar Wilde memorial at Pere La Chaise Paris, was his next difficult task, for cemetery sculpture imposes severe restrictions. Epstein worked in England on a 20-ton block of Horston wood stone, and conceived a vast winged figure, a messenger swiftly moving with vertical wings, giving the feeling of forward flight.
Jacob Epstein - The Tomb of Oscar Wilde
One might expect the city of the can-can, a city teeming with sex traffic, to be more open-minded than the uptight metropolis of London. However, nothing causes the upright authorities to take quick action than the sight of an uncovered male member. The order of the Préfet of the Seine and the head of the École des Beaux-Arts was sent out to fashion some kind of fig leaf and someone was given the unenviable task of slathering the exposed genitalia with plaster, covering the offensive sight. The act of censorship happened even before Epstein had completed the finishing touches on the memorial. The eighteen figures of 1908 had been protected from such incursions by their height from the street, but the Winged Sphinx was at ground level, easily reached. Epstein had to witness at first hand the fear of full frontal male nudity, a fear still present in society today. He said, “Imagine my horror when arriving to the cemetery to find that the sex parts of the figure had been swaddled in plaster! and horribly.” Worse was to come, the tomb was covered with a tarpaulin, with a gendarme on patrol to prevent its removal. Although Epstein attempted to complete his work, he was not allowed to remove the cover. Without the artist’s consent, a bronze fig leaf was fixed to the offending member and the tarp was whisked away. The bronze butterfly covering did not last long, stolen by “a band of artists and poets from the Latin Quarter,” and the penis and testicles were soon revealed to the world, at which point, the Great War began and the authorities had better things to do with their time.
After the War, the world had changed and Epstein’s statue was now quaint and old-fashioned and receded from art world concern. The tomb became a place of pilgrimage and thousands of fond fans of Wilde fondled the now exposed parts until they shone like jewels. According to urban legend, two (English) ladies, offended by the unseemly shine, attacked the hanging genitals of the unfortunate Sphinx and severed the penis, a strange impulse for 1960. Existing photographs of the original sculpture indicates that there was nothing offensive or even remotely obscene, but this sculpture had the power to move people very powerfully. Now shorn of its proud possession, the statue’s appeal only increased–coincidentally or not–and over the years, thousands of visitors began kissing its surfaces.
In 1922 Epstein was commissioned to create the Hyde Park memorial to the naturalist writer W.H. Hudson. The memorial was unveiled to the public in 1925; carved in Portland Stone the relief represented Rima, a character from Hudson's book Green Mansions who was both human and bird.
Rima highlights Epstein's thoughts on humanity, sexuality, and gender as well as his ideas on how the concept of 'beauty' was subjective and often restrictive. The panel likewise was roused in a storm of contoversy, though today it's difficlt to see what people found wrong with it. At the time Rima was the subject of hostility from those opposed to what they viewed as his 'ugly' and 'unfeminine' portrayal of the female body. His sculpture was defaced and the Daily Mail campaigned for the removal of the sculpture. Epstein was also subjected to antisemitic abuse and in 1935 the Independent Fascist League defaced Rima with swastikas. Much of the opposition to Rima as a piece of artwork went hand-in-hand with racist formulations of Epstein as an 'alien' outsider and his artwork as unEnglish. The storm of abuse eventually died away and the strange elusive beauty of this small panel blends perfectly in its green sanctuary.
Rima
Night and Day likewise set the critics baying. The entire work merged easily into the horizontal courses of St James' Park Station. They were not meant to be seen in isolation. Divorced from their context and viewed at a wrong angle, it was natural for them to appear distorted. Night came in for major criticism through the poplar naturalistic conception that Epstein should have portrayed it by an attractive lady with a sad face and dressed in flowing black drapery.
Epstein commented that he always turned to Egypt for inspiration for architectural or monumental sculpture and the influence of Egypt and other cultures is clear in these abstract figures. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie protested about the style of the sculptures, denouncing them as 'part of the modern system of Jazz' and racialising them as a 'primitive product of a race'. Petrie was only one of a number of people who publicly protested; the classical archaeologist Percy Gardner felt the sculptures lacked 'morality' and there was consternation about the length of the boy's penis on Day.
Night and Day
His religious subjects, including the Madonna and Child, 1927; Riverside Church, New York, Jacob and the Angel, 1940-1; Tate, Genesis, 1929-31; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, and Adam, 1938; Harewood House, provoked particular ire as being created by a Jewish sculptor.
Genesis flooded the art world with comment. The statue carved in a block of Servezza marble, portrayd the symbolic truth of the eternal primeval feminine, the mother of the race. A storm of protest rose from women who complained that their sex had been insulted. It was tantamount to saying that art should be clad in the demure habilments of a Mother Superior. To refuse Epstein the right to create Genesis in the way he did would have denied sculpture the right to exist. In elementary terms, sclpture is the form given to a thought... the sculpture's thought, not that of the moralist or the art critic.
Genesis
It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. It is now a prime possession of the Tate Gallery. As history has shown us, that which is ridiculed in one era is hailed in another.
Adam
The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941), his most famous creation. Rendered in glowing alabaster, streaked with veins of pink and brown, it depicts two muscular figures locked in a sensual embrace, it has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.
Despite being married to and continuing to live with Margaret Dunlop, whome he had wed in 1906, Epstein had a number of relationships with other women that brought him his five children: Peggy Jean (born 1918),Theo (1924–1954), Kathleen (1926–2011), Esther (1929–1954) and Jackie (1934–2009). Margaret generally tolerated these relationships – even to the extent of bringing up his first and last children. In 1921, Epstein began the longest of these relationships, with Kathleen Garman, one of the Garman sisters, mother of his three middle children, which continued until his death. Margaret "tolerated Epstein's infidelities, allowed his models and lovers to live in the family home and raised Epstein's first child, Peggy Jean, who was the daughter of Meum Lindsell, one of Epstein's previous lovers. Evidently, Margaret's tolerance did not extend to Epstein's relationship with Kathleen Garman, as in 1923 Margaret shot and wounded Kathleen in the shoulder.
Jacob Epstein was knighted in 1954, but his later years were marked by personal
loss. His son died of a heart attack in 1954, and his daughter committed
suicide later the same year.
The Risen Christ, produced as a result of his experiences in the war caused problems when it was exhibited in 1920. Epstein considered the figure to be an anti-war statement and declared that he would ideally like it to be remodelled and made hundreds of feet high as a "mighty symbolic warning to all lands." In his autobiography Epstein wrote :"It stands and accses the world for its grossness, inhumanity, cruelness and beastliness, for the First World War...The Jew- the Galilean - condemns our wars, and warns us that Shalom, Shalom, must still be the watchword between man and man. By pointing a finger towards the stigma on his palm, he brings the viewers attention to the idea of suffering, Neither his face, nor his body, bears any emotion. The Christ depicted here could be any human being. In a metaphorical way, the "Risen" Christ here "rises" against the cruelty of war.
The Risen Christ
The Oscar Wilde memorial at Pere La Chaise Paris, was his next difficult task, for cemetery sculpture imposes severe restrictions. Epstein worked in England on a 20-ton block of Horston wood stone, and conceived a vast winged figure, a messenger swiftly moving with vertical wings, giving the feeling of forward flight.
Jacob Epstein - The Tomb of Oscar Wilde
One might expect the city of the can-can, a city teeming with sex traffic, to be more open-minded than the uptight metropolis of London. However, nothing causes the upright authorities to take quick action than the sight of an uncovered male member. The order of the Préfet of the Seine and the head of the École des Beaux-Arts was sent out to fashion some kind of fig leaf and someone was given the unenviable task of slathering the exposed genitalia with plaster, covering the offensive sight. The act of censorship happened even before Epstein had completed the finishing touches on the memorial. The eighteen figures of 1908 had been protected from such incursions by their height from the street, but the Winged Sphinx was at ground level, easily reached. Epstein had to witness at first hand the fear of full frontal male nudity, a fear still present in society today. He said, “Imagine my horror when arriving to the cemetery to find that the sex parts of the figure had been swaddled in plaster! and horribly.” Worse was to come, the tomb was covered with a tarpaulin, with a gendarme on patrol to prevent its removal. Although Epstein attempted to complete his work, he was not allowed to remove the cover. Without the artist’s consent, a bronze fig leaf was fixed to the offending member and the tarp was whisked away. The bronze butterfly covering did not last long, stolen by “a band of artists and poets from the Latin Quarter,” and the penis and testicles were soon revealed to the world, at which point, the Great War began and the authorities had better things to do with their time.
After the War, the world had changed and Epstein’s statue was now quaint and old-fashioned and receded from art world concern. The tomb became a place of pilgrimage and thousands of fond fans of Wilde fondled the now exposed parts until they shone like jewels. According to urban legend, two (English) ladies, offended by the unseemly shine, attacked the hanging genitals of the unfortunate Sphinx and severed the penis, a strange impulse for 1960. Existing photographs of the original sculpture indicates that there was nothing offensive or even remotely obscene, but this sculpture had the power to move people very powerfully. Now shorn of its proud possession, the statue’s appeal only increased–coincidentally or not–and over the years, thousands of visitors began kissing its surfaces.
In 1922 Epstein was commissioned to create the Hyde Park memorial to the naturalist writer W.H. Hudson. The memorial was unveiled to the public in 1925; carved in Portland Stone the relief represented Rima, a character from Hudson's book Green Mansions who was both human and bird.
Rima highlights Epstein's thoughts on humanity, sexuality, and gender as well as his ideas on how the concept of 'beauty' was subjective and often restrictive. The panel likewise was roused in a storm of contoversy, though today it's difficlt to see what people found wrong with it. At the time Rima was the subject of hostility from those opposed to what they viewed as his 'ugly' and 'unfeminine' portrayal of the female body. His sculpture was defaced and the Daily Mail campaigned for the removal of the sculpture. Epstein was also subjected to antisemitic abuse and in 1935 the Independent Fascist League defaced Rima with swastikas. Much of the opposition to Rima as a piece of artwork went hand-in-hand with racist formulations of Epstein as an 'alien' outsider and his artwork as unEnglish. The storm of abuse eventually died away and the strange elusive beauty of this small panel blends perfectly in its green sanctuary.
Rima
Night and Day likewise set the critics baying. The entire work merged easily into the horizontal courses of St James' Park Station. They were not meant to be seen in isolation. Divorced from their context and viewed at a wrong angle, it was natural for them to appear distorted. Night came in for major criticism through the poplar naturalistic conception that Epstein should have portrayed it by an attractive lady with a sad face and dressed in flowing black drapery.
Epstein commented that he always turned to Egypt for inspiration for architectural or monumental sculpture and the influence of Egypt and other cultures is clear in these abstract figures. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie protested about the style of the sculptures, denouncing them as 'part of the modern system of Jazz' and racialising them as a 'primitive product of a race'. Petrie was only one of a number of people who publicly protested; the classical archaeologist Percy Gardner felt the sculptures lacked 'morality' and there was consternation about the length of the boy's penis on Day.
His religious subjects, including the Madonna and Child, 1927; Riverside Church, New York, Jacob and the Angel, 1940-1; Tate, Genesis, 1929-31; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, and Adam, 1938; Harewood House, provoked particular ire as being created by a Jewish sculptor.
Genesis flooded the art world with comment. The statue carved in a block of Servezza marble, portrayd the symbolic truth of the eternal primeval feminine, the mother of the race. A storm of protest rose from women who complained that their sex had been insulted. It was tantamount to saying that art should be clad in the demure habilments of a Mother Superior. To refuse Epstein the right to create Genesis in the way he did would have denied sculpture the right to exist. In elementary terms, sclpture is the form given to a thought... the sculpture's thought, not that of the moralist or the art critic.
Genesis
It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. It is now a prime possession of the Tate Gallery. As history has shown us, that which is ridiculed in one era is hailed in another.
Adam
The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941), his most famous creation. Rendered in glowing alabaster, streaked with veins of pink and brown, it depicts two muscular figures locked in a sensual embrace, it has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.
Jacob and the Angel
From 1912 onwards, Epstein was inundated with portrait commissions, and
portrayed distinguished subjects throughout his career including Albert
Einstein, Joseph Conrad, Winston Churchill, Ralph Vaughan Williams and
Lucian Freud.He participated in the Festival of Britain 1951 but by this time he
was being outflanked by younger contemporaries such as Henry Moore,
Eduardo Paolozzi, and Lynn Chadwick.
When Jacob Epstein completed the following sculpture in 1928, Paul Robeson was
enjoying huge success in London, both in the English production of Show
Boat and in a series of triumphant concerts. Lionized by English
society, he was experiencing an acceptance hardly imaginable by blacks
in America: "Everyone wanted to know Paul and to be seen with him," said
a fellow cast member, "especially some of our so-called society
ladies." His wife wrote to a friend that they both were feeling "as
though at last we are at the end of a long journey. Paul . . . is
tickled to death and greatly relieved."
Paul Robeson
Epstein was a pacifist and he joined with other left-wing artists and writers, including David Low, Henry Moore and Eric Gill
to form a National Congress organised by the British section of the
International Peace Campaign. He was also involved in the Artists'
International Association's efforts on behalf of the Poplar Front government during theSpanish Civil War. He was furious when the Foreign Office refused Epstein a visa when he wanted to visit Spain in 1937.
He completed further commissions
for religious figures, notably on the re-built Coventry Cathedral, but
his final secular work was the magnificent war memorial that stands in
front of TUC headquarters at Congress House in London. The work is a memorial to Trade Union victims of the two World Wars A mournful evocation of loss, a lone woman supports the limp naked
body of a dead soldier. It was carved from a 10 ton block of Roman stone and was
originally backed by green Carrara marble running up to the roof; this decayed and
has been replaced by green tiles as an economy measure. The statue was unveiled and the building opened on 27th March 1958.
Despite being married to and continuing to live with Margaret Dunlop, whome he had wed in 1906, Epstein had a number of relationships with other women that brought him his five children: Peggy Jean (born 1918),Theo (1924–1954), Kathleen (1926–2011), Esther (1929–1954) and Jackie (1934–2009). Margaret generally tolerated these relationships – even to the extent of bringing up his first and last children. In 1921, Epstein began the longest of these relationships, with Kathleen Garman, one of the Garman sisters, mother of his three middle children, which continued until his death. Margaret "tolerated Epstein's infidelities, allowed his models and lovers to live in the family home and raised Epstein's first child, Peggy Jean, who was the daughter of Meum Lindsell, one of Epstein's previous lovers. Evidently, Margaret's tolerance did not extend to Epstein's relationship with Kathleen Garman, as in 1923 Margaret shot and wounded Kathleen in the shoulder.
When Jacob Epstein died of a heart-attack on 19th August 1959 in Kensington, the sculptor Henry Moore wrote: " . .
. I first met Jacob Epstein in the mid-Twenties, a time when I was
unknown and he was the most famous sculptor in Britain . . . He took the
brickbats, he took the insults, he faced the howls of derision with
which artists since Rembrandt have learned to become familiar. And as
far as sculpture in this century is concerned, he took them first."
He is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Tate, 1953, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1980, and a touring exhibition in 1987, which included Leeds City Art Galleries and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His work is held in major public collections around the world including Tate, National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Pompidou Centre.
Jacob Epstein remains one of the most significant British artists of the twentieth century; specialising in sculpture, particularly public sculpture, his pieces both challenged and influenced British art conventions. Despite having a number of supporters, Epstein's work though was often criticised by the public and the media; often this opposition was purely antisemitic and nationalist. Despite this his life, like his art, might have been the stuff of myth, but in his large works, shaping the endless struggle of human life, Jacob Epstein was at his best. Any attempt to gauge the full value of Epstein's art forces us to realise how imperfect a vehicle of expression is language when it attempts to explain the significance of another art medium. This much we can say. Epstein introduced a new creative intelligence with his uncompromising, radical sculptural vision. His art is still capable of provoking.
He is buried in Putney Vale Cemetery. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Tate, 1953, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1980, and a touring exhibition in 1987, which included Leeds City Art Galleries and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His work is held in major public collections around the world including Tate, National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Pompidou Centre.
Jacob Epstein remains one of the most significant British artists of the twentieth century; specialising in sculpture, particularly public sculpture, his pieces both challenged and influenced British art conventions. Despite having a number of supporters, Epstein's work though was often criticised by the public and the media; often this opposition was purely antisemitic and nationalist. Despite this his life, like his art, might have been the stuff of myth, but in his large works, shaping the endless struggle of human life, Jacob Epstein was at his best. Any attempt to gauge the full value of Epstein's art forces us to realise how imperfect a vehicle of expression is language when it attempts to explain the significance of another art medium. This much we can say. Epstein introduced a new creative intelligence with his uncompromising, radical sculptural vision. His art is still capable of provoking.
I sum up in his own words : I rest silent in my work .... words superb in finality.
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