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.
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.
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.
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.
