Jacob Epstein - WikiHQ

Sir Jacob Epstein (, 10 November 1880 – 21 August 1959) was an American and British sculptor who helped pioneer modern sculpture. He was born in the United States, and moved to Europe in 1902, becoming a British subject in 1910.

Early in his career, in 1912, The Pall Mall Gazette described Epstein as "a Sculptor in Revolt, who is in deadly conflict with the ideas of current sculpture." and negative reviews of his work sometimes took on an antisemitic flavour, though he did not attribute the "average unfavorable criticism" of his work to antisemitism.

After Epstein died, Henry Moore wrote a tribute in The Sunday Times which included a recognition of Epstein's central role in the development of modern sculpture 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.... We have lost a great sculptor and a great man." The family was middle-class, owning a number of businesses and tenements, and Jacob was the third of their eight surviving children.

As a child Epstein suffered from pleurisy and he left school aged thirteen. Between 1893 and 1898 he attended classes at the Art Students League of New York. He also began selling his drawings and provided illustrations for two articles by the journalist Hutchins Hapgood. Returning to Manhattan in June 1901 he worked in a bronze foundry while taking classes for sculptor's assistants at the Art Students League of New York.

thumb|BMA Building July 1908 Agar Street Elevation

Although the six figures representing aspects of medicine and science attracted little attention, the twelve statues representing different stages of life were greatly criticised, notably by the National Vigilance Association whose offices were opposite the building. In June 1908 the London Evening Standard described the sculptures as "statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man his fiancée to see."

While working on the Strand statues, Epstein was asked by Augustus John to create a portrait of his two-year-old son, Romilly. This 1907 bronze Romilly John became the first of a series of such portraits of the child. The 1908 controversy over the Strand statues left Epstein depressed and short of money.

The Tomb of Oscar Wilde, 1908–1912

Near the end of 1908, without any prior discussion or advance warning, Robbie Ross announced that Epstein was the chosen sculptor for a new tomb of Oscar Wilde in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. During the time they worked together, both Epstein and Gill produced significant works on similar themes, notably Epstein's Sun God and Gill's Cocky Kid and they both carved portrait heads of Romilly John.

Following an introduction from Augustus John in 1910, John Quinn, a wealthy American collector and patron to the modernists, visited Epstein's studio to view the Wilde tomb and quickly became the artist's major patron and a collector of his work. After his death in 1924, several of Quinn's Epsteins were acquired by public collections in the United States. In May and June 1912, Epstein was among the artists hired to produce artworks for a new London nightclub, The Cave of the Golden Calf, which brought him into contact with a number of younger artists, notably Wyndham Lewis and the poet T. E. Hulme. The scheduled departure of his regiment to the Middle East precipitated a breakdown in Epstein. After he was found wandering on Dartmoor, and spent a period in hospital, he was discharged from the army in July 1918 without having left England.

File:Jacob epstein, dei primaverili (verso, dio solare), 1910, 02.jpg|Sun God, 1910

File:Doves Second Version by Jacob Epstein 01.jpg|Doves Second Version, 1915

File:Jacob epstein, torso in metallo da the rock drill, 1913-14.jpg|Torso in Metal, 1916

File:Visitation Tate.jpg|The Visitation, 1926

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The Risen Christ

Epstein spent most of 1919 making portrait sculptures but also returned to work on a large bronze, The Risen Christ, which he had abandoned when called up. When exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in February 1920, the seven-foot figure of a gaunt, accusing Christ figure provoked a torrent of abuse towards Epstein, some of which was racist in nature.

The Hudson memorial

thumb|Detail of the Hudson memorial

In 1922, Epstein secured a commission from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, RSPB, for a memorial in Hyde Park, London to the author and naturalist W. H. Hudson. By early 1923, he had produced a model of Hudson beside a tree, looking at a bird. The Daily Mail ran the headline "Take this horror out of the Park" while the Morning Post described Rima as "hideous, unnatural, unEnglish" and a question was asked in the House of Commons about "this specimen of Bolshevik art".

In January 1924 the Leicester Galleries held their third exhibition of Epstein's works. The exhibition attracted few sales but did elicit a critical and damaging review in the New Statesman by Roger Fry and an unsigned and overtly racist article in The New Age. The Polish government refused to accept the work, completed a few months before Conrad died, and it was eventually, in 1960, acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

America 1927

In 1927 Epstein agreed to hold an exhibition in New York at the Ferargil Gallery on West 47th Street and spent most of that year preparing fifty works for the show. When shown as part of Epstein's February 1930 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, the response to Genesis was vicious, not just from the popular press but from more serious journals. Epstein took particular exception to an insulting review by the artist Paul Nash.

Epstein spent the summer of 1933 at his cottage in Epping Forest and, in the space of two months, painted over a hundred landscapes and flower compositions. These were shown at Tooth's Gallery that Christmas and these Christmas exhibitions of his paintings became a popular annual event.

Ecce Homo, 1934

thumb|Ecce Homo

Throughout 1934 Epstein struggled with carving a huge block of marble that proved so tough it regularly broke his tools until he had a new set of instruments made for the work. Behold the Man (Ecce Homo) depicted a squat Christ with a huge head that, in Epstein's words, was 'a symbol of man, bound, crowned with thorns and facing with a relentless and over-mastering gaze of pity and prescience our unhappy world'. First shown, unfinished, at the Leicester Galleries in March 1935, Ecce Homo led to a storm of criticism including accusations of blasphemy. Some newspapers considered the work so grotesque they refused to publish photographs of it. Anthony Blunt wrote a positive review for The Spectator, stating that the scale of the work was more suitable for a large church rather than an art gallery. Epstein never sold the work and it remained in his studio throughout his life. In 1958 he was approached by the rector of Selby Abbey in Yorkshire, who asked if Epstein would leave Ecce Homo to the abbey in his will. He agreed but local church members raised a petition that persuaded the church authorities to overrule the rector and refuse the gift. It was not until 1969 that Ecce Homo, donated by Epstein's widow Kathleen Garman, was finally installed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral.

The Strand sculptures, 1935–1937

thumb|Remains of three of the Strand sculptures in 2023

By 1926, the British Medical Association had vacated their Strand headquarters and the building was sold to the government of New Zealand which, in 1928, commissioned a structural survey of Epstein's 1908 statues. This survey found extensive signs of erosion, weathering and other damage among them. No further action was taken at that time but in 1935 the building was sold to the government of Southern Rhodesia and the new owners soon announced their intention to remove Epstein's statues from the building. A vigorous campaign was again launched to preserve the figures. The leaders of nine of Britain's leading art organisations, but notably not the Royal Academy, signed a letter supporting the preservation of the statues. That campaign was a success until 1937 when, as some bunting, erected for the coronation of George VI, was being removed from the building, a piece of one figure was knocked off and fell to the pavement below. The London County Council instructed the owners to make the building safe. Several of these pieces were eventually acquired by the National Gallery of Canada and one of the heads was later found at a school in Bulawayo.

Late 1930s

In the second half of the 1930s alongside his sculpture work, Epstein took on other projects in different media. With the artist Bernard Meninsky, he designed and painted the stage curtain for the ballet David at the Duke of York's Theatre in central London. The curtain, now lost, was considered a great success. Epstein began, in 1938, to sculpt Adam, a seven foot high figure carved from a three-ton block of alabaster. Forty pages, a fifth of the book, was devoted to Epstein's account of the Strand sculptures controversy. By then, Churchill was living in Hyde Park Gate across the road from Epstein and the two became friendly. Epstein had numerous casts of the Churchill bust made and it was among his most popular works.

Epstein imagined the fallen angel Lucifer as a tall, winged, androgynous figure with male genitals and a female face, that of the Kashmiri model Sunita Devi, all cast in a golden patinated bronze. The front of the Leicester Galleries had to be removed to get the statue inside for its first public showing in October 1945. Despite positive reviews, Lucifer remained unsold until 1946 when A. W. Lawrence, the brother of T. E. Lawrence, and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust purchased it with the intention of donating it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The Fitzwilliam refused the donation as did both the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate but several other museums did show interest and Epstein was pleased when the statue entered the collection of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where it remains.

Jacob and the Angel was bought by a businessman, Charles Stafford, who already owned Epstein's Adam, which he had been exhibiting in local fairs and fetes for its shock value. In Blackpool, he installed Jacob and the Angel in an old song booth on the promenade behind an 'Adults Only' sign.

1950s

After the Second World War there was a notable change in attitudes to Epstein and, nearing seventy, he was about to enjoy a sustained period of recognition and one of the busiest periods of his artistic life. Early in 1950, he received his first commission in twenty years for a public monument, the statue Youth Advancing, for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It was not until April 1957, that Christ in Majesty, was unveiled, suspended above the nave of the cathedral on a concrete arch designed by George Pace. Epstein strongly suspected that Winston Churchill had nominated him for the honor. 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, and his last, Jackie, whose mother was the painter Isabel Nicholas. Evidently, Margaret's tolerance did not extend to Epstein's relationship with Kathleen Garman, as in 1922 Margaret shot and wounded Kathleen in the shoulder. They have one daughter.

A memorial exhibition of 170 sculptures by Epstein was held during the Edinburgh Festival in 1961. The exhibition included the four works that had been at Blackpool in Louis Tussaud's shows. After Epstein died the four works, Jacob and the Angel, Adam, Consummatum Est and Genesis, were bought by a group led by Lord Harewood and Jack Lyons. Adam is now in the entrance hall of Harewood House, Consummatum Est is in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Genesis is at The Whitworth in Manchester. With Epstein's former pupil Sally Ryan, Garman created the Garman Ryan Collection, a collection of works by Epstein and other artists that she donated, in 1973, to the people of Walsall, and are now exhibited at The New Art Gallery Walsall. Ryan also donated Epstein's 1927 seated bronze Madonna and Child, which she had bought in the 1930s, to the Riverside Church, New York City in 1960.

By 1912, Epstein had begun collecting west African, ancient Egyptian, pre-Columbian American, Oceanic and other non-western artworks, having purchased pieces of Fang work, including a reliquary figure, in Paris that year.

Epstein's art is to be found all over the world. Highly original for its time, it substantially influenced the younger generation of sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. According to June Rose's biography, during the early 1920s Moore visited Epstein in his studio and was befriended by the older sculptor. Epstein, Moore, and Hepworth all expressed deep fascination with non-western art in the British Museum.

Selected major pieces

thumb|[[St Michael's Victory over the Devil (1958), on the new Coventry Cathedral]]

For a more comprehensive list, see List of sculptures by Jacob Epstein.

1907–08 Ages of Man – British Medical Association headquarters, Strand, London – mutilated / destroyed 1937
1910 Rom – limestone – portrait of Romily John – National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff
1911–12 Oscar Wilde's tomb – Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
1913–14 Rock Drill – bronze — Tate Collection (symbolising 'the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made ourselves into')
1917 Venus – marble – Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
1919 Christ – bronze – Wheathampstead, England
1921 Bust of Jacob Kramer – Leeds Art Gallery
1922–30 Head of Hans Kindler – Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
1924–25 Rima – W. H. Hudson Memorial, Hyde Park, London
1926 bronze bust of Ramsay MacDonald – Palace of Westminster, London
1927 Madonna and Child – seated bronze – donated to the Riverside Church, New York City in 1960 – University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
1954–55 Christ in Majesty – 5.5m aluminium figure – Llandaff Cathedral, Cardiff – Lewis's Building, Liverpool
1956 statue of Field Marshall Jan Smuts – bronze – Parliament Square, London
1957 bust of William Blake – Westminster Abbey, London
1958 Trade Union Victims of Two World Wars – The Spirit of Trade Unionism – stone – Congress House, London
1958 St Michael's Victory over the Devil – bronze – Coventry Cathedral
1959 The Rush of Green (also known as Pan or The Bowater House Group) – Hyde Park, London
After 1959 Christ in Majesty – gilded plaster – Riverside Church, New York City

Bibliography

Epstein, Jacob, The sculptor speaks: Jacob Epstein to Arnold L. Haskell, a series of conversations on art (London: W. Heinemann, 1931)
Epstein, Jacob, Let there be sculpture: an autobiography (London: Michael Joseph, 1940)

References

External links

9 artworks by Jacob Epstei at the Ben Uri site
Jacob Epstein An article on Jacob Epstein's work on The National Archives website. Includes references to files held at The National Archives.
Londonist.com – Jacob Epstein in London