Art: Sculptor Lets Fly

I don’t like the family Stein: There is Gert, there is Ep and there’s Ein; Gert’s poems are bunk, Ep’s statues are punk, And nobody understands Ein.

Plenty of people—including Critic Adolf Hitler—would agree that punk is a mild word for Jacob Epstein’s statues. But those people would have plenty of contrary-minded to deal with: not the least of them Sculptor Epstein himself. For 30 years this pudgy, bumptious, Manhattan-born sculptor has kept London’s salons mouth-frothing. At the same time, a respectable squad of critics has admitted that he is one of the world’s foremost portrait sculptors.

Epstein’s statues have started riots, thrown academicians into fume and sputter, horrified bishops, even worried Scotland Yard. They have been tarred and feathered, lathered with green paint, censored with fig leaves. They have been called ”bestial, hideous, obscene, monstrous, misshapen, vile.”

Last week Sculptor Epstein published his autobiography under an Old-Testament title Let There Be Sculpture (G. P. Putnam’s Sons; $5). The book roared like a thwarted bull, and with as little humor. It told little about Sculptor Epstein and his dramatic rise from Manhattan’s lower East Side, much about his work. Getting back at his critics, Epstein flayed the “wretched lot of logrollers, schemers, sharks, opportunists, profiteers, snobs, parasites, sycophants, camp followers, social climbers and . . . fourflushers [who] infest the world of art—this jungle into which the artist is forced periodically to bring his work and live.”

About his own work, Sculptor Epstein waxes both lyrical and lucid. Wrote he, of his famous bulb-bellied statue Genesis: “How a figure like this contrasts with our coquetries and fanciful erotic nudes of modern sculpture! At one blow, whole generations of sculptors and sculpture are shattered and sent flying into the limbo of triviality, and my Genesis, with her fruitful womb, confronts our enfeebled generation. Within her man takes on new hope for the future. The generous earth gives herself up to us, meets our masculine needs, and says, ‘Rejoice, I am Fruitfulness, I am Plenitude.’ “