Art: Again, Epstein

For at least 30 years the name of Manhattan-born Sculptor Jacob Epstein has made news in London and enraged conservative Britons (TIME, March 25, 1935 et ante). Last week after nearly two years of comparative obscurity, the head fell off one of his earliest statues and slapped Sculptor Epstein right into the headlines again.

In 1907 Sculptor Epstein, not long after he settled in London, received his first big commission through the kind offices of Etcher Muirhead Bone: 18 colossal figures for the façade of the British Medical Association’s new building in the Strand. For his theme he chose The Birth of Energy and his uncompromising, starkly modeled figures represented such ideas as Primal Energy (a nude man blowing the breath of life into an atom), The Brain (a figure holding a winged skull), Manliness (a figure whose physical attributes were very obvious). Preachers and conservative editors roared denunciation.

A large section of the British public has not yet grown used to the figures. Year ago the British Medical Association moved out of the building and the Government of Southern Rhodesia moved in. Immediately Rhodesian High Commissioner Stephen Martin Lanigan O’Keeffe tried to have the statues removed, to the rage of Sculptor Epstein and esthetes in general. Artist Richard Sickert resigned from the Royal Academy because that solemn body refused to sponsor a public appeal for the statues’ preservation, and with all the hullabaloo the move to oust the statues was quietly dropped.

Last week the head of Primal Energy cracked, fell to the ground, slightly injuring a passing woman pedestrian in the foot. This was all Rhodesian High Commissioner Stephen O’Keeffe needed. Promptly he ordered all six statues along the Strand front of the building taken down, withheld judgment on the rest.

“They are an awful danger,” said Commissioner O’Keeffe, “and I am not going to have any citizens killed if it can be avoided. I wonder if Mr. Epstein would like to camp under the statues without protection?”

Huffed Sculptor Epstein: “The root of the matter is that they don’t like the statues. I have not been consulted.”