Art: The Epstein Epic

One day in 1902 a mop-headed, bumptious, 22-year-old sculpture student from Manhattan’s East Side collected $400 for illustrating a book by Hutchins Hapgood. On this, he bought a ticket to Paris, where during his first few weeks he:

> Attended Emile Zola’s funeral at Montmartre.

> Knocked a deaf & dumb Gascon head-over-heels among the modeling stands.

> Quit his anatomy class at the sight of a “slightly green object”—an arm from a corpse.

The ebullient boy was Sculptor Jacob Epstein.

Last week appeared the first objective and fully illustrated study of this most controversial modern sculptor (now 62) to be written and published in the U.S. Author is Robert Black, art editor for Manhattan’s Illustrated Editions. Sculptor Epstein once wrote a one-line introduction for a catalogue of one of his exhibitions: “I rest silent in my work.” Equally content to rest in the master’s work, Author Black chiefly tries to answer two questions about Epstein: Who he is; What he has done. The rest of The Art of Jacob Epstein (The World Publishing Co.; $3.50) is made up of 100 photographs of the sculptor’s provocative statues; 75 reproductions of his less familiar drawings of lushly reclining odalisques.

The Epstein career has proceeded by a mounting series of sensations. It began in 1908. Commissioned to sculpt decorations for the British Medical Association Building, Epstein spent 14 frantic months suspended on a scaffold high above London’s busy Strand. When the scaffolding was removed from his first five oversized nudes, the storm broke. Wrote the Evening Standard on page 1: “It is unnecessary to say any more than that they are a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see.” Result: for thousands of careful fathers who stared upward from the Strand, stiff necks; for Sculptor Epstein, fame.

Next sensation broke in Paris. In 1909 Epstein was commissioned to carve a figure for Oscar Wilde’s tomb. He purchased a 20-ton block of stone, spent nine months in London carving “a demon-angel, in full flight across the face of the world,” transported the work to Paris. The French were even more shocked than the English. Says Author Black: “This simplified and symbolic statue was violently objected to because it possessed genitals.” To the fury of Critic Remy de Gourmont, author of a famed biological theory of esthetics, puritanical Frenchmen covered the offending fact with a large bronze fig leaf.

Then there was Epstein’s Christ, which one outraged cleric compared (with Empire inclusiveness) to “some degraded Chaldean or African . . . an Asiatic, American or Hun . . . some emaciated Hindu or badly grown Egyptian.”

There was also his seven-foot, simian, pink alabaster Adam, sometimes referred to as “a biologist’s nightmare” or “three tons of ugliness.” An Australian gold miner bought Adam for $35,000. For like Epstein notoriety, Epstein prices have soared steadily upward. In each esthetic crisis Sculptor Epstein has remained cosmically bland.

Sculptor Epstein is much more than a hewer of vast priapean nudes. One importance of Author Black’s book is that, by bringing together the best of Epstein’s works, it enables everybody to see something that most critics have overlooked—the fact that whatever else Epstein may be, he is one of the world’s best portrait sculptors and its most sensitive carver of the faces of children.