Art: Volcanic Knight

Sculptor Jacob Epstein, who died last week, was born 78 years ago into the brawling, colorful, self-contained world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His Polish immigrant parents prospered and moved uptown, but young Epstein, by choice, swam with the rats in the East River, peered wistfully under the swinging doors of Bowery saloons, grew up belligerent and ravenous for experience. He wanted a life with size and shape, and that was what he forged for himself.

Epstein studied at Manhattan’s Art Students League, made a little money as an illustrator. In his early 203 he invaded Paris, became a close friend of Sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Together they “discovered” and fell under the spell of African carving. Later, Epstein staked out elegant old London as his chosen battleground, began alternately shocking and dazzling the British with hugely energetic, part sentimental and part brutal monuments. Epstein’s bull-bold, pink alabaster Adam made strong men blush, girls giggle, and dowagers howl for blood. “I saw my subject,” Epstein rumblingly explained, mankind.” “as His the contorted fount of female all nude, Rima, was unveiled by Stanley Baldwin in 1925. As he pulled the cord, the Prime Minister was heard to exclaim, “My God!”

Maddened Elephant. Went a famed limerick of the period: There’s a wonder/24 family called Stein —There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.

Gert’s poems are bunk, Ep’s statues are punk, And no one can understand Ein.

Epstein reacted to criticism like a maddened elephant, but never let the struggle affect his art. “The man in the street,” he would say, thrusting out his low er lip like a rain spout, “is a fool. And I care not a whit for his opinions.” Asked his opinion of other sculptors, the big man in the long-billed baseball cap would per mit himself a little twist . of a smile : “When I want to see a great sculptor, I have to look in the mirror.” Critics and collectors often agreed with Epstein’s self-appraisal, kept him comfort ably supplied with commissions. He proved himself the greatest portraitist of modern sculpture, immortalized hosts of the great (including the frozenly quizzical Somerset Maugham and the electric-haired “Ein”) with dashing busts that almost seemed to breathe. “What could be more interesting,” he demanded, “than a human face?” Epstein’s female portraits were often busts in undress; he proved that breasts also can show personality.

Almost Old-Fashioned. As his primitivist monuments faded to grimy familiarity, Epstein found himself an accepted eccentric. Acceptance slowly turned to deep respect, and in 1954 the old volcano became “Sir Jacob.” A new generation of sculptors was shocking the public in its turn, with carvings full of holes, welded metal totems, and assemblies from the junk yard. Epstein by contrast came to seem imbued with Semitic melancholy, soft-edged and almost oldfashioned.

But Sir Jacob kept spewing out sculptures like molten lava, including powerfully original works that may never date at all. Among the best of them: his bronze group Social Consciousness (with its awesome central figure of “Fate”) in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park; his Madonna and Child, a moving adornment to London’s Cavendish Square; his Christ in Majesty (TIME, April 22, 1957), which nobly embellishes Llandaff Cathedral in Wales.

Last week in his adopted London, the grumpy, rumpled, life-hungry old master was struck down by a coronary thrombosis. At the end, among other things, he was working on a head of Princess Margaret. His battles had been won and great work done.