Jacob Epstein

Fine Artist

• Born: November 10, 1880
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: August 19, 1959
• Place of death: London, England

American-born British sculptor

An unequaled portrait sculptor and an innovator in sculpting techniques, Epstein was the most renowned British sculptor in the early twentieth century.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Jacob Epstein (EHP-stin) was born in the Hester Street neighborhood of New York City, the third child of Max Epstein and Mary (née Saloman) Epstein. Both his parents had migrated to the United States to escape anti-Semitic persecution in Russian Poland, and his father had quickly established himself in his adopted country as a fairly prosperous merchant. Epstein was a rather sickly boy who spent much of his childhood reading and, as time passed, drawing much to the consternation of his practical-minded parents. He especially enjoyed wandering around his congested and cosmopolitan neighborhood, producing drawings of the numerous colorful ethnic groups that crowded its streets.

In 1900, Epstein attended the Art Students’ League school in New York City but never felt quite at home there. However, it was during this period that he also first became interested in sculpture. Obtaining a part-time job at a nearby foundry, he taught himself bronze casting, and he used the meager wages from this job to pay for night classes with the well-known sculptor George Grey Bernard. Bernard had a profound influence on developing Epstein’s sculpting talents, but the young man also realized that the possibility for further study was limited in New York City and that he needed to go to Europe to obtain additional training.

The opportunity for such a trip came in 1902. In that year, the writer Hutchins Hapgood selected Epstein to illustrate his book, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902). With the four hundred dollars that he earned for this work, in addition to the money that he received for selling several drawings to Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Epstein managed to pay for passage to Paris. Although he did not realize it at the time, he would never live in the United States again.

In Paris, Epstein studied the ancient statues displayed at the city’s various museums and enrolled at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, though he did not remain there for long. His American sensibilities were offended by the tradition of newer students running errands for older ones, and his refusal to participate in this archaic custom earned for him the hostility of his fellow pupils. To escape this oppressive atmosphere, he transferred to the Julien Academy, where he remained until he left Paris.

Although he won several competitions while he was in Paris, Epstein was never really happy there and moved to London in 1905. He immediately fell in love with England and, after a quick trip back to the United States to visit his family, he decided to become a British subject. He became a naturalized citizen in 1911. His first years in England were rather difficult. Often short of money, he worked as a model for art classes, earning the equivalent of a dollar and a half a night. In 1906, he married Margaret Gilmour Dunlop, a native of Scotland, who would bear him a son and daughter before her death in 1947. (In 1955, Epstein married again, this time to Kathleen Esther Garman, a daughter of the noted surgeon William Chancellor Garman.)

Descriptions of Epstein from this period portray a short but powerfully built man with sad gray eyes and rough-hewn features. Although he was capable of amazing amounts of energy and intensity while working, he tended to be withdrawn and taciturn during social occasions. He took no interest in his personal appearance and often dressed in the same clothes for days on end.

Life’s Work

Beginning in 1907, Epstein’s fortunes began to improve. In that year, Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, bought his Head of an Infant, a bronze bust that he had made a year earlier. This was his first important sale, and it soon led to others. That same year, thanks to his contacts in the New English Art Club, he received a commission from the architect Charles Holden to decorate the newly built British Medical Association building in the Strand area of London. For this commission, Epstein created eighteen larger-than-life nude statues representing the various stages in the human life cycle. Although the statues were very traditional in both subject matter and execution, they caused a great outcry when they were unveiled in June, 1908. A reporter from the Evening Standard and St. James’s Gazette examined Epstein’s statues through a telescope and wrote a front-page article condemning them as a shocking affront to public morality. This unwarranted, and basically ignorant, attack launched a vigorous debate as various journalists, politicians, and clergymen joined in either to criticize or to defend the statues. Crowds jammed the street in front of the building on a daily basis to see the controversial works for themselves and pass their own judgment. The final act in this drama was played out in 1935 when the Southern Rhodesian government, which purchased the building in that year, removed and destroyed the statues.

Epstein received nationwide publicity as a result of all the commotion over his “Strand” statues. Yet as soon as this controversy had died down, a new one arose. In 1909, he received a commission to create a tomb for Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The finished monument, completed in June, 1912, was a huge, stylized “flying demon-angel” embedded in a twenty-ton rectangular piece of granite. British reaction to the piece was favorable; even the Evening Standard liked it. Many Frenchmen, however, did not approve of it, and the ensuing debate over whether it should be displayed in Père Lachaise caused the sculpture to remain hidden by a tarpaulin for two years. It was only uncovered in September, 1914, when the outbreak of World War I diverted French public attention.

As his public projects generated controversy, Epstein began what would become a lucrative and very successful career as a portrait sculptor. His first busts were of his wife, bronzes that many critics claim are among his finest work. Their critical success, in turn, led to other portrait commissions, and his fame in that specialized area of art rapidly spread throughout England. Even his less-than-glorious record during World War I (he somehow managed to avoid military service and was even investigated by the government as a suspected spy) did little to dim his reputation, and he turned out excellent busts of such well-known contemporaries as Iris Tree and Admiral Lord Fisher.

Epstein’s bronze portrait busts, influenced as they were by Baroque and Renaissance models, were always better accepted by the general public than his stone monuments, which were generally more experimental and avant-garde. As a case in point, during World War I, Epstein became interested in the vorticist movement, a school heavily influenced by primitive art. During this phase, he produced a number of simplified and abstract statues, including his incomplete Rock Drill and Venus (1917). This latter work, which portrayed the goddess as a faceless, otherworldly creature, created much public excitement when it was first unveiled at the Leicester Galleries in 1917 and thus enhanced his already considerable reputation for controversy.

Indeed, although he never consciously courted it, Epstein seemed to be unable to avoid controversy over his work. In 1920, he produced his bronze Christ, which portrayed an emaciated savior wrapped in a funeral shroud. Epstein intended to evoke both the human and divine qualities of Jesus in the statue, but he instead found himself attacked from all sides for his “offending caricature.” He was defended by George Bernard Shaw and other notable individuals, and the excitement eventually died down when the work was purchased by Apsley Cherry-Garrard and removed from public view. His Memorial to W. H. Hudson (1925) was not as lucky. This stone panel was set up in Hyde Park and immediately provoked charges that it was obscene. Shaw, Sir Muirhead Bone, and others defended the work and prevented it from being removed from its public setting. It has been attacked by vandals over the years, however, and periodically splattered with paint and tar.

During the interwar years, Epstein’s portrait practice suffered from the periodic public outcry over his stone carvings, and he concentrated mainly on producing busts of friends and relatives. He produced several other large and innovative stone statues Genesis (1931), Sun God (1933), Ecce Homo (1935), Consummatum Est (1937), and Adam (1939) but they ignited the usual heated public debate without earning for him the lucrative portrait commissions and official recognition that he desired. This situation improved during World War II, when he received important commissions from the ministry of information to make portrait busts of Winston Churchill and various military leaders. His next large-scale stone project, Lazarus (1948), provoked the usual controversy when it was revealed in Battersea Park, but it was ultimately purchased by Oxford University, a sale that gave Epstein great personal satisfaction. From that point onward, portrait and public commissions flooded into his studio, and his career and artistic reputation were finally firmly established. During this prolific period, he produced such stunning public monuments as Lucifer (1945), the T.U.C. War Memorial (1948), Madonna and Child (1949), Christ in Majesty (1953), and Social Consciousness (1955) and turned out portrait busts of such notable figures as Shaw, Paul Robeson, John Gielgud, Albert Einstein, Ramsay MacDonald, Lord Beaverbrook, John Dewey, Joseph Conrad, and many others.

In addition to sculpting, Epstein also painted and provided illustrations for books. In fact, exhibitions of his paintings were generally very well received and generated excellent sales. Among his best-known painting groups were his Epping Forest series (1933) and his so-called Flower paintings (1936 and 1940). He also provided a collection of striking illustrations for a new copy of the Old Testament (1929-1931) and for an English edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal (1938).

Earlier in his career, Epstein had been rejected for membership in the Royal Society of British Sculptors and the Royal Academy. Yet in the 1950’s, he finally received the official honors that had eluded him for so long. In 1953, he received an honorary degree from Oxford University, and in 1954, he was knighted. Although he often regretted that he had never been asked to teach by any college, Epstein had at least earned an honored position among British artists by the end of his career. He did not, however, have much time left in which to enjoy it. He died during the night of August 19, 1959, at the age of seventy-eight.

Significance

There is no doubt that Epstein was the major British sculptor of the early twentieth century. He was an individual who possessed a powerful intuitive instinct as well as the courage to resist artistic fashion and public taste to produce works that expressed this instinct without compromise. He was hurt very deeply by the controversies that many of his monumental stone carvings created, yet public misunderstanding and ridicule never prevented him from doing what he believed he had to do: to represent the fundamental constants of human existence birth, love, maternity, and death in a forceful and dynamic manner. One need only gaze at the best of his stone carvings, at Rock Drill, Ecce Homo, Lazarus, or Adam, to be overwhelmed by their direct and simple emotional power.

Epstein also produced striking bronze portrait busts. They always transcended mere flattery and, through the skillful manipulation of his medium, Epstein actually suggested such physical sensations as color and shadow and such intangible qualities as intelligence, stupidity, sensuality, and ambition. He was occasionally accused of exaggerating negative qualities at the expense of positive ones, but once again, he claimed to be only reproducing the characteristics that he not only saw but also felt in his subjects. He once stated that few of his patrons were pleased with his completed busts, but he nevertheless had more portrait commissions than he could handle during most of his career.

Epstein was, in short, an artist of profound and uncompromising honesty. Others might have possessed more talent and a wider, more appreciative, audience, but only a select few created with the raw, undiluted energy and relentless emotional intensity of Epstein. These characteristics, which manifested themselves clearly throughout his long and productive career, place Epstein among not only the best British sculptors in the twentieth century but also the best in the history of Western art.

Bibliography

Babson, J. F. The Epsteins: A Family Album. London: Taylor Hall, 1984. An interesting examination of Epstein’s parents as well as his wives and children, this book is an excellent source for biographical information on the artist, especially his youth in New York City.

Buckle, Richard. Jacob Epstein, Sculptor. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. This book, published shortly after Epstein’s death, is short on biographical information on the sculptor, but it does provide an outstanding and sympathetic appreciation of his work.

Epstein, Jacob. Epstein: An Autobiography. London: Hulton Press, 1955. Written toward the end of his life, this book is indispensable for understanding Epstein’s motivations and emotional attachment to his work. It also provides a clear, statue-by-statue account of the process of creation involved in his most famous works.

Harrison, Charles. English Art and Modernism, 1900-1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. An excellent examination of the various trends in British art during the first third of the twentieth century. This book also includes an excellent investigation of the vorticist movement, which had a powerful influence on Epstein’s work in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Ramsden, E. H. Twentieth Century Sculpture. London: Pleiades Press, 1949. An adequate textbook-type account of sculpture, primarily European, from the turn of the century to the early post-World War II period. It is also highly critical of much of Epstein’s work and thus provides an example of the type of criticism that the sculptor had to endure throughout most of his career.

Rose, June. Demons and Angels: A Life of Jacob Epstein. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. A well-researched and well-presented chronicle of Epstein’s life and work.

Silber, Evelyn. Rebel Angel: Sculpture and Watercolours by Sir Jacob Epstein. Birmingham, England: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 1980. A scholarly catalog for a retrospective of Epstein’s work organized by Silber, the foremost authority on Epstein. Her analysis of the sculptor’s career should not be ignored by any serious student of his life and work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Sculpture of Epstein. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1986. By far the most complete work on Epstein by the foremost authority on the artist. In addition to providing abundant biographical information on the sculptor, this book also provides the best, and the most sensitive, assessment of his work in print.

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