EPSTEIN' ART

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 288, 31 August 1929, Page 29

EPSTEIN' ART

HIS TWO LATEST SCULPTURES

Storms of criticism, rising at times into terms of honest full-blooded abuse that are rarely heard in art controversy in England, although common enough, indeed usual, in France at the appearance of any new expression in art, have greeted the appearance of the two sculpture groups, by Mr. Epstein over the-portals of the new building of the Underground Railways at St. James’s Park Station, Westminster. At the same time a number of artists, architects, and critics whose opinions are worthy of respect have expressed their admiration of these works (writes “J. B.” in an English paper).

The position to-day, indeed, is like that which followed the unveiling of Mr. Epstein’s Hudson Memorial relief in Hyde Park a couple of years ago. and also that of his statues on the British Medical Association's building in the Strand some twenty years ago. No party would raise an outcry now about the Strand figures, and if they did people would probably now be only surprised, while even Rima in her grove in Hyde Park has ceased to arouse angry feelings and has become, indeed, one of the sights that the modern Londoner likes to take his visitors to see after the cloying candy of the Peter Pan statue.

The figures on Underground House, however, are now on trial and, as the Scots say, “tholling their assize.” That they are extremely distasteful on first sight to a considerable number of people of culture and taste is undeniable, much as Rodin’s Balzac was to the Parisians of that time. Mr. Epstein has at any rate succeeded in making people look at and even think about architectural sculpture, aud one cannot easily remember any other architectural sculpture in London that has done that. Whether we like it or not, Mr. Epstein in whatever he does commands our attention and makes us think about the nature of sculpture. And his work, however he may shock the complacency of a country that is as poor in sculpture as it is rich in poetry and has very little to show the stirring of new ideas in aft that are moving over Europe, has to be taken seriously, for no one acquainted with the subject will deny that be is a skilled and gifted artist and that his portrait busts, at least, are among the outstanding works of this age. If he choses lo express himself in the arbitrary forms of sculpture, he uses wo cannot say that it is because he has not the skill to represent a, man as closely as a Madame Tussaud figure does. The groups at the Underground House must be accepted as his conception of architectural sculpture, however naughty of him it is to think so. He really must know something about his job. “Night,” which was the first of the two groups to be free of scaffolding, did not quite rouse the old hostility, although most people frankly did not like it. The subject is a mother figure of a heavy Eastern type with a male figure lying on her lap whom she is stilling to sleep with a gesture of a mighty hand. The shapes are simplified to their bare essentials and carved with a hard, square expressiveness without regard to anything but the

sculpture idea. The horizontal line of the recumbent figure repeats with a curved variation the line of the stone course over the doorway; the leg of the male figure, curved at the knee, with its drooping foot is echoed on the other 'side by the shoulder and hand of the female figure. The rhythm of the design runs through all its parts, which fall into three main planes receding toward the top. It is an elemental conception of night, ponderable and remote, making strange calls to our consciousness. “Day” is harder to accept. A large father figure, with a fierce face, flat and hard and round like the sun at noon, holds aud presents a male child standing between his knees, while the child stretches up his arms toward the neck of the father, his face turning upwards in a gesture of reluctance to face his task. The main pattern of the group is made of the two pairs of arms, the small ones within the larger, and the four legs forming the base. It is one of the most inventive Mr. Epstein has evolved. Again the sculptor has sought to express his idea in the starkest, most simplified forms, with a severe squareness of effect. His task was to produce an architectural decoration by carving a projecting part of the actual stone of the building, and this he has done with an appropriate imagination and evocative power adequate for the emphasis of the portal bn the face of this sheer, tower-like building with its regiments of windows. But there are points about this group that are difficult to get over, particularly the modelling of the upper part of the child's body, where the chest seems to have been carved away, and the treatment of the arms, while the squareness of the legs changes to a rounded treatment of the body as though the sculptor had two minds about, his technique. But the power to imagine and deliver his idea with its uncanny fire are tremendously there. Learned men tell us that there is nothing Assyrian or African about his art and no resemblance to archaic rock-carving; in short, they deny the art pedigree that many writers would force upon him. But if Epstein has taken his studies of these works so deeply into the body of his art that they cannot be identified, it only increases the suspicion that there is something new as well as something alien to our habits of thought in his sculpture. Before we reject it with abuse we might perhaps take a little time to get used to it. We can’t be quite sure right off that lie is not saying new things to us that we have to tune our ears to hear:

Change is the pulse of life on earth; The artist dies, but art lives on; New rhapsodies are ripe for birth When every rhapsodist seems gone. So, to my day’s extremity May I, in patience infinite, Attend the beauty that must be, And, though it slay me, welcome it. Yes, but do we know that Epstein is bringing new beauty to our generation? Well, it seems to the present writer to be here “burning bright,” although to many it is still “in the forests of the night.”