EPSTEIN STATUES

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 78, 29 September 1930, Page 9

EPSTEIN STATUES

B.M.A. BUILDING IN LONDON

FATE AFTER DEMOLITION

I LONDON, 27th September. ! The group of Epstein statues on the British Medical Association's building in the Strand, which shocked London twenty-five years ago and became known as the Epstein "indecencies," but the nakedness of which, has been considerably toned down by London grime, is again, in the limelight. 'The New Zealand Government now owns tho building, which has been marked out for demolition.

The . British Medical Association Bays that it is not feasible to make an offer for the statues for its new building in Tavistock Square/ because Epstein, would hardly: harmonise with the Elizabethan courtyard.

The eighteen large figures which the Kussian-Americau Epstein carved for the front of the British Medical Association building in 1905 represented his first considerable commission after ho had "gone to London from the Ecolo dcs Beaux-Arts in Paris. Epstein had then been in London for.about three years and his intensely personal and vigorous style> coloured by his long acquaintance with eastern culture, leading to productions very different from the Western tradition, aroused immediate opposition. The outburst of abuse which followed the revelation of the figures was a forerunner of the famous controversy over the Hudson Memorial in 1925, when, popular opinion was stirred and the memorial was vilified despite protests by Muirhead Bone, Cunningham Grahame, and Sir John Lavery.