Epstein, Enigma and Sculptor of Strength

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 129, 3 June 1933, Page 16

Epstein, Enigma and Sculptor of Strength

Mr, Epstein is the only artist of our time practising in England whose, art arouses strong feelings and controversy when he is well into his maturity. Steer's and Sargent's impressionism shocked the nineties, but they lived into a time when nobody could understand what the controversy had been about, whilo Mr. Augustus John, who thirty years ago infuriated the public just as much as Mr. Epstein did then, is now admired and fashionable, except, perhaps, with the young. Mr. Epstein, however, sf.ill chisels his lonely furrow amid showers of brickbats and a few bouquets, and at every exhibition he sheds an old public and begins to gather a new one (says the art critic of the "Manchester Guardian"). His latest exhibition at the Leicester Galleries will be no less a battleground than his former shows there. Both in method and in ideas he is inimical to public opinion in a country which has never concerned itself much with sculpture and has a deep distaste for the sculptural or pictorial expression of ideas wEich it accepts in literary form. Mr. Epstein's large relief "Primeval Gods," in Hopton Wood stone, carved on both sides, of a great slab, seems a sequel to his "Genesis" of two years ago. On one side is-an upright male figure with arms . outstretched and hands raised, the hieratic attitude, the youthful head and rayed hair suggesting the Sun God. On the other side is a brooding seated figure, with two smaller figures in the recess under the breast formed by the taut straight arms. The small figures are like a child with arms over its head, and a prone female figure. As "Genesis" symbolised maternity, the symbolism hero seems concerned with generation on the male side. Tho figures are carved with all Epstein's smouldering strength. The single figure, which was begun in 1910, soon after his Strand figures for tho British Medical Association, has possibly passed through different phases before it took this final form. It is the most graceful figure ho has done, and produces an almost disconcerting contrast with the group on the other side, which is in the grim domineering convention of his Underground House sculpture. The connection between the heavy "earth god" figure and the two smaller figures in the centre is not to me established, and the calliper shapes

|of these smaller figures worry the eye within the monumental outlines that surround them. In this whole sculpture one has the sense of an artist, balked by the conditions of the time from full expression of his idea, searching restlessly within himself to find a formula. The exhibition contains thirty-nine pieces, including a few pre-war carvings and a bronze half-length nude. The bronze group "Madonna and Child," which Mr. Epstein took to the United States with him on his visit, is here. The figures are from Indian models, and the design is one of the most closely wrought of all his groups. The Mother and Child are conceived tragically and sensitively, with a richness of effect and nobility of outline that must surprise those who only know his, work in its simplified forms. Here is one of the greater sculptures of our time that would enrich any of the important new ecclesiastical buildings that aro now rising in so many English cities. It has that rare thing in our sculpture, it has a presence. That can be said, too, of nearly ail his busts. Tew of them in this show are of. well:known people, apart from his well-known conception of Joseph Conrad. One of the finest is the bust of Professor Lucy M. Donnelly, of Bryn Mawr College in the United States. Here the sculptor seems to have accepted everything of this reserved, thoughtful, authoritative, little, middleaged lady, and returned it in an enriched and distant art form that will endure. Another fine interpretative portrait is of a negress, ""Boma of Barbados," treated with equal respect. "Sona (Mrs. Health)," a free and gaily composed head in bronze, a "Portrait of a Lady," with a Spanish comb in her hair, and "Arthur U. Nicholle" are other notable examples in his brilliant collection of vital portraiture. The strength of this sculptor as he moves from one conception to another, sometimes harsh, sometimes puzzling and overcharged, but never faded or facile, is one of the wonders of our time. In his half-figure "Isobel," he combines his delight in the rich exuberant forms of the East and the Italian finesse of decorative/ line to a work of proud and finely wrought beauty. East is East and West is West, but sometimes they meet in Mr. Epstein's studio.