EPSTEIN STATUES

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 133, 7 June 1935, Page 7

EPSTEIN STATUES

PKOTEST AT REMOVAL

"LANDMARKS IN ART"

I am glad that the ''Manchester Guardian" feels concerned about the strange proposal of the Southern Rhodesian Government to remove the famous statues by Mr. Epstein from the building they have acquired in the Strand, writes Muirhead Bone, the famous artist, to the "Manchester Guardian." It is a proposal to' tear an important page from the art history of England. These statues are truly landmarks in that history. Taken away from the building for which they were designed (they are indeed its only monuments, as the architect, Mr. Charles Holden, kept his whole facade severely plain in order to emphasise them to the utmost), they would lose most, if not all, of their meaning, and London would lose the most successful, perhaps, of all its modern art monuments. And we art-lovers would feel such a robbery keenly. The monument I speak of is the perfect combination of the building and its statuary.

The history of sculpture—that most difficult of arts, the one most deserving of public encouragement and endowment—is strewn, as every student knows, with pathetic fragments, reminders of noble projects which age or death overtook before a complete conception could be brought to fruition. Such were the hajf-hewn, weed-grown torsos of Michelangelo's one used to come across in the dark alleys of the Boboli Gardens and gaze at with awe and an overwhelming sense of the pathetic grandeur of this art with its resolute claim to everlastingness. In the old British Medical building in the Strand a happily complete thing came into existence —an achievement uniting one of the very,first buildings to show the real style of modern architecture with the earliest and perhaps the happiest public work by our chief English sculptor. DEEP FEELING. So I entreat the Southern Rhodesian Government to pause while there is time and realise the depth of feeling in the whole of our art world against such vandalism. Their proposal creates a grave precedent which I am sure they would hesitate to inflict on the London public who care for such matters as their first welcome in our midst. This great series of sculptures was once before in danger of removal, but' the art-lovers of London united to fight for them, and they stand above the Strand to this day as a testimony of a notable victory over Philistinism and misunderstanding. To hew them down now would be a serious discouragement to English art and a disheartening setback to its progress in England. Even were it possible to remove the sculptures safely, their whole purpose would be entirely frustrated by this hacking out of the "eyes" of the building and dispersing them for ever to the twilight of collections. I do not think it is too much to say that this building has, proved a real "academy" to sculptors and architects, for the difficult art of sculpture applied to architecture is here seentp perfection. All this would be gone, and It .would prove a real loss to the public good. "CLASSIC RANK." If the Southern Rhodesian Government would act as one is sure Rhodes himself would have acted—for no one was keener, Sir Herbert Baker makes plain in his book, in recognising and encouraging dignity in architecture and sculpture—they would magnanimously hold their hand now; a great work of :art is in their power. For there is no question that such destruction as they, propose will be considered unthinkable :by anyone (including their own Government) a few years hence. For Mr. Epstein is graduating rapidly to classic rank and to the respect that.is; due to the work of a classic .