BY THE WAY

Southland Times, Issue 20897, 5 October 1929, Page 13

BY THE WAY

EPSTEIN THE TROUBLE MAKER.

(By

Rowan.)

“We seem, indeed, under the fierce heat of Epstein’s personality, about to become almost as artistic a nation as the French.” According to at least one English critic, a surprising number of people have awakened in England to find that they take an interest in art in. Epstein’s case—and want to have it stopped. Since the pre-Raphael-ite days when Charles Dickens denounced

Millais’s “Carpenter’s Shop” with honest fury, and since Ruskin accused Whistler of throwing a pot of paint in the face of the public, nothing so disturbing as Epstein has happened to disturb the even tenor of recognised Art. To-day there is a battle raging about his head in much more vigorous language than is commonly used in England in art circles.

The two statuary groups, “Night” and “Day,” which he had just completed over the portals of the two main entrances to Charles Holden’s Underground Railways House in Westminster, London, have aroused the strongest disapproval not only from the average man of the street but from many persons of acknowledged culture and taste. It Is an open secret that the directors of the company were pressed to have them removed, and it is an open secret that some of the directors needed no pressure to take such a view. Such an eminent architect and scholar as Sir Reginald Blom-

field has denounced them as “expressionism that has ended in the grotesque” and has discovered “bestiality” in Epstein’s types. Learned authorities on Assyrian art and archaic art generally have denied that there is any similarity between Mr Epstein’s work and the works of the archaic antiquity, or of really good negroid art. There is no getting away from the fact that Epstein has to be rated as an original artist who has arrived “bringing his sheaves with him.” To many his Underground Railways groups seemed like strange creatures in the recesses of the earth that had come up through their shafts. His types are not English, or the classical types of ordinary European sculpture, but usually a generalized Eastern type, alien to English habits of sympathy, and this, allied to a harsh, logical technique without minor graces, has prejudiced his art before the ordinary court of public opinion. He demands that you give your attention and imagination to his art before it will speak to you. Its only merits are the large, rhythmic essential merits of sculpture. The statues “Night” and “Day” by the main shape in each group, “resemble-key-stones over the portals of the building. ‘Day’ is on the sunny side; ‘Night’ on the northwest, never catching the sun. ‘Night’ shows a mother-figure soothing a mail to sleep with a benedictory gesture of her great hand. The man-figure lies across her lap and the main lines of the group are horizontal with a slight languorous curve. ‘Day’ is vertical; a father-figure with a face round, fierce and flat like the sun at noon, presents a child-man to the world, the child with his arms raised to the neck of the fat her, as though reluctant to go forth!” Epstein has said there is a Whitman

suggestion in the group. The stones are actual projecting parts of the building, and the sculptor carved the work himself on the spot. There are weaknesses and possibly miscalculations in the sculptures, as one might expect from the conditions of the task, the sculptor having worked in a little shed on the face of the building, unable to see and guage the effect from below. His experience in this form of geometrical sculpture was fairly new. For instance he has not taken full advantage of the depth of the stone, and in “Day” uses only two planes where he had the opportunity for three. But it is “the imaginative energy of the designs and the power with which the sculptor as with one blow has imposed his vision upon you so that you can never be free from it and the many meanings it communicates to the minds of the observer,” which show that he speaks with the tongue of a master, in the high language of his own art. Already critical opinion has ranged itself strongly on his side. Of Polish parentage, Jacob Epstein was

born on the east side of New York nearly fifty years ago. His early life was a struggle amid squalour. He says little about those days, but it is known that a New York woman became interested in his efforts to draw and helped him to attend sculpture classes where Barnard, the sculptor of the famous Lincoln statue, taught, and later to go to Paris, where he had further art training. He did not return to America, but settled in London, married a Scotswoman and has one child, Peggy Jean, whom he, has sculptured as an infant, as a child, and now as a girl in her ’teens. He is a heavy, untidy man of little above the average height, with a massive brow and very bright eyes and a strong head of dark hair now thinning on the top. His expression is both gentle and proud, frank and suspicious. He is a very hard worker and seems to take no recreation except some hours of ease at the Cafe Royal

at night when he usually sits with his Indian model, Sunita, and her son. On Saturdays he usually holds a. little court there. When he goes off on a journey he packs his things around him, and only by his unusually bulky appearance do his friends know that Epstein is on a journey. Like Augustus John, the painter, of whom he has done a memorable bust, he is one of the most picturesque figures in England, and as long as these two are alive, the Kingdom of Bohemia will still be in London. Only three other European sculptors can be considered in the same rank— Mailliol, the Frenchman; Milles, the Swede, the master of the fountain, and Mestrovich, the Serbian, whose sculptures are well known in America.

Epstein’s earliest works in London were the full-length figures set in Adams & Holden’s building for the British Medical Association in the Strand. Here, with characteristic daring, young Epstein set out, in groups of imaginative figures, to symbolize the life of man in many stages. On account of the spacing, the groups had to be crowded together, and the effect in its rhythm of perpendicular figures is rich and mysterious, like a Gothic screen. The figures are of Portland stone, a material in which Epstein has now done much of his important work, set on a gray granite building which has darkened, while the stone has whitened in the twenty-three years of London weather. The work is more picturesque than any of his other architectural sculpture, and the influence of Rodin suggests itself. The figures being in the middle of the building, their nudity might have passed with no more attention than that given to other architectural sculpture, had it not happened that the National Vigilance Society’s offices were in the building opposite the sculptures and on the same level, and the distressed society took prompt steps to move the authorities to act. Evening papers on the lookout for sensation got righteously to work and soon the hunt was up. Embarrassed policemen, notebook in hand, were observed on the scaffolding making their investigations while admiring crowds observed them from below.

The British Medical Association became a little alarmed, but when the pressure upon them was at its height, a memoran--dum signed by many distinguished professors of art and by gallery directors and artists, was laid before them. As professional men the association did not act against professional opinion on its own subject. So the vigilants had to obscure their windows and the indignant newspapers turned to report the details of the divorce cases of the moment. Epstein’s sculptures remain in their place to perform their office, which was to unite the two parts of this building, and to enrich it. , Next came the Oscar Wilde Memorial, which Epstein was commissioned by a com mittee to design. In this memorial he found an image to express a creator of beauty and a mutineer against life. He cut from the face of a forty-ton block of stone a flying figure with horizontal wings, moving with swiftness through the air, not up toward the heavens, but parallel to the earth. The whole effect is of something revealed in the stone, not of a man that looks like’a stone, but of a stone that looks like a man. That is characteristic of Epstein’s art to-day, and that is why his architectural sculpture in his “Day” and “Night” looks quite unlike other modern architectural sculpture in England and rallies the architects io his support. “The proud, worn eyes of the figure, the close, straight, sharp, unsoaring lines of the wings forming a beautiful enrichment, and the ; clear, strange imagery of the small figures —of Envy, Pride, and Luxury, with a trumpeting spirit proclaiming their glory—which adorn the headgear, are vital imagination expressed in the appropriate terms of sculpture.” France received this monument with instant antagonism, and many obstacles were put in the way of its erection in Perc Lachaise, where Wilde’s body lies. It was one of the major disappointments which tinged Epstein’s early career. A few years later he designed his “Venus,” an experiment in abstract form in marble, not very convincing, and also a “Christ,” a full-length figure in which he sought to produce a man typical of all the white race. At that period he also produced a number of portrait busts, of which his most

! inveterate enemies could not deny the merit. The Hudson Memorial, which came after the war. roused a fury of abuse which reached some high points when Epstein was scolded by another artist before a crowd in front of his statue, and the ‘statue itself was splashed with green paint one night by a band of dithyrambic students of academic persuasion. Again the newspapers were crowded with denouncing letters and some of the subscribers to the memorial, who had not contributed very much, wanted their money back. The Gov- | ernment was asked in the House of Commons to have the memorial removed at once from Hyde Park. It was even argued that ’it upset the birds. -The reply of Epstein’s admirers was to offer a new Epstein statue of a woman, “The Visitation,” to the National Gallery at Millbank, and it was accepted by the fastidious committee of trustees of that institution. A vigorous defence of the memorial was made by a group that included many distinguished artists, architects, and men of letters. Epstein has never lacked enthusiastic and devoted supporters, and they have included men whose own work was poles apart from Epstein’s untraditional dynamic conception of art. Epstein’s next challenge to his times was his “Madonna and Child,” which he showied to some people before taking it to I America for his exhibition there in 1927. lit was the result of two years’ work and I disclosed his art in its maturity of mind and skill. The “Madonna and Child” are of Indian type; the Boy stands between her knees and she is both protecting the child and presenting it to the world. The Boy looks upward, his arms raised in .an attitude of invocation. There is a tenderness in the whole conception unusual in Epstein's work. It was not surprizing that further displeasure was caused because the type was Indian. His exhibition in New York last year aroused interest, but did not bring support from those who make important purchases or commission big undertakings, so he returned to London. The most significant development of the new Epstein battle is that the younger generation of art students are advancing to his support,