Jacob Epstein, Sculptor

A Note on the Man and His Work

JOHN QUINN

JACOB EPSTEIN has been the stormcentre of English art for the last ten years. But now he has arrived. An article in The Fortnightly Review for June, 1917, by John Coumos on The Sculpture of Jacob Epstein, an article in The New Statesman for March 17, 1917, by the poet and critic Laurence Binyon; a long article on Epstein's work by Bernard van Dieren, the Dutch composer, in The New Age of March, 8, 1917; and many other critical notices all unite in recognition of Epstein's work as that of a master.

Epstein has now established himself solidly as a great sculptor. His foes, with a few exceptions, have surrendered, and the praise he is now receiving has given the lie to early and jealous attempts to label him as a charlatan.

PSTEIN is still a young man. He was bom in New York in 1880, of RussianJewish-Polish parents. He started on his career in America at the age of twenty, then studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and has lived in England for about a dozen years. Those who have followed with understanding the development of art in the last decade will recall the storms that have raged about his work, the row that was kicked up over his sculpture for the British Medical Association building in the Strand, in order to compete for which he became a naturalized British subject; the furore over his Wilde monument, and the bitterness, malignancy and ignorance that inspired attacks upon others of his works.

One looks back now at those stupid and malevolent attacks as mere curiosities, to be marked and catalogued along with similar idiocies written, in his day, of the work of Puvis de Chavannes, and, in his day, about Cezanne. After all it is a sign of mental health to forget the jibes of negligible journalistic souteneurs. Epstein, who has won his laurels, can smile. One feels he could build a palace in harmony with his sculpture.

EPSTEIN has had two striking exhibitions in London this year. The second, at the Leicester Galleries, was the artistic sensation of the last London art year. Twenty-six examples of his work were shown, mostly portraits, including busts of Augustus John, the painter, of the poet W. H. Davies, the charming "Meum," the splendidly modelled "Nan," and that of a French girl of great beauty, "Marcelle." At the earlier exhibition he had shown the portrait busts of the Duchess of Hamilton and the Countess of Drogheda, and busts of Lord Fisher and other notables. At the Leicester Galleries he also exhibited two abstract figures, "Venus" in marble, and a carving in granite, unfinished, called by him "Mother and Child," both of which are to form part of my collection of his work. The catalogue of the exhibition had no introduction but only these words: "I rest silent in my work." That, it seems to me, is the right spirit for an artist; for a painter never to talk except with his brush in hand, and for a sculptor to speak only with stone and chisel.

The two abstract figures, the "Venus" and the "Mother and Child", puzzled some of the critics, angered a 'few others of atrophied minds, but called forth great admiration from very many. Epstein does not make the mistake of overrating what is generally called advanced work. He knows that not all advanced work is good; that some of it is painfully bad. He does not make the mistake of following the tendency to slight work that has any resemblance to natural objects. His own essays in abstract art have always been natural—never forced. It is only when he sees something to be done in abstract form that better conveys his meaning than natural forms, that he employs it. He recognizes, though, that there is a solidity in natural forms that will always attract a sculptor, and he knows too that great work can be done on a natural basis.

THE "Venus" figure in marble, the granite "Mother and Child," the metal torso of the "Rock Drill," and the powerful and suggestive "Carving in Flenite" which is among my dozen or so examples of Epstein's work, are so far, apart from his monumental figures, his strongest pieces of abstract work.

His ambition has always been to do great works. He has trained himself to efficiency, lived simply, kept himself in good health, and although as a naturalized Englishman, he has been summoned for military duty, the true friends of art will hope that he may not be swept away by the war.

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America has no great sculptor as Epstein is a great sculptor and as the Rumanian, Constantin Brancusi, who lives in Paris, is a great sculptor. We have contractor-sculptors, who, after they get their contracts in Washington, seem to rush to the long-distance telephone to telephone to their Italian or French workmen in their New York studios to "go ahead with a Goddess of liberty" so-many feet high, and "with a group of so-many children, a nude man with a hammer, and a sheep or a goat or two"; others who advertise their desires to turn a perfectly good mountain into a sculptural mole-hill; others who are instantaneous photographers in mud, with all the imperfection of a bad moving picture; others again whose work reminds one of brass stove ornaments; others again who sit in their studies and direct their workmen to take off a little here and chip a little away there, and whose work seems to be finished with sand blast, just as Ford machines are painted with a hose.

ONE should not blame these American pseudoartists too much for not being men of genius, for we have the testimony of Henry James that "It is of extreme interest to be reminded at many a turn . . . that it takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition, and an endless amount of tradition to make even a little taste, and an endless amount of taste, by the same token, to make even a little tranquillity",—and, he might have added, to accomplish the miracle of art.

But pseudo-sculpture, pseudo-art, is not by any means confined to America. It is only very common here. The criticism of London and Paris is more honest than ours. In fact genuine, courageous, downright artistic criticism is not merely uncommon here; it is almost non-existent. I will leave it for the theorist to say whether art preceded art-criticism or whether the creation of the first work of art produced the first art-critic. But our pseudo-artists are not even pseudo-critics. If those of them who are honest had any gift of self-criticism or real pride, the patient American public would be spared a vast amount of trashy art.