Images of Sculpture
Epstein. Photographs by Geoffrey Ireland.
by Laurie Lee.
André Deutsch (London). Distributed by New York Graphic Society. Unpaginated. $12.00.
Sir Jacob Epstein told me that he was not too happy about this elegant volume: it was much too “personal.” Yet I found nothing more intimate in it than a picture of the artist with his collie. The sculptor appears in several pictures, but always in the midst of his work; most of the photographs are of the statuary.
It is tempting to contrast this book with The Private World of Pablo Picasso, by David Douglas Duncan, published last year. Duncan’s more than 300 pictures (many of them not larger than passport photographs) reveal Picasso as an extrovert, almost as much given to histrionics as Dali. He poses in his bathtub, or in an African helmet and his girl friend’s petticoat; he is masked as an Italian clown, he watches a bull fight, carves a chicken, fires a pistol. Photographer Ireland’s approach is entirely different. Whereas in the Picasso volume paintings and sculptures are no more important than friends, children, and household pets, Epstein here appears small and insignificant beside his creations, many of which are of gigantic proportions. At seventy-eight, he is a big-boned, homely man in work clothes splashed with clay, and looks like a New York taxi driver or, rather, a Jewish “paintner.” But his eyes are very vivid, very much alive.
There aren’t many sculptures by Epstein in this country (the 1958 catalogue of New York’s Museum of Modern Art lists only three bronzes and one marble group); we must therefore content ourselves with photographs of them. Ireland, who spent two years observing Epstein, concentrates on the last decade of the sculptor’s work, letting some of the older, better known bronze heads appear in the background.
Oddly, some works seem more impressive in these photographs than they are in situ. The 25-foot high “Christ in Majesty” looks magnificent both as a plaster figure and in the subsequent aluminum casting. There is Byzantine restraint about the figure, though head, hands, and feet are done with expressive realism, and it is one of the finest samples of Epstein’s Altersstil. According to the Manchester Guardian, however, the figure is too large for its position in the cathedral at Cardiff, Wales. The same source reports that, by contrast, the stone group (a mother carrying her lifeless son) for the London Trades Union Congress is too small for the courtyard in which it stands.
The statuary group called “Social Consciousness” is also unfortunately placed. It consists of three colossal bronzes: the central figure depicts “The Eternal Mother,” while the two figures on the right symbolize “Succor,” and the two on the left “Compassion”; with thin, elongated bodies and expressive faces, they are indeed very powerful. But the photograph might have told Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Association, which commissioned this monument, that the three pieces should be placed apart, their link being literary rather than artistic. Set on individual pedestals and separated by at least thirty yards, they would not have competed with each other. In their present position—grouped together at the rear entrance to Philadelphia’s Museum of Art—there is too much going on around them which distracts the eye from the formal merits of each unit.
Ireland is a surrealist who can give an unearthly sort of life to sculpture by photographing it from unusual angles, distributing light and shade in a special way, blurring or accentuating outlines. In the introduction, Laurie Lee, one of England’s younger poets, aptly says of the “Social Consciousness” photos:
In his treatment of the figures—enclosed and shadowed by the foundry walls—he [Ireland] gives us something which no one, anywhere, will ever see in the same light again. Slashed by his lenses, darkened by London’s skies, separate, together, looming close and far, they must haunt us forever as he first saw them.
Typical of Ireland’s method is a photo montage of portrait heads on shelves—a nightmarish vision that could have come from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The still life with Epstein’s tools and a pair of old shoes could be a trompe l’oeil picture by the 19th-century American, William M. Harnett. Unforgettable is the studio shot—T. S. Eliot on the floor and Gina Lollobrigida to the right, while the huge, partly shrouded figure of “Ecce Homo” is in the center, towering above all the dozens of heads of celebrities.
Mr. Lee considers “Ecce Homo” the most powerful of Epstein’s carvings: “The thorncrowned, rope-bound, martyred Christ is terrible in his silence, his grief and accusations. Squat, square, the totem of our crimes, he stands before us in a pitiless, blinding light. No chisel was ever less compromising than Epstein’s in this work. Ten thousand churchfuls of sentimentalized Christs are denied forever by this raw and savage figure. This was a Man, not a doll, and looking upon his face and hands we can no longer take refuge in the pretty pieties.”
Epstein’s admirers are still divided into two camps: those who adore the modeler and deplore that the artist ever strayed into the field of carving, and those who judge carvings like “Adam” or “Ecce Home” as far superior to the bronze portrait heads. Mr. Lee manages to reconcile the two views. Epstein, he says, is an unusual portraitist (“each head is vibrant with the life of the subject”), though of course, his imagination can develop more freely in his vision hewn from stone: “To be confronted with new carvings by Epstein is to discover new Easter Islands.”
Curiously, Mr. Lee does not once mention the fact that Epstein is a Jew who grew up among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in New York’s Hester Street. He says: “Jacob Epstein came to this country [England] from . . . America, and by descent, from Poland.” Yet in two of the photographs we see, flanked by portrait heads, a replica of the famous Temple menorah standing on a cupboard in the hall that leads to the sculptor’s studio at Hyde Park Gate.
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