Eric Gill in the flesh:

...One of the typefaces designed by Eric Gill, reprinted from the November 1982 issue of The Chesterton Review, which is devoted to articles on Gill...

...It's just that the book is thoroughly without intuition...

...Established as a master mason in 1904, Gill made his living as a carver of tombstone inscriptions until meeting sculptor Jacob Epstein in 1910...

...There is a chapter for Gill's notions about clothes and women ("Women should dress decorously at all times in keeping with their God-given roles as mothers, nurses, servants or nuns...

...So they flash a pretty package like Malcolm Yorke's Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit, with promise of raciness (ah, the flesh of that subtitle...

...The dandy's authority derived from his power to intimidate through the sheer presumption of his intentions...

...Style requires constant reinforcement to maintain its effect...

...GILL wrote voluminously on the relationship of religion to workmen and to art...

...Yorke, a sculptor himself, responds to the tolerances of the Old Boy network like a dog to a whistle...

...By now, Gill is known primarily to connoisseurs of rare books and typefaces...

...His avoidance mechanisms get in the way whenever it becomes necessary to exercise critical imagination, make distinctions, weigh inferences, risk conclusions...

...The primitive farm conditions provided the women with ample opportunity to fulfill their ordained service roles while the men secured themselves a place among the communion of saints with readings from the Martyrologium before meals, the various Epistles and Gospel of the day, much splashing of holy water and high purpose: Visitors to the community commented on how unselfishly the women drudged to support the men's artistic, intellectual and spiritual lives whilst being excluded from the central decision-making structure of the Guild...

...The basic data, MAUREEN mullarkey is a New York painter who writes on art for Commonweal...

...The plain brown wrapper of facts, after all, is intact...

...Uncomfortable with the exercise of discernment, the professor is quick to sit back and put his feet up on what he quaintly calls "the urgency of Gill's inquisitiveness:" This inquisitiveness, a kind of erotic kleptomania, led him to collect and copy erotic photographs, accumulate an erotic library, study and draw his own and others' genitals, erect a mirror in the studio to watch his illicit love-making, and to watch and draw lovers in Hyde Park...

...GILL TYPIFIED the aggressive, self-conscious elevation of taste that constituted nineteenth-century England's cultural Reformation...

...In 1931 he won the commission for the relief "Prospero and Ariel" which stands over the main entrance of the BBC in London...

...Gill was enough of a voyeur and just enough of a parody of the Natural Man to be parodied himself in a book that is part chronicle, part encomium, part locker-room talk for the carriage trade...

...It is those closetsful of culture-conscious Peeping Toms who insist that their field glasses are for aesthetic inquiries only ("This is intended primarly as an art book," states Professor Yorke) and that, no, this doesn't do a thing for them...

...This would have provided a context for a useful investigation of Gill as a religious artist...

...Eric Gill (Universe Books, $25., 304 pp...

...There is a chapter for his philosophy of art ("To hell with culture as a thing added like a sauce to otherwise unpalatable stale fish"), one for his drawings, his lettering, and so on...

...He borrowed from papal doctrine and the theories of Coomaraswamy and leaned heavily on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, John Henry Newman, and the luminaries of the Oxford Movement...

...Epstein encouraged Gill's turn toward figure work and collaborated with him on a scheme for the construction of a "twentieth century Stonehenge...

...abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Artists are no more immoral than stockbrokers...

...As the hall was Britain's contribution to the League of Nations, Gill's Creation Panel can be considered one of the most prestigious commissions of his generation...

...That ecclesiastical sculpture is subject to the same standards of judgment as any other work seems lost on Yorke...

...It gives me great satisfaction...

...Yorke's attempt to "redress such neglect" would have been better put toward understanding it...

...Yorke interprets it solely as evidence of Gill's love of "orderly relationships...

...It goes against Yorke's grain, susceptible as he is to the mystique of the Artist-as-Proletarian-Bohemian-Hero, to admit that the pleasures of snobbery never change...

...The power of Assy is in its array of significant commissions from artists estranged from religious orthodoxy- Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipshitz, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pierre Bon-nard, the Marxist Jean Lurgat, the atheist Germain Richier who created Assy's bronze crucifix...

...Worse, the book smirks and plays peek-a-boo when it ought to know better...

...A prototype of the modern artist, the dandy was a deliberately synthetic personality, a cultural configuration, a style...

...In 1935 the British government asked him to provide the three bas-reliefs in the lobby of the council hall of the Palace of Nations, Geneva...

...Popular books of the period refer to the dandy as a man superior to the visible world, indifferent to its values, a seer...

...On the contrary, it is likely to generate it...

...Drawn to wood engraving "for the sake of lettering," Gill also founded his own press in 1915...

...At this point in the book there is no longer any doubt that Yorke is having trouble managing his buttons...

...As Wilfrid Sheed put it in an old essay Dirty Business: "It would be nice if mankind's need for pornography could somehow be met without commandeering whole art forms like this...

...is already on the shelves of museum bookstores...

...Gill is presented as another Man for All Seasons, inflated into a Prometheus Bound by the twin cords of religious conviction and sexual drive...

...There is even some straightforwardly useful information and sufficient illustrations to give the flavor of Gill's talent and limitations...

...He used it to establish the patriarchy that constituted his home life and to cement his reputation...

...Yorke refuses to see Gill as the typical Englishman and latter-day Victorian - coxcomb, actually - that he was...

...ommandeering whole art forms like this...

...Skeptical locals called Gill "The Married Monk...

...lights up the margins in neon...

...The audience is gathering, egged on by the jacket: Gill's 1976 wood engraving of a faceless, soft-core Eve straddling a serpent with, yes, a smile on its phallic face...

...Without the systematic application of pressure, prestige based largely on manners is apt to lift and waft off like a morning haze...

...He calls Gill "a throwback only as far as the nineteenth-century Victorian sculptor with his mildly sexy nymphs" and at the same time compares him to the anonymous carver-masons of medieval England...

...The others, Gill among them, were eclipsed at home by the younger Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and on the continent by Minne, Lehmbruck, Barlach, Maillol, and such carvers as Brancusi, Arp, and Modigliani...

...It's a bit of a nuisance to have to work one's way through an entire book just for the sexy parts...

...Art is all...

...As the literature of the time makes plain, the dandy rules more by his airs than by his works...

...He has no ear for cant, no eye at all for gall and wormwood., The tone is all wrong...

...By Gill's time the myth of Brummell had made its way across the Channel where it acquired a tradition and a literature...

...Women are cheap and must advertise...

...as a come-on to a dull event...

...Consequently, he sets out to prove Gill's "continuing relevance to modern society and modern art" by ignoring those aspects of Gill that are clearly dated and by refusing to distinguish between what counts and what doesn't...

...that Epstein dismissed all of his writings as "doggerel" and that Gill's friend G.K...

...The figure for which he was most famous, the Hoptonstone torso "Mankind," is against the wall of a basement storeroom of the Tate Gallery in London...

...An inheritor of dandyisme, Gill adapted its postures to the extravagances of the convert...

...Published to coincide with the centenary of Gill's birth, this latest look at the once well-known British sculptor, polemicist, and typeface designer is aimed at a certain category of oglers, the ones with sensibility...

...On occasion he added garters and did himself up, in the phrase of one observer, "like Malvolio...

...Gill was every inch the dandy, a self-created objet d' art who invented himself through his costume and his attitudes...

...culled obediently from the many previous biographies of Gill (all by relatives or personal friends of Gill and usually fellow-Catholics as well), are re-assembled here in an orderly way, like a course outline...

...His portrayals of the female nude, with their stilted combination of classical idealization and center-fold explicitness (catch that ring of dots around Eve's nipple...

...A chronic philanderer, Gill emerges from Yorke's anecdotes as Good St...

...Artists and poets were high on Beau Brummell whose vanity, insolence, and panache titillated London in the early decades of the century...

...It was never sexual freedom that he celebrated, simply his own erections...

...Not one bit...

...His woodcuts are rarely reproduced...

...Instead, he tries to revive interest in Gill as a sculptor of religious works: His best work is done in the service of an idea which has nothing to do with a programme of aesthetics but which is passionately held - his religious beliefs...

...Yet Yorke accepts Gill's get-up as testimony to the "humility of the artisan...

...The ploy works...

...THE YOUNG GILL studied masonry at a technical school where Edward Johnson, a gifted pioneer in the nineteenth-century revival of hand lettering, taught calligraphy...

...The real stuff...

...There is not an idea in it, not an inkling of either historical or psychological insight...

...His reputation as a sculptor was launched in 1914 with the carving of the Stations of the Cross in bas-relief for Westminster Cathedral...

...Not an original thinker, Gill was nonetheless a successful popularizer, the Tom Paine of the revolution in social and artistic thought that occurred in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.This aspect of Gill might have provided Yorke with fruitful avenues for inquiry but Yorke is content merely to record: I have refrained from imposing my own judgments on Gill's ideas even when I have found them wrong or downright absurd, partly because it would need several volumes to do so, but mainly because I believe the reader will be provoked by what he reads into his own reactions and replies...

...The audience in mind is neither the serious student of Gill, of the English Catholic Revival, of the Arts and Crafts Movement nor of nineteenth-century social philosophy...

...Such statements are, in effect, Yorke's apology for the fact that Gill is less interesting as an artist than as a naughty fellow...

...He did his best to re-establish a tradition of ecclesiastical sculpture and sculpture for use, and in this where are his rivals let alone his equals...

...It's not that the decencies have not been observed...

...He scampers back and forth from one unlikable aspect of Gill to the next, oblivious to the ground underfoot and barking approval all the way...

...But what am I to call you' The fact that Chute was fully his equal, even his superior, as a draftsman, makes Gill's remark all the more Man is matter and spirit, both real and both good...

...Besides, it is evident from Gill's views on divorce ("a phantasy of disordered imagination"), homosexuality ("the ultimate disrespect to the human body and to human love"), contraception, masturbation, and female sexuality ("much more reprehensible than male") that this self-styled champion of "the exuberance of human nature" was no such thing...

...Goaded by a full chapter devoted to Gill's erotic preoccupations and a G-string of such items as the size of the genitals of his carved Christ figures ("uncommonly well hung"), readers labor to the end pretending this is art history...

...He despised trousers on the grounds that they pushed "man's proudest ornament" over to one side "like an afterthought...

...No mention is made of the bastardized Darwinianism of the time that produced tract after tract"proving" women to be a lesser breed, ill-equipped for the jungle struggle of survival...

...Classes with Johnson instilled a lifelong love of the architecture of letters that provided Gill with the basis for a career...

...only to be told at the end - in a stab at objectivity...

...A great deal comes under this category...

...Intimidation came easily to Gill ("a natural leader" Yorke calls him) and presumption he had on an epic scale...

...Indeed, his sartorial affectation took the form of quasi-monastic drag: a simple belted smock ("The Christian norm") that came only to his shins...

...He concedes, though with his grudges showing, that Gill "adds nothing to the arcane language of modern sculpture" and that he is "demonstrably less important in the history of sculpture than he is in those of type-designing or wood-engraving...

...Of the pre-war British avant-garde only Epstein is still known and exhibited...

...The book's gift for provocation, however, is fully inadvertent...

...Any reader doing more than looking at the pictures is going to be irked by having to plod through Gill's opinions on just about everything ("He approved of skyscrapers, aircraft hangars and the Aswan Dam...

...Yorke seems to be banking on the assumption that his intended readership will be too busy at its solitary vice to notice...

...By mistaking the pose for the man, Yorke has mistaken art for life...

...While the plan went no further than negotiation for a site, Epstein provided Gill with entree to the British avant-garde which Gill came to dominate between the two world wars...

...His own Pygmalion, the dandy was part of the spirit of the times...

...No attempt is made to place the crudity and virulence of Gill's contempt for women within a larger cultural context...

...A beret ("a tribute to the dignity of the human head"), scarlet socks, boots ("a tribute to the foot") or something akin to toe shoes completed the costume...

...Gill's reputation did not survive his death in 1940...

...Piety is no stay against banality...

...GEE WHIZ, WHAT A GUY...

...Underneath all the ballyhoo about "Christian sensuality," this apostle of the flesh harbored a barracks sensibility that had a souring effect on his art...

...GEE WHIZ, WHAT A GUY...

...The Roman Catholic Rouault's commissioned saints in Assy are less resonant, less profound than any of his prostitutes, clowns, and judges...

...Yorke avoids discussion by ignoring those many instances over the last one hundred years when the demands of art were diminished at just that juncture where issues of faith become involved or when, conversely, superior works of religious art were produced outside the circle of faith...

...The dandy, in his flamboyant antagonism to bourgeois values, distinguished himself from the philistine crowds and set the stage for the notion of the avant-garde...

...Yet it is precisely as a man of a particular time, place, and social milieu - with its specific postures, prejudices, and sense of trespass - that Gill is interesting...

...An admittedly minor sculptor cannot be considered a major religious sculptor except insofar as religious sculpture is a subspecies - like women's art - operating under a handicap and evaluated accordingly...

...are often closer to the pin-up than Yorke has the wit to admit It is just one more contradictory aspect of this complex man that this patronising view of woman as a rather dim, inferior Jill-of-all-trades finds no place at all in his art, for there she is exotic, idealized and Gill is obeisant before her...

...In a letter to Desmond Chute, Gill's closest friend as well as his assistant, he writes: "I would like you to call me Master...

...The book simpers more than a beachboy on the make...

...His living arrangements signified his disdainful withdrawal from the Babylon of contemporary life...

...The famous church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grace, in Assy, France, comes straight to mind...

...The precipitous decline in Gill's reputation in the years immediately after his death owes in good measure to the simple truth that the dead can no longer oversee their own image...

...But understanding is secondary to commemorative ambition and, so, whatever meaning Gill holds for the present is allowed to go up in great gusts of incense...

...Gill rightly saw that all freedoms are inter-connected, so sexual, political and artistic freedoms are inextricably linked...

...Yorke simply blinks at Gill's misogyny, tells us that Gill considered women suitable factory workers and then concocts a sentence like this: Gill took the trouble to read Mein Kampf and found something in it to admire, such as Hitler's rejection of contraception as "unworthy of Germans," and also his view that "land" and "craft" were "man-making" and factories "man-killing," fit only for inferior peoples...

...Gill chose his smocks with the same self-congratulation as an Oxonian laying out his tweeds or Oscar Wilde pressing his velvet suit...

...His strong sexuality is one of the two great forces which . . . make Gill the unique artist that he is...

...telling...

...Baudelaire had devoted an entire section of the Painter of Modern Life in praise of the dandy who had the "pleasure of astonishing and the proud sensation of never being astonished...

...But Yorke is careful to by-pass argument...

...Gill earned international attention as a wood engraver and book designer for his submissions to the celebrated Golden Cockerel Press...

...YORKE DOES NOT extend himself trying to resuscitate Gill's fame as a sculptor per se, though he clearly wishes he could...

...Gill, enlightened paterfamilias, and heroic warrior against Victorian prudery: Frequent brief separations, plus Mary's pregnancies, miscarriages and illnesses meant that the highly virile and attractive Gill was exposed to temptations he could rarely resist...

...Together with his Griselda-like wife Mary ("a never-failing source of forgiveness for his many infidelities"), Gill formed a small, self-sufficient rural community with spiritual and reformist ambitions - an English Catholic Brook Farm...

...This allowed him to use engraving for evangelical purposes, to illustrate and propagate the socialistic religiosity that earmarked the beginnings of Modernism at the time the Bauhaus was created...

...For vanity in the male is a virtue, but in the female vicious - a sign of degradation, a proof of departure from the divine plan, the fruit of irreligion and sexual abnormality...

...Gill termed it "primarily a religious fraternity for those who make things with their hands...

...He liked to . record in his diary the matings of the various farm animals...

...Yorke begs off from any responsibility to bat the ball around by steering clear of "those specialist topics about which I am unqualified to speak...

...Chesterton held a similar view...

...He substituted loose scarlet silk drawers which he often left off altogether - as when working overhead on the scaffold for his BBC carvings - or hung nearby...

...An ardent Fabian before his conversion to Catholicism, Gill spent his professional life grafting the style of the church militant onto the reformatory aims of the equally militant Arts and Crafts Movement...