Epstein's Humanity

...None...

...Of The Progressive, published monthly at Madison 3, Wisconsin, for October 1, 1960...

...How could a father expose his young daughter to this alarming sight...

...Inspecting the figures, Dr...

...Epstein spent fourteen months carving a series of eighteen nudes...

...Epstein used what he earned for illustrating Spirit of the Ghetto to pay for a journey to France...

...Here is Hapgood's description of Epstein's "studio" in a dilapidated house at the corner of Hester and Forsyth streets: "A miserable iron bedstead occupies the narrow strip of floor beneath the descending ceiling...

...He and his patron erred in two details only: Epstein achieved fame as a sculptor rather than as a draftsman or painter, and the art he was to produce was to transcend the narrow boundaries set by nation, race, or religion...

...Some insist that it will be his portraits that rank with the best work in this genre ever produced by Rodin or Despiau...

...If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given...

...Oddly, by the year 1954—when the Queen of England bestowed knighthood on Epstein, a naturalized citizen —he had long ceased to be a maverick, a stormy petrel, a dreamer of startling dreams...

...Jacob Epstein continued to be an artist until his death, last summer, at the age of seventy-eight...

...Cosmo Lang, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury...

...4. Paragraphs 2 and 3 include, in cases where the stockholders or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting...

...Ecce Homo," a colossal stone carving, had just been rejected by the Canadian "man in the street...

...The safe thing would have been to adorn the facade with "inoffensive" likenesses of celebrated surgeons...

...An impressive energy," he noted, "radiates from the self-contained rhythm of its volume, while its austere pattern, and the rudimentary indication of facial features, possess greater emotional content than would a nearer approach to physical versimilitude...

...Kathleen Carman...

...Business Manager, Gordon Sinykin, Madison, Wisconsin...

...This son of poor immigrants from Poland had little formal education and had worked only at odd jobs...

...3. The known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding one per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: (if there are none, so state...

...The loudest outcry was raised, however, when Epstein turned to sacred figures of the New Testament...

...In 1955 the aged sculptor married his secretary and model, Mrs...

...The first of these battles raged around the decorations made in 1907 and 1908 for a London building newly acquired by the British Medical Association...

...Associate Editors, Mary Sheridan and John McGrath, Madison, Wisconsin...

...I mention these nudes not because they are Epstein's most important work—which they are not—but because these early works are pivotal in his development...

...MILDRED LOHFF Notary Public, Dane County, Wis...

...There is one window, which commands a good view of the pushcart market in Hester Street...

...The Vancouver Art Gallery had intended to purchase it, but a local group was formed to stop the museum from using public funds for what the group called a "monolithic monstrosity...

...He would never compromise with a public to which subject matter is the only important thing in art, and which punishes, with anything from indifference to downright hostility, artists who deviate from the insipid idealizations commonly considered "beautiful...

...Young as he was, Epstein had no doubts about the career he wished to pursue: "Two things...

...About the narrow walls on the three available sides are easels, and sketches and paintings of ghetto types...

...An enraged Father Vaughan made the most of the fact that, at that time, the Epsteins lived in the Bloomsbury section of London, a neighborhood which, the clergyman asserted, was devoted to the manufacture of contraceptives...

...When I visited Epstein, the summer before he died, one of his most controversial New Testament sculptures occupied the center of his studio...

...This protest died down only in his last decade when a London convent commissioned him to do a large "Madonna and Child" group, and the Cathedral of Cardiff, Wales, solemnly unveiled his "Christ in Majesty...

...Title 39, United States Code, Section 233...

...But we must never forget that he stands, or stood, at the beginning of the road which left the romantic Expressionism of a Rodin and developed into the trends that have become clearly noticeable since the end of the last world war...

...Almost sixty years ago, Hapgood found the art student Epstein on New York's Lower East Side, and was so fascinated by his skill as a draftsman that he commissioned him to illustrate his book, The Spirit of the Ghetto, with drawings from life...

...The hostile critics failed to notice a significant detail: Adam's head is thrown back to indicate that he is different from other animals, that he alone of all creatures had received the breath and the spirit of God...

...The millionth variation of a chorus girl Venus would have been preferred by most people, who did not understand "Adam" as Epstein had conceived him...

...One chapter, "The Young Art and Its Exponents," singles out Epstein above several colleagues...

...Yet the public was shocked because one of the figures was of a woman in advanced pregnancy...

...But which portion will it be...

...While anti-Semitic prejudice was not entirely absent from the case of Epstein vs...

...And he added gratefully: "I imagine that the feeling I have for expressing a human point of view, giving human rather than abstract implications to my work, comes from these early formative years...

...Esthetically they are not always convincing, but it was through these efforts that he tried most valiantly to convince the public that sculpture was a limitless art of pure metaphor, a spiritual triumph over the intractability of matter...

...He took upon himself the arduous task of disentangling the eternal from the ephemeral so as to catch the structure of essence...

...But the body of his entire work, from the sketches he made for Hapgood to the still unfinished work found in his studio on August 20, 1959, is permeated with a profound humanity which one may, perhaps, trace back to his early years...

...How could any pure-minded young man let his fiancee behold these "obscenities...

...Others maintain that it was through his huge carvings that he gained for himself a niche in sculpture's Hall of Fame...

...Near the window is a diminutive oil stove, on which the artist prepares his tea and eggs...

...Yet all of this miraculously happened when Hutchins Hapgood discovered Jacob Epstein...

...Those who had attacked Epstein because the figure did "violence to treasured ideas" were challenged by the well-known critic, T. W. Earp, who spoke for many progressives when he wrote that sculpture in England owed Epstein a "considerable debt of gratitude" and that "Ecce Homo" was a noble work of art, reminiscent of Romanesque sculpture...

...5. The average number of copies of each issue of this publication sold or distributed, through the mails or otherwise, to paid subscribers during the 12 months preceding the date shown above was 30,865...

...All of this can be applied to the portrait sculptor, if we insert the word "human" before "race...

...Epstein's course was fixed long before he had reached thirty years of age...

...the British public, it was a repetition of the story of William Blake, that most un-English Englishman...

...This theme, depicting men and women in various stages of their development was, he felt, more appropriate for an edifice of this character...

...On a peg on the door hang an old mackintosh and an extra coat—his only additional wardrobe...

...Epstein never forgot that a portrait, though rather faithful to the sitter, must be shorn of superficialities and non-essentials, and that the artist's task is to epitomize the sitter's personality rather than to create a three-dimensional replica perpetuating the subject's external aspects...

...Jacob Epstein, however, proposed an artistically more gratifying sequence, "The Birth of Energy...

...He belongs to a number of debating societies, and is now hesitating in his mind whether to become a Socialist or an Anarchist, although he is tending towards a humane socialism...

...When they are old, great people often suffer from amnesia...

...They were destroyed in the mid-Thirties, when the building was taken over by the Southern Rhodesian government...

...She lived with him through the early lean years and the many years of heated controversy over her husband's work until she died in 1947...

...These were some of the arguments proffered by the National Vigilance Society...

...I have seen him angry for a fraction of a minute—and in this tiny interval the artist's normally kindly eyes expressed a scorn of such dimensions that I could think only of the eyes Michelangelo gave to his infuriated Moses...

...I shall concentrate here on one or two of the artistic "scandals" that shook his life, turmoils that he managed to withstand only because he firmly believed that he was on the right path, and that the battle he waged against bigots and reactionaries was one fought in the name of seriousness and freedom...

...He studied and worked in Paris for three years, then moved to England where he married a Scottish girl, Margaret Gilmour Dunlop, who bore him a son and a daughter...

...Yet, how often, in the past, had his own work been dismissed with the utterly inadequate term, "ugly...

...Twentieth Century sculpture has gone far beyond Epstein...

...MORRIS H. RUBIN, Editor Sworn to and subscribed before me this 30th day of September, 1960...

...Looking back, from the peak of his fame, he remarked in his Autobiography: "Rembrandt would have delighted in the East Side...

...With mild, yet penetrating eyes, he looked at his sitters searchingly, trying to find a key to their essence...

...1. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business managers are: Publisher, The Progressive, Inc., Madison, Wisconsin...

...My Commission expires Jan...

...Here again one may recall what Hapgood wrote about young Epstein's pencil renderings of Lower East Side characters: "It is a forcible illustration of how, while really remaining faithful to the external type, his love of the race leads him to emphasize the spiritual and humane expressiveness of the faces about him and so paves the way to an art imaginative as well as typical...

...But it would be unfair to the British people to pass silently over the favorable opinions...

...Artistically they were beyond reproach...

...25, 1963) free embodiment, in stone, of his inner vision...

...I looked at the statue and was overawed by the huge head bearing a crown of thorns, thick, sad lips, and sightless, almond-shaped eyes...

...If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual member, must be given...

...2. The owner is: (if owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding one per cent or more of total amount of stock...

...In the revolutionary first decade of this century, sculptors in many lands were abandoning the "Greek" tradition and looking with astonishment at the firm and compact art of aborigines...

...He, whom his opponents believed to be an irresponsible Bohemian hedonist, was basically a good-natured and benevolent family man, though, when irritated, he could suddenly become angry...

...Some who sat for him were: Joseph Conrad, Tagore, Paul Robeson, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Haile Selassie, Ernest Bevin, Winston Churchill, Ernest Bloch, Jawaharlal Nehru, and T. S. Eliot...

...In the same spirit, Epstein created sculpture that, above all, expressed emotions and ideas...

...When a duke asked to be posed in the ceremonial uniform he had worn at the coronation, the artist sternly refused to portray the man in a majesty he did not really possess, and insisted that he wear ordinary clothes...

...Without having learned these lessons, he could not have fashioned "Genesis," the large statue symbolizing motherhood that, in spirit and in expression, is much nearer to Negro sculpture than to the naturalistic knick-knacks produced during Epstein's fighting years in Europe's academies...

...While bigots, supported by the conservative press, loudly clamored for the removal of the "indecent" statuary, Epstein got unexpected help from no less a person than the Bishop of Stepney, Dr...

...In a radio interview, the aged sculptor remarked about his younger colleagues' work that "Ugliness is what is sought for, and, by Jove, found...

...Some of England's outstanding writers and critics also sided with Epstein: "Had Michelangelo ever disguised sex...

...G. K. Chesterton called it "one of the greatest insults to religion I have ever seen...

...With all his astuteness and open-mindedness, Epstein was unable to fathom the goals of those twenty or thirty years younger than he...

...Epstein admired the inchoate sculptural wisdom of anonymous African and Polynesian carvers in the British Museum and put his own creative imagination to good use while applying the tenets of aboriginal art: simplification, architectonic organization of structural planes, and fidelity to material...

...he seems definitely to have settled—that he will devote himself to his art, and that that art shall be the plastic picturing of the life of his people in the ghetto...

...Editor, Morris H. Rubin, Madison, Wisconsin...

...His articles on art have appeared in a number of publications including Commentary, The American Scholar, and the Chicago Jewish Forum...

...Intentionally, Epstein made his huge "Adam" resemble a hairless gorilla beating his breast...

...ALFRED WERNER, Vienna-born art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...

...For as a mature man Epstein loathed what he called "this pernicious racialism," and his sitters included people of all faiths, nations, races, and from all stations in life...

...The work he modeled in clay was grudgingly admired even by some of those who could not forgive him the liberties he took when carving in stone...

...The Progressive, Inc., Madison 3, Wisconsin, a non-profit corporation consisting of more than 5,000 members, none of whom holds 1 per cent of the stock...

...They blended perfectly with the building...

...Even as a portraitist, Epstein often ran into trouble, though his bronze portrait busts were, of course, less "shocking" to untutored eyes than his STATEMENT OF THE OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION REQUIRED BY THE ACT OF CONGRESS OF AUGUST 24, 1912, AS AMENDED BY THE ACTS OF MARCH 3, 1933, AND JULY 2, 1946...

...Genesis" is the eternal primeval woman, the fertile mother of the human race, in the dormant fullness of gestation...

...When the work was first shown, London's Catholic Times saw in this work only "the debased, sensuous, flat features of an Asiatic monstrosity" (the same word, "monstrosity," was used in 1935 that occurred to hostile British Columbians more than two decades later...

...Epstein's unceasing fight for un-trammeled artistic expression is a long story filled with amazing, though often disturbing, details...

...Since this excellent volume about New York's ghetto, published in 1902, has long been out of print, the reader will appreciate liberal quotations from it...

...Blake insisted that exuberance was beauty, and that the gateway of excess led to the palace of wisdom...

...An art patron who commissioned Epstein to portray herself as an aristocratic lady was infuriated when he made her look as she actually was, a middle-aged, school-marmish woman, instead of a Juno...

...I believe that whatever portion of Epstein's work survives will live on because it conveys the emotional power of this sturdy, strong-willed innovator who had established his studio among a more inhibited people, unlikely to tolerate his Biblical ardor...

...but he fascinated Hapgood: "For so young a man, his intellectual, as well as his artistic, activity has been considerable...

...also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant's full knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bonafide owner...

...The artist never flattered his sitters...

...Lang saw nothing indecent or shocking in them...

...they asked...

...By 1945, he had become acceptable to most English art lovers, even those who could not quite forgive him earlier "sins," and in his old age he himself leaned more and more to conservatism, to the point of declaring that all abstract art was "downright bad...

...Epstein won, and the statues were left alone...