Jacob Epstein

For other people named Jacob Epstein, see Jacob Epstein (disambiguation).

Sir
Jacob Epstein
KBE
1921 photograph by George Charles Beresford
Born10 November 1880
New York City, US
Died21 August 1959(1959-08-21) (aged 78)
London, England
Citizenship
Alma mater
Known forSculpture
Spouses
  • Margaret Dunlop
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1906; died 1947)​
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 1955)​
Children5, including Theodore and Kathleen

Sir Jacob Epstein KBE (10 November 1880 – 21 August 1959) was an American and British sculptor who helped pioneer modern sculpture. He was born in the United States, and moved to Europe in 1902, becoming a British subject in 1910.

Early in his career, in 1912, The Pall Mall Gazette described Epstein as "a Sculptor in Revolt, who is in deadly conflict with the ideas of current sculpture."[1] Revolting against ornate, pretty art, he made bold, often harsh and massive forms in bronze or stone. His sculpture is distinguished by its vigorous rough-hewn realism. Avant-garde in concept and style, his works often shocked audiences. This was not only a result of their, often explicit, sexual content, but also because they abandoned the conventions of classical Greek sculpture favoured by European academic critics and sculptors, to experiment instead with the aesthetics of art traditions as diverse as those of India, China, ancient Greece, West Africa and the Pacific Islands.[2][3] His larger sculptures were his most expressive and experimental, but also his most vulnerable.

Such factors may have focused disproportionate attention on certain aspects of Epstein's long and productive career, throughout which he aroused hostility, especially challenging taboos surrounding the depiction of sexuality. He often produced controversial works that challenged ideas on what was appropriate subject matter for public artworks. Epstein would often sculpt the images of friends, casual acquaintances, and even people he spotted on the street. He worked even on his dying day. He also painted; many of his watercolours and gouaches were of Epping Forest, where he lived for a time. These were often exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in London.

Bronze portrait sculpture formed one of Epstein's staple products, and perhaps the best known. These sculptures were often executed with roughly textured surfaces, expressively manipulating small surface planes and facial details.

Epstein was Jewish,[4][5][6][7] and negative reviews of his work sometimes took on an antisemitic flavour, though he did not attribute the "average unfavorable criticism" of his work to antisemitism.[8]

After Epstein died, Henry Moore wrote a tribute in The Sunday Times which included a recognition of Epstein's central role in the development of modern sculpture in Britain. "He took the brickbats, he took the insults, he faced the howls of derision with which artists since Rembrandt have learned to become familiar. And as far as sculpture in this century is concerned he took them first.... We have lost a great sculptor and a great man."[9]: 274 

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference WThing was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Rupert Richard Arrowsmith (2011). Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant Garde. Oxford University Press. pp. 103–164.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference GBrockington was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ "ART: Familiar Sensation". Time. 25 March 1935. Archived from the original on 22 December 2011. Retrieved 21 July 2021. The spectacle to which he referred was an 11-ft., 7-ton statue of Christ propped against the wall in London's swank Leicester Galleries, the latest work of a heavyset, U.S.-born Jewish sculptor, Jacob Epstein.
  5. ^ Ezra Mendelsohn (2002). Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art. University Press of New England. p. 240. In his discussion of the American-born Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein, Hutchins Hapgood writes
  6. ^ Alyson Pendlebury (2006). Portraying 'the Jew' in First World War Britain. Vallentine Mitchell. p. 165. Among the most striking of these is an image of the Anglo-Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein, a private in the 38th battalion, modelling a human figure out of sand
  7. ^ Peter Lawson, Anthony Rudolf (2006). Anglo-Jewish Poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein. Vallentine Mitchell. p. 84. with the American-Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein
  8. ^ Jacob Epstein (2007). Let There Be Sculpture. READ Books. p. 180. ISBN 978-1-4067-2981-8.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference JRose was invoked but never defined (see the help page).