It’s hard to believe it now, but for the first decades of his career, Jacob Epstein was the sculptor some people loved to hate. The genitals of the angel that he carved on the tomb of Oscar Wilde caused such a row that the sculpture was covered up with a tarpaulin while the naked woman in Rima, his memorial to W. H. Hudson, was attacked with green paint. As the sculptor Henry Moore said at Epstein’s funeral, Epstein ‘took the brickbats for modern art’. Epstein’s portrait busts didn’t provoke the same levels of outrage but I was surprised to learn that they were viewed with suspicion by many early critics. What was it about these lively sculptures that led one critic to compare them to a ‘mud-pie’? …
By
Clare Barlow, Assistant Curator
8 May 2013
