Word: epstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...alien cultures than to itself. Shown on the following pages are an early stone puma that resembles nothing so much as an ancient Chinese bronze, a gold figurine that looks like a Javanese puppet, a double-image vessel that prophesies cubism, and a portrait head worthy of Sir Jacob Epstein...
...most of his creative lifetime, Sculptor Jacob Epstein has been outraging public commentators on good taste and good morals with his lumpish, aggressively individualistic statuary. G. K. Chesterton denounced his Ecce Homo as an "insult"; the London Times called his Genesis "repellent." Such criticism has convinced Epstein that he is a persecuted, misunderstood genius, denied the recognition due to one of the world's greatest living sculptors. Last week an accolade came to Epstein which should convince him that the world now acknowledges him both as an artist and as a public figure of standing and respect...
Sandwiched between "Fine Chippendale'' and "French Books" in the London Times last week was an ad that was enough to make an old sculptor turn in his chisel. The ad: "Epstein's masterpieces. Adam, Jacob and the Angel, Consummatum Est, For Sale. Offers Wanted." The statues were three of Jacob Epstein's most famous works: a hulking, dumbly defiant alabaster giant that makes the first man look scarcely human; a muscle-bound Jacob hugging a brutish-looking angel; and a recumbent, mummy like figure of Christ, with crude but powerfully eloquent hands upturned in protest...
...Sculptor Epstein raged that "Adam and the others should be in a museum." But at week's end the owner of the big three, an ice-cream manufacturer named Tony Crisp, still planned to sell to the highest bidder. What about Eve? She belonged to Crisp's associate, one Walter West, and he was more considerate, said he might lend Eve to London's Tate Museum. "I expect they'll be tickled pink...
...Africans' extraordinary freedom in making shapes was what appealed most to the modern artists who first put African sculpture on the map. Painters Braque and Picasso and Sculptors Brancusi and Epstein were inspired to savage experimentation by African art. But moderns, for the most part, have imitated the forms of African sculpture, divorced from the spirit inside them. By civilized standards, that spirit is nightmarishly superstitious. Harmony and order-as much a part of the classical art heritage as realism-are sacrificed to demoniac fervor. But African sculpture has an intensity greater than any that modern...