Epstein's Baudelaire

The massive, primitive and impassioned works of Sculptor Jacob Epstein have shocked London for 30 years. Last week Londoners were not so much shocked as surprised by Epstein's latest exhibition, which consisted not of sculpture but of 37 pencil drawings displayed at Tooth's New Bond Street Galleries. They were part of a set of 60 illustrating Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) by the 19th-Century French poet, Charles Baudelaire. "This Bible of the modern man has long called to me," explained Sculptor Epstein.

In Baudelaire's imagination, sensuality had tragic grandeur. He lived with a fat mulatto and wrote the most magnificent French verse since Racine. He was also the only art critic of his day who recognized the greatness of Daumier. He died, broken by drink and opium, in 1867. Though not precisely a Bible to modern man, the Flowers of Evil has been abundantly profaned by illustrators who interpreted it as high-class pornography.

This Epstein did not do. All but seven of the drawings shown were directly derived from the text, reflected its despair and horror as well as its sensuous music. Examples: Danse Macabre, a female skeleton posturing on a bed, and Flowers of Evil (see cut), which even conservative London critics, shocked again, conceded to be true to the poet.

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