With a Hammer

In London one morning last week, Sculptor Jacob Epstein got up early, donned a dirty cotton shirt and frayed, clay-soiled suit. After breakfast he stuffed a hammer and chisel into his sagging pockets, pulled a long-billed baseball cap down over his bald dome, and shambled hurriedly off to the Leicester Galleries. His first exhibition in three years was due to open there at 9 a.m. Epstein arrived at 8 to put some last-minute nicks in a major work, his 1 1/2-ton, 7 1/2-foot-tall Lazarus.

An hour later, when the critics came, Epstein stepped down from his ladder with a sigh of satisfaction. "I have tried," he said, "to express the idea of a man coming from death to life." He had succeeded. Lazarus, swathed in a cocoon of burial wrappings, was shown at the moment of Christ's command: "Come forth." Stone though it was, the loosely bound body almost seemed to breathe.

Mockers v. Shockers. "The man in the street," Epstein once remarked, "is a fool, and I care not a whit for his opinions. I should be a fool too if I were in the least influenced by him." The sculptor's damn-it-all individualism, combined with the inspiration of African carvings (which he collects), has led Epstein to create some monumental shockers. Among the first was Rima, a lumpish bas-relief nude unveiled in Hyde Park in 1925. Stanley Baldwin officiated at the unveiling. A moment after he had pulled the string Baldwin was heard to exclaim: "My God!"

Epstein followed Rima with a peculiar procession of huge works, including his aggressively naked Adam and the squat, vast Ecce Homo which G. K. Chesterton described as "one of the greatest insults to religion I have ever seen." He was continually accused of pulling the wool over the public's eyes. "I don't make controversies," he replied to all such criticism, "I make sculptures."

His new Lazarus, which seemed likely to offend no one, might go a long way toward persuading "the man in the street" that Epstein is among the most intense and skillful sculptors alive.

His skill was made abundantly clear by the bronze portrait busts that rounded out the show. Seven were of children, including three of his own. "Children," Epstein says, "have a beauty no adult does. All children are beautiful, aren't they?" Among his best portraits was that of his Negro cook's son. The cook thought Epstein made the lips of the clay head too full, pushed them in one night. Epstein righted them next morning.

Epstein has sculpted enough notables to furnish a contemporary hall of fame. A recent sitter was Winston Churchill, who brought along two bodyguards, two secretaries and pockets full of cigars. While Churchill dictated his memoirs to the secretaries, Epstein modeled. Following his usual practice of working directly in clay, without preliminary sketches, he did the job in six sittings. As usual, the result was a bang-up character sketch, loaded with life and liberally dented with the prints of Epstein's thick thumbs.

Gentleman v. Hooligan. Among the few sitters to complain of Epstein's handling was Bernard Shaw, whom he has modeled six times. "Here I am a respected Irish gentleman," said Shaw, "and you make me look like a Brooklyn hooligan like yourself." Actually, Epstein was born and raised on Manhattan's Lower East Side, just across the river from Brooklyn. At 22 he made his way to Paris, settled in London three years later. Now a paunchy, patriarchal 69, he lives in an ivied house diagonally opposite Churchill's in Hyde Park Gate.

Since his wife's death three years ago, Epstein has been cared for by his daughter Esther and an old friend who acts as housekeeper. He rarely goes out, spends most of his time at work in his dusty, cluttered, cavernous studio. Last summer he made a two-month trip to the U.S., his first in 20 years. "I like it over there," he says, "but I like to live in England. They leave you alone and let you get on with your work."

Even at his own tea table, Epstein is a lonely looking and rather frightening figure. Mountainous, with a fighter's set face and contemptuously protruding lower lip, he speaks in a forbidding rumble. Modern art, curiously enough, is one of his pet hates: "When I get discouraged I look at Picasso's stuff and then I feel better about what I'm doing." He himself once flirted with cubism, "but I abandoned the lady very early and since then she has prospered under other patronage." The semi-abstract sculptures of Henry Moore, with their pinheads and pierced bodies (TIME, May 16), make Epstein smile. "A good cheese is not interesting because it's got holes in it," he says. "It's because of the quality of the cheese."

The sculptor, Epstein thinks, must "embody the hopes and ideals of his people, like the great artists of Egypt and Greece and the men who built the cathedrals . . . What they did everybody could understand. Everybody must understand."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.