PORTRAITS IN BRONZE

WITH the arrival of the photographer, both painters and sculptors lost the impetus for what through the ages was one of their main functions: recording the great, the vain and the beloved for posterity. One of the few topflight 20th century sculptors who kept at portraiture is Britain's U.S.-born Sir Jacob Epstein, 77. Best known for the press outbursts that until recently greeted such Epstein works as his pregnant Genesis, blocklike Ecce Homo, and misshapen Adam, Epstein holds that portraits rank with the monumental in sculpture. "It's good stuff," he says. "What could be more interesting than a human face?"

Sir Jacob knows how to make a bronze face human--and interesting. The impressive garnering of Epstein's portraits, on view this week at Manhattan's James Graham & Sons gallery, offers convincing proof of his unique talent (see color page). The 19 bronze casts (the largest Epstein show in the U.S. in more than two decades) glow with richness, powerful psychological insight and sense of deeply observed human beings.

Epstein says that he does not start with a definite conception of his subject. Instead, he believes in allowing the sitter's character to impose itself gradually on the clay as he works. After years of portraiture, he reached the learned conclusion that "men sitters are more vain than women sitters." This may in part explain why some of Epstein's most moving pieces are portraits of women.

To describe the state of high nervous tension in which such a bust is done, Epstein tells how he first roughs in the shape with clay, moves in to observe the eyes including "the exact curve of the under-lid," defines the nostrils so that they seem to quiver with breath, moves on to the lips, cheeks and finally the shoulders and back until he feels "a trembling eagerness of life pulsate through the work."

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