Recent Sculpture by Jacob Epstein: Leicester Galleries
Mr. Epstein is a great portrait sculptor. He has a wonderful power of "living into" his models. He produces not only a likeness, but also that kind of likeness which we can enjoy without knowing the original, and in a certain sense even more than the original when known. For he sees what we should scarcely be able to see without his vigorous assistance. Standing before one of his portrait heads we have the consciousness of some magnetising influence, evoking all kinds of subterranean thoughts and emotions; we are drawn out of ourselves into our external objective vortex.
It is objective and yet essentially the creation of Mr. Epstein's "realistic" vision. Realistic is a difficult and dangerous word, but we know what is meant by it, although often when we try to explicate that knowledge still further we arrive at something which the word does not, or should not, or need not, mean. It should not mean, for instance, photographic, or immoral, or ugly. It may contain a consciousness of all these elements without being them, for to be conscious of them surely means to supersede and dominate them. "Realistic," of course, might be extended so as to cover everything, but in the present instance of ordinary usage it is limited to one particular aspect of things, which, curiously enough, is rather a negative than a positive one. It is the positive consciousness of negatives such as difficulty, failure, struggle, pain: it is the intense and overpowering desire to know them fully, to drain the imaginative experience of them to the dregs, because once they have taken a hold on our awareness, only by that means can we triumph over them.
Not only does Mr. Epstein endeavour to bring home to himself and to us in his character studies a sense of individualised conflict (though he is never gloomy), he often approves of sternness and ruggedness as good in themselves; he enjoys the titanic groping of life. And it is perfectly true that without some sort of a fight existence would be hopelessly inert and hyper-æsthetic; but we do want sometimes the calm and untroubled pleasure of attainment. Indeed only the complete process conjoining the two opposites is completely good, yet we inevitably stress now the one, now the other facet, placing in the centre of our consciousness either the fact of struggle and failure or the fact of success: for art is itself part of the process. And Mr. Epstein's art stresses the "realistic" side, not only in the sense that he is in desire revolting from it, but also that he appreciates it, enjoying the process as much as the arrival at the goal. For instance, he has made several studies of his own baby, over whom he has kept his head severely. Indeed he seems to have been too ferociously interested in the animalism and precocious ugliness of a small baby to have been at all tempted to idealise; at the same time he is impressed with the baby's vigour and vitality.
Sometimes it seems to me he loses sight of the whole in the elaboration of expressive detail. In the bust of Lord Fisher in the War Museum Exhibition he has obviously attempted to produce the leathery, wrinkled texture of an old man's skin, because he saw it as a significant feature. But in the effort to get this difficult effect he has lost sight of the significance and produced a mere verisimilitude of wrinkledness. Similarly in his Christ, the feature which arrests us most is the clay-like gruesomeness of the loosened wrappings. We shudder at the faint suggestion of decomposition and we are wounded by the slit in the opened palm of the hand. But practically the whole force of the composition has spent itself in these subsidiary details.
Paintings by Duncan Grant: Wm. B. Paterson and Carfax & Co. Ltd., 5 Old Bond Street
This is a very important exhibition, and confirms the report which has been current for some time that Mr. Duncan Grant is an artist of unusual originality. I am deliberately emphatic, not only because I am very enthusiastic about some of these pictures, but also because I feel sure that many people will have been "put off" from the first by a few of them, in which Mr. Duncan Grant, under the influence of the modern abstractionist and pattern-making theories, has taken undue liberties with the human body. Even in these pictures there is much that is very fine, but it is quite independent of the stupid distortions which only have a marring or comic effect. But consider, for instance, the Still Life No. 23, Bowl, Skull, and Jar. Whatever other criticism may be levelled against it, it is immune from the charge of arbitrariness. Personally, I have nothing but praise for it, as being a magnificent piece of lyrical painting. There are several other pictures—landscapes, still lives, interiors—possessing the same exquisite qualities, notably Nos. 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 21. The last named, styled Juggler and Tight Rope Walker, which is in many ways the most brilliant of the whole collection, does evince here and there a certain exaggeration. This, however, can be overlooked because it does not rivet our attention.
On the other hand, in No. 29, Venus and Adonis, the placing of the lady's neck on her left-hand shoulder, with the consequent elongation of the right-hand shoulder, stirs up in our minds a whole swarm of general reflections, so that our æsthetic enjoyment of other real values in the picture is practically swamped. It is true that in caricatures we allow without cavil all sorts of liberties. But only because the result is expressive, and actually where we appreciate the caricature we do not notice any distortion, we see the work as convincingly true.