Demons and Angels

de June Rose

"Jacob Epstein had a vision. "I feel that I can do the best, most profound things and life is short," he wrote when he was thirty, and wished that he "was living in an age when man wanted to raise temples to man or God or the Devil." Time would prove Epstein's artistic talents to be as grand as his creative passion. His powerful and often explicit sculptures, monumental in their scale, would eventually define and indeed epitomize his age - but only after years of controversy during which his work was criticized, condemned, and sometimes destroyed.". "While Epstein is now recognized as a seminal figure in the history of twentieth-century art - a Modernist who was the first sculptor to carve directly in stone since the Middle Ages - the genius of his work in the early 1900s was recognized by only a few contemporary figures like Ezra Pound and Augustus John. Among the art establishment his work for the most part aroused hostility and censoriousness. So it was that Epstein endured the public scandals created by the nudity of his so-called Strand Statues (1907-1908; destroyed 1937) and by the debauched-looking naked angel that commanded his 1912 memorial for Oscar Wilde - but three decades later, he was modeling the portrait of Sir Winston Churchill and was knighted himself in 1954.". "In this life of Jacob Epstein, acclaimed art historian and biographer June Rose follows the course of the controversial sculptor's career from scandal to celebrity. She tells a true rags-to-riches story that takes Epstein from the Jewish ghetto in his native New York to a bohemian existence in Europe, where he set up a domestic menage with his wife and several mistresses, to ultimately the heights of artistic success. He formed friendships with Picasso, Modigliani, and Brancusi, and by the time of his death in 1959, at the age of seventy-nine, Epstein had met virtually everybody of importance in the art world and not a few luminaries in political and other spheres."--BOOK JACKET.