Mr. Epstein╒s earlier exhibitions failed with the public because of his Cubist ╥Venus,╙ which diverted attention from the main part of his art, and through his full-length ╥Christ,╙ which provoked argument about everything but its merits as sculpture. His third exhibition, which is now open at the Leicester Galleries, has nothing to attract the simply curious or offend the rigidly-minded. It is an exhibition of busts and heads, nearly all in bronze, with a marble carving of two arms and one small uncompleted figure. There is nothing to prevent people from taking it simply as a collection of sculpture by a man of genius who happens to belong to our own time.
What stands between Mr. Epstein and many people who admire the brilliance of his modelling and the amazing energy of his conception is the roughness of his surface and his dislike of what is placid in beauty, and his striving, often agonising strivings, for a beauty of expressiveness, a deeper revelation of the individual spirit through the envelope of the flesh; also something alien in his attitude towards his sitters and his environment, a detachment from the English standards and traditions such as Mr. Shaw often deliberately cultivates but Mr. Epstein has by nature and circumstances.
The form of his art changes restlessly from abstract design, as in his Cubist ╥Venus,╙ to the most gripping realism, as in his ╥Augustus John.╙ His power to see things as it were for the first time, and his passion to wring the last drop of significance from his model, somehow produce extreme and curious results extending the animality of one type of model to an inhuman degree, and often tending to caricature. This is most noticeable in a certain type of female model, but when the sitter╒s personality stands up top him there are masterpieces in sight. In Lord Fisher, that dread figure of will and action, the sculptor found the right intractable stuff, and from the struggle emerged that wonderful bust that stands by itself in modern art.
