Toiling over Adam
Jacob Epstein, 'Adam', 1938-39. By kind permission of The Earl and Countess of Harewood/Photo Leeds Museums & Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive)/© The estate of Sir Jacob Epstein
This huge marble sculpture of 'Adam', made by Jacob Epstein, must have been a pretty brutish encounter at the best of times. This spring it's at the Royal Academy in London as part of a show called Modern British Sculpture, and it's doing its level best to outface us. Almost alone in the gallery - there's a tiny snake by Henry Moore in a vitrine, and Epstein's autobiography, Let There Be Sculpture, in the far corner, open at two pertinent pages - it holds the floor with a kind of monstrous, heavy-handed defiance. Yes, monstrous, that's how 'Adam' looks at first glance, carved out of a single block of marble. It would be almost impossible to date too if you didn't know when it was made (1938-9).
It looks, from a stylistic point of view, weirdly synthetic, part Egyptian, part Easter Island, part Asiatic, part Vorticist. In short, it reminds us of the fact that Epstein had a huge collection of ethnographical objects from an extraordinary range of periods and cultures at his home in Hyde Park Gate. This massive figure of 'Adam' causes us to reflect that when he was making it - and this is what the two pages of that open book in the corner is describing , his reflections upon the making process (you can read them for yourselves below) - he may have been looking at them all at once.
The sheer downward thrust of the weight of the piece strikes us - these massively muscular legs seem to be bearing down upon themselves. The whole thing is so overbearingly squat and blockish. The figure is striding, right leg first - well, not so much striding as slithering ahead. Looked at from behind, you can either admire or be slightly repelled by the hugely protuberant buttocks. The left is like a smooth, balloon-like sack, swollen with silicone or water. The right, as the figure moves ahead, stepping out with its right foot, seems to disappear rather awkwardly. There is an odd something going on as we look from left buttock to right, past the crack. It doesn't look quite right, this walking movement, from behind. The right buttock disappears too much, collapses too much in on itself, or is not sufficiently emphasised. Is this a stylistic decision or is it a fit of incompetence? Impossible to say. The man is too long dead.
From the front, the whole thing looks like a series of regular, stacked forms. We notice how the head is tilted - almost ratcheted, mechanically - back at a truly extraordinary angle. It is as if the head, this tilted disc of a head, has been wrenched off the shoulders and placed, like a platter, side on, snugly nestled into the shoulders.
What we see when we look up at that head from the front is the forward-pushing, prow-like shape of the chin, pointing straight at us. So the eyes are looking heavenward - perhaps towards the sun. Why should Adam be looking towards the sun? Did the sky suddenly darken when his helpmate bit into the apple, as if in anticipation of the Crucifixion? The pubic area is pure, geometrically ship-shaped vorticism - trapezoidal, in fact. The testicles are a great, swollen sack of sex stuff. The penis - and, my god, what a penis this is! - swings violently to one side like a policeman's cudgel banging at a door. The hands and toes are squared off. The hands are turned, palms up, in a kind of gesture of supplication, the arms wedged into the sides of the torso. Surprisingly, the upper half of the torso - perhaps it is being squeezed a bit too hard by those arms - seems strangely narrow, too narrow than it ought to be, and especially when we glance up and consider the extraordinary width and the strange flatness (and especially when seen tilted up, face on) of the head. Can a head really be almost as broad as a torso? Is this incompetence again? Or stylisation? From front and side, we register the massiveness of the legs. Why are the lower legs quite so muscular though? From behind, the head, and the way it falls back, with its block of hair, sheared off in a straight line, looks almost Pharaonic in shape.
We are impressed, mightily so, by all this hands-on, tough-minded, direct carving - we admire the chisel marks gouged into the base - but part of us still wonders whether this would not better be described as a kind of freak-show piece, in the over-serious medium of marble. Is it serious or unserious? And it is not at all surprising to learn from the catalogue that it found a good home for itself in the collection of a showman, and that it was later exhibited in Blackpool, amongst all those fairground noises and the wild, happy-go-lucky gostering of the working people who were letting their hair down during works' weeks. Yes, you can easily imagine Adam tramping down The Golden Mile, bellowing as he goes, King-Kong style, then crushing them, to left and right, with his squared off feet. Utterly pitilessly.
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Epstein published the first edition of his autobiography, Let There Be Sculpture, in 1939. Here is what he wrote about the making of another of his great pieces in marble. This text is exhibited in the same room as 'Adam' at the Royal Academy.
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'CONSUMMATUM EST': 1937
The unworked alabaster block lies in my studio for a year. While I work at other things I look at it from time to time. The
block lies prone in its length, and I consider whether I
should raise it, but decide to leave it where it is. I can conceive any number of works in it. I can conceive a single figure or a group of figures. I have been listening to Bach's B Minor Mass. In the section, 'Crucifixus,' I have a feeling of tremendous quiet, of awe. The music comes from a great distance and in this mood I conceive my
'Consummatum Est.' I see immediately the upturned hands, with the wounds in the feet, stark, crude, with the stigmata. I even imagine the setting for the finished figure, dim crypt, with a subdued light on the semi-transparent alabaster.
I now begin on the stone and draw out where the head will come, the lengthened arms, and the draperies and feet, jutting farther out. I start carving tentatively, carefully on the head, having chosen the light coloured part of the block for this. I work downwards until roughly the whole figure is shaped. I concentrate on the hands and give them definite form and expression. In carving I rarely have recourse to a model, and depend for the form on my experience and knowledge. I block out the containing masses, leaving the details until later; I always try to get the whole feeling and expression of the work, with regard to the material I am working in. This is important. There are sculptors who treat a figure in stone in exactly the same manner as they do a work in clay. With an isolated piece of stone they should regard the sculpture as primarily a block, and do no violence to it as stone. There must be no exact imitation of nature to make one believe that one is seeing a translation of nature into another material. Imitation is no aim of sculpture proper, and a true piece of sculpture will always be the material worked into shape. This shape is the important thing, not whether the eye is fooled by representation, as at Madame Tussaud's wax-works.
As I worked upon this figure in alabaster, I asked myself continually whether I was getting the feeling, the emotion from the work I intended. I do not ask this question consciously. It is subconscious. Many imagine that the artist, having his working hours like any other craftsman, thinks only when in front of his work of its practical problems of shaping and chiselling, but this is not so. The work a sculptor is engaged on is continually in his mind. He sees it with his mind's eye, and quite clearly, so that at any moment of the day or night, or even in lying down to sleep, the vision of the work in progress is there for analysis, as an inescapable presence. I would say that on a work like this, one lives in it until it is finally finished and one has gone on to some other work which usurps its place in one's thoughts. It is a question whether one is more thrilled at beginning a work than finishing it. I think beginning is the more exciting. The finished work - well, there it is. All one's ardours and hesitations are over, the problem is solved. The sculptor with his vision, planning, working, laying loving hands upon the wiling and love-returning stone, the creation of a work, the form embodying the idea, strange copulation of spirit and matter, the intellect dominating hammer and chisel - the conception that at last becomes a piece of sculpture. This seems to me fit work for a man. 'Consummatum Est' - it is finished. Instead of writing about it, and people standing about talking, arguing, disputing over the prone Son of Man, with protesting palms upturned, there should be music, the solemn music of Bach.
Where should this work go? Is it hopeless to imagine it could ever be placed in a cathedral or a basilica? At the best, will it go into one of those conglomerations called art galleries, to be idly viewed by tourists? Most likely for a decade or two the work will remain in my studio, to be forgotten by all save myself. It came from me and returns to me in a world where it is not wanted. I imagine a waste world; argosies from the air have bombed the humans out of existence, and perished…
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And here is what the Royal Academy's catalogue says about 'Adam'.
The sexual power that Epstein's 'Adam' exudes is rare in British sculpture. Lessons learned in the British Museum - both about carving and about new ways of representing the figure - led to a degree of sexualisation in the works of Gill, Underwood and others, but this was mostly expressed on a small scale and with coy effects. Moore and Hepworth flirted with the power of the sexual in their early carvings, but had put it behind them by this date.
When it was shown in London, Adam attracted some favourable notices. The artist William McCance wrote in Picture Post (24 June 1939): 'Adam is a great work of art' because it 'is conceived in stone, its nature has not been violated by the chisel, and the forms and volumes are so magically related, one to the other, that there is an upward surge and flow which brings it to life - a kind of pulsating stone'. However, its subsequent history was to be less happy. Adam belongs to the small group of huge carvings, a number of them in alabaster, made by Epstein between 1929 and 1941. None was commissioned; none had a preconceived destination.
As Epstein's name was now well established as a byword for sexual (and anti-semitic) innuendo, his carvings were a gift for the tabloid press. Some (those owned by the showman William Cartmel) were so comprehensively unloved as works of art that they were instead exhibited in the basement of Louis Tussaud's Waxworks in Blackpool. 'Adam' was bought first by a showman who toured it in Britain, then by another who took it to a New York peep-show, and then it too went to Blackpool. (It may well have been one of the sculptures by Epstein that, when on show in London, were defended byKenneth Clark, Charles Holden, Henry Moore, Eric Newton and Charles Wheeler in a letter to The Times dated 1 November 1945.)
In the 1950s it was shown in an adults-only exhibition in the old Liverpool School of Anatomy, which Tussaud's had acquired. Lord Harewood rescued three pieces from this fate: 'Consummatum Est' is now in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; 'Genesis' is in the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester; and 'Adam' remains at Harewood House. 'Jacob and the Angel' was acquired by the Tate in 1996. Epstein's 'Adam' comes only a year after the scandal surrounding his works in the Strand.