Studio: international art (79.1920)

JACOB EPSTEIN: ARTIST-PHILOSOPHER

question remains : Why did men crucify
Him i 0 0 0 0 0 0

The real crux of the matter is this:
Epstein has tried to produce a real, human,
god-like, above all a plausible Christ, a
Christ capable of being crucified and of
crying on the cross his great cry of despair,
“ My God, my God, why hast Thou

forsaken me i "—while the Christ who has
grown up in the hearts of man, behind
multiple veils of time, is Christ, literally
the Son of God, and as invulnerable in his
divine attributes as God Himself. Such a
Christ could never have been crucified.
But the virtue of Epstein's Christ is pre-
cisely that he could be crucified. 0 0

Now we come to what is perhaps the
most interesting aspect of the problem, the
unities of time :

After Golgotha.

After the Great War.

The problem : the establishment of a

living connexion. The sculptor's creation
of an eternal Christ, a Christ eternally
susceptible to crucifixion. 000
The night at Golgotha. Imagine that
terrible night. Christ on the cross, be-
tween two thieves. Christ, in pain, looking
down on that sea of faces, distorted with
malicious joy, seeming more like gargoyles
than men. Then three days in the en-
tombment, three days of profoundest
mystery. Then His final .appearance be-
fore His disciples, and His words to
doubting Thomas : 44 Blessed are they that
have not seen, and yet have believed " ;
the moment with the whole past behind it;
it was evidently just this moment that
Epstein has chosen for a portrayal of his
Christ. 000000
Then turn to the present, the devastation
of Europe, Golgotha on an immense scale,
the crucifixion of civilization, the cruci-
fixion of Christianity itself. Imagine a
Christ arising out of the entombment of a
shell-torn earth ; His profound reproach,
His fierce anger, touched with scorn at the
sight of what had been wrought by men
professing a belief in Him; were they not
also doubting Thomases of a sort i 0
All this the sculptor has put into his
statue, which is a work, surely, of its time ;
the first work of art which shows the more
significant effects of the passion drama
lately enacted in the once fertile valleys of

“ MLLE GABRIELLE SOENE ’
BY JACOB EPSTEIN

Europe ; but for the war, I hardly think
this Christ could have come into being. *
The statue has, surely, had one good
effect. It has set us speculating about
Christ, and the precise essence of the
Christ-nature. On the principle that even
44 the devil can quote scripture," some
persons are sure to maintain that the
author of this Christ is Antichrist; but
unhappily for these, there will always be
other stubborn persons to maintain equally,
and with some logic, that there can never
be any certainty as to which among those
quoting the Scriptures is the devil and
which the angel. 0000
It is always a thankless task to discuss
the personality of a living artist; yet one
point is worthy of mention in connexion
with the statue—though I run the risk of
annoying some persons. Epstein, like
many an artist of great original genius, has

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