Occupational Medicine 2008 58(6):386-387; doi:10.1093/occmed/kqn055
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Occupational Medicine. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Sir Jacob Epstein, Torso in Metal from Rock Drill (1913–1914).
Sculpture Bronze object: 705 x 584 x 445 mm. Tate Britain, London
Mike McKiernan
This sculpture looks like a fierce robot storm trooper from some science fiction movie. But this visored, menacing android has no legs; its left shoulder is withered compared to the right and the right forearm and left hand are missing. Inside its armour-like ribcage extending into the abdomen is an embryo. Epstein called it ‘the armed sinister figure of today and tomorrow’ [1] and it is the second stage of a work originally created by him in 1913 when he was fascinated by mechanization and the machine culture in America and Europe. He had attempted to create a symbol of the new age, a man-robot in plaster straddling a real drill (a phallic extension), which he had bought second hand [2]. He had also considered adding a motor to make the piece move, rather reminiscent of Duchamp's ‘ready-made’ bicycle [3]. Epstein's Vortex period lasted just 3 years and he never did such abstract work again [4].
Epstein's infatuation with the Futurists' passion for machinery was destroyed by the wholesale slaughter wreaked by the mechanical weapons during the First World War. The repetitive chatter of the Maxim Gun and the staccato sound of the rock drill were as one. The sight of maimed and mutilated soldiers returning from the trenches led Epstein to abandon his support for industrialization. He cut off his man-robot's limbs, removed its symbol of power (the drill) and recast the torso in its present truncated form. Like the returning soldiers, the robot became a tragic war-scarred amputee, not virile and threatening, but impotent, solitary, hesitant, vulnerable and even melancholic. It is no longer a mechanized marvel but a ‘casualty of the violence of modern life’ [5]. The embryo, which might have been transformed into another dehumanized robot, is no longer a threat but a victim.
Sir Jacob Epstein was born in New York's Lower Eastside Jewish community in 1880. His parents were Polish emigrees and his father became a successful tailor and property investor. Epstein, aged six, contracted pleurisy and was seriously ill for several years spending much of his time drawing [1]. In 1894, he joined the Art Student's League of New York. Two years later he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. He settled permanently in England in 1905 where he pioneered modern sculpture, often producing controversial pieces that challenged perceptions of sexuality in public artworks. For example, his first major public commission in 1908 was for the new British Medical Association Building (now Zimbabwe House) in the Strand. His 18 larger than life-size figures embodying in sculpture ‘the great primal facts of man and woman’ [6] caused a public outcry. The carvings were later mutilated and remain in that state today. In 1928, under cover, he carved two sculptures ‘day’ and ‘night’ directly onto the façade of the new London Underground Electric Railways headquarters at 55 Broadway (still visible at London Undergrounds's HQ above St James Park tube station). The naked child in day offended both workers and passers by and despite critical acclaim, Epstein was asked to reduce the size of its penis for ‘public decency’. He was only offered three large public commissions during the next 30 years [7]. He was knighted in 1954 and died of a heart attack in August 1959.
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References
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- Epstein J. Epstein: An Autobiography (1955) London: Hulton Press.
- Cork R, drill Rock. Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings—Silber E, ed. (1989) Leeds: WS Maney and Son. 160–171.
- Duchamp Marcel. Bicycle wheel (1913) Readymade, diameter 64.8 cm, mounted on a stool, 60.2 cm high. Replica. Private collection.
- Epstein K. Epstein Drawings (1962) London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
- Cork R. Jacob Epstein (1999) London: Tate Gallery Publishing.
- Epstein J. Letter to The British Medical Journal, 27 June 1908.
- Wilson M. Dark Forces: Jacob Epstein, the London Underground and the British Press. MA Dissertation, University of London, 2005.
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