Creator Bio
Jacob Epstein
1889–1959
The pioneering modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein was born on the Lower East Side of New York. He studied art in New York and Paris and settled in London in 1905. Much of his early work, with its explicit sexuality, rough-hewn composition, and indebtedness to non-European sculptural traditions, challenged taboos on what was appropriate for public art and aroused intense controversy. Later he became known for his bronze sculptures of the heads of public figures.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
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Jacob Kramer
The rough-hewn sculptures that Epstein created early in his career, like that of the painter Jacob Kramer (1892–1962), departed from the conventions of classical Greek sculpture in a radical way that…
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Jacob and the Angel
Jacob Epstein’s primitive style was not to everyone’s liking, especially when it came to his sculptures with biblical and religious themes. The overt sexuality of some of his sculptures also aroused…
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Torso in Metal from "The Rock Drill"
The first version of The Rock Drill, exhibited in 1915, was a white plaster figure sitting astride a real drill, an amalgam of man and machine. The sculptor, Jacob Epstein, originally intended it as a…
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Buying a Newspaper
Jacob Epstein, “Buying a Newspaper,” from Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York. Epstein was best-known for his sculptures, but he also created the…
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Morris Rosenfeld
Jacob Epstein, “Morris Rosenfeld,” from Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York. Epstein was best-known for his sculptures, but he also created the…