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, Epstein became known for his bronze sculptures of the heads of public figures. He was also the illustrator for The Spirit of the Ghetto, an early intimate and sympathetic portrait of New York immigrant Jewish life by the non-Jewish journalist Hutchins Hapgood (1869–1944).
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
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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…