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.
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…
This phantasmagoric portrait of poet and playwright Daniel Levi (Miguel) de Barrios and his family is from Imperio de Dios en la harmonia del mundo (God’s Empire in the Harmony of the World), a…