Jacob Epstein: Rock Drill – An Essay

Although Jacob Epstein himself tried to stay independent from the avant-garde groups of his time, besides The London Group – an amalgamation of The Camden Town Group and the English Cubists which formed itself in 1913 – his sculpture Rock Drill inhabits many styles of the modernist movement. These included hints of Futurism’s fascination with machinery, aggressiveness and war; Vorticism’s concept of “the point of maximum energy” and Duchamp’s take on Dada with his readymade objects such as the bicycle wheel which he’d announced as a piece of art recent to the time of Rock Drill’s creation.

The sculpture was comprised of an actual drill, bought second hand, and what is described by Epstein in his autobiography as “a machine-like robot, visored, menacing” in plaster perching on the instrument, the complete piece standing at around 3 meters. This figure, simultaneously man and mechanical with both parts merging into an extension of the other, did still appear to have a few shreds of mimicked organic nature to it in the foetus or “it’s progeny, protectively ensconced” within its ribcage, and the lines in the back and shoulder of the form from behind, almost presenting an anatomical description of the muscles of a human body. Like in many of Epstein’s sculptures presenting pregnancy and the female form, such as Figure in Flenite, the neck of the model cranes forward and the arm that controlled the drill defensively and equally aggressively curves around the form within. The fierceness and mechanisation of this sculpture has strong links to the Vorticist movement with the style of abstraction, modernity, the penetration of the space around it and, though being completely immobile, a sense of movement and dynamism within the work.

While Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E Hulme – who was to write a book on the piece and Epstein’s other work before he was killed by a shell in 1917 – showed enthusiasm for the sculpture, much of the public were disturbed and disgusted by it when it was exhibited in 1915 along with works from other artists in the London Group. The Current Art Topics article in the May 1915 edition of the Fine Arts Journal can be seen as an example of this, openly slandering Epstein and the London Group’s exhibition, which the author describes as “refuse”, stating:

“The piece de resistance – the draw, of the show is Mr. Jacob Epstein’s performance entitled ‘Rock Drill,’ exhibited first, I believe, at Brighton a year or so back, to the scandal of the community. Neither it nor its meaning can be fully described in these pages, but I can quote the ‘Observer’ probably the foremost English Sunday paper whose art critic writes as follows: ‘The whole effect is utterably loathsome,’ * * * ‘Even leaving aside the nasty suggestiveness of the whole thing’ etc., etc.”

By the time of its exhibition in 1916, however, Epstein had dismantled the piece, removing the legs, the drill and cutting the arm that operated it off at the elbow, casting it in gunmetal in a rather bitterly ironic way and renaming the work Torso in Metal from the ‘Rock Drill’. The slaughter

that was witnessed in this time and the death of Gaudier-Brzeska in June 1915 on one of the French battlefields was said to have spurred many associates of the Vorticists into a realisation of the true horror of war and influence Epstein’s radical alterations to his work. It has been widely understood that this fragmentation of the sculpture was a mirror of the very same fragmentation and destruction that fell upon the men and their bodies on the battlefields and trenches of France during the War. Though having been cast in metal, these alterations made the sculpture appear no stronger, but defenceless and sad, unable to protect the progeny within him. Much later, Epstein would write about the previous state of the work: “Here is the armed, sinister figure of to-day and to-morrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have turned ourselves into.”

Henceforth, Epstein’s Rock Drill, a sculpture that was before violent and optimistic though ‘prophetic’ to the destructiveness of the First World War, became a symbol of the audacity and atrociousness of war and the demise of the avant-garde. Many avant-garde artists and those that had associated themselves and their work with the Vorticists had – or had known those who had – enlisted during the war days, leaving their numbers dwindling in Britain by the end as they died or recoiled from the movement and its implications of human abstraction and mechanistic energy. Epstein himself stated that he couldn’t see that forms of abstraction taken up later than 1913-14 made “any advance on the period, or produced more novel forms,” besides the use of mannequins in surrealism and what he describes as “lunatic collections.” Despite his negativity towards progressing appearances of avant-garde art, his work still had a profound influence on later artists such as Henry Moore.

 

Bibliography

Carroll, Luscombe. Current Art Topics, Fine Arts Journal. Volume 32 (5). 1915.

Comentale, Edward P; Gasoirek, Andrzej. T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism. Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2006.

Cork, Richard. ‘Rock Drill’: Rediscovering a Lost Revolutionary Sculpture. Available: http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/events/past-events/2013/richard-cork. 2013. Last accessed: 2nd November 2014

Cork, Richard. Jacob Epstein. London: Tate Gallery. 1999.

Epstein, Jacob. An Autobiography. London: Hulton P. 1955.

Malvern, Sue. Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance. London. 2004

Redfern, David. History of the London Group. Available: http://www.thelondongroup.com/history.php. Last accessed: 30th October 2014

Walsh, Micheal J. K. London, Modernism and 1914. London: Cambridge University Press. 2010

Turner and British Landscape Between 1750 and 1850

A lot can be told about British opinion and tastes in landscape painting between 1750 and 1850 from the lines of James Thompson’s poem The Castle of Indolence:

‘Whate’re Lorrain light touched with softening hue

Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew’

First of all, and most simply, was the taste for older artists; those which had been around and in the public eye for at least a hundred years or so and therefore had successfully passed the test of time. Another – and equally as obvious, if not more – is a preference for central European landscapes and landscape artists. The lines also hint to interest in the idea of the Classicly Beautiful, which was more linked to the art of Claude, and the Sublime, which was more linked to art of Rosa, with Poussin hanging between both depending on which of his works one looks at. For all of this, the most relevant person to observe would be Joseph Mallord William Turner. Born in 1775 and dying in 1851, Turner lived through the very centre of the period of time this relates to, and was influenced at some point or another by all three artists mentioned in The Castle of Indolence, but most importantly by Claude who became a running feature in Turner’s art throughout the most part of his artistic career.

As I stated earlier, the most obvious idea that can be lifted from the lines is the taste for the landscapes of mainland Europe, mainly influenced by the scenery of Italy – or more specifically, Rome – and Biblical or classical tales. An example is Claude Lorraine’s Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, illustrating the story of a mountain nymph called Echo who falls unrequitedly in love with Narcissus, a beautiful young man who in turn falls in love with his own reflection and eventually wastes away until only a flower is left in his place.  While it shows this tale, it is predominantly an idealised Italian landscape, with Claude’s iconic use of yellow light that initially attracts the viewer’s eyes to the background – where there is a small town, boats resting in a harbour and a castle on a cliff – and way of employing trees and darker tones in the foreground as a mode of framing the landscape. The figures only rest in the bottom right hand corner, staking up very little of the painting. Other examples of classical and biblical narrative from the artists outlined in the poem include Rosa’s River Landscape with Apollo and the Cumean Sibyl and Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds. This usage of Greek and Roman myths and legends – however marginalised it might be in some of the art, due to the lack of respect for pure landscape painting at the time they were made – may have worked as a catalyst towards the development of Neoclassicism in the mid eighteenth century, having helped found an interest in it, along with the advancement of archaeological discoveries of the time; though this movement initially developed in Europe as opposed to Britain.

Another influence in British taste in landscape, as the poem suggests, is Claude’s use of light. This was especially specific to Turner whose work had a great impact upon it from Claude, often using the same framing effect and, again, the appearance of classical tales. This also inspired him to travel to Italy from 1819 to 1820 and again in 1829 in order to study the scenery that had previously animated Claude’s work. He sought out places he knew from the paintings like the lake Albino and sketched out the key sites that Claude had made familiar to him in order to capture the French artist’s style and so that he could use them or their structure in his paintings after hand. Even in the pieces before he travelled to Italy, one can easily see parallels in Turner and Claude’s art, with some of Turner’s earlier paintings nearly entirely replicating that of Claude. A prime example of this is his Appulia in Search of Appulus in which the scene is almost identical to Claude’s Landscape with Jacob, Laban and his Daughters. Both show a landscape with a river cutting through it from the left and a long arched bridge stretching across it and reflecting against the water below. On the right of the scene in each, there is a small cluster of buildings, in Claude’s case it’s classical architecture and in Turner’s ruins, adding to the Picturesque effect of his work. The trees that frame the more central landscape are unbelievably similar in shape and structure, along with the placing of the sheep in the left hand corner and cows along the river bank in the centre of the painting. Even the details are exact, down to the colour of the figures’ outfits. There are, of course, many less obviously influenced paintings such as The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire which shows a river running between sets of buildings and tells a scene from the story of Dido, the female figure in blue on the left, as she builds her husband’s tomb which appears beside her in the painting. This can be coupled with Claude’s Seaport with the Embarkation of Queen Sheba. Though these paintings aren’t identical like the previous two, the structure in them is very similar with a central beam of yellowy light piercing through dark water and Claude’s work also being bordered by pale buildings and figures, emitting the same sort of atmosphere – however Turners seems marginally darker, with a greater presence of a tree on the right hand side, but this may have been done intentionally to emphasise the situation at hand in his own painting. For these reasons, Turner was often referred to, at the time, as the ‘modern’ or ‘British Claude’.

While Claude may have been an inspiration for Turner, he saw him as as much of a rival for his own work as anything, trying to surpass him, remake the Claudian legacy in his own image and further the legitimacy of landscape painting as Claude had done before him. This desire for them to be compared and for Turner to show himself as the superior finally manifested itself in physical form at the end his life when he bequeathed The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire and Sun Rising through Vapour to the National Gallery on the condition they be placed next Claude’s paintings Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca and Seaport with the Embarkation of Queen Sheba.

However, in Turner’s later work, he began to swap his Classic approach for a more Sublime one and his paintings became increasingly vague. While Claude’s influence still reveals itself through the light he uses, depicting “not objects of nature but the medium through which they are seen” and the lingering presence of dark, framing trees and yellow hue, his eye turned further toward the work of Rosa. Described in the poem as ‘savage’, Rosa’s paintings portray the violence of nature, with characters standing beneath looming cliffs and rocks, ominous, grey skies hanging above and bare, twisted trees punctuating the landscape. This can be seen in his oil painting Rocky Landscape with Huntsman and Warriors, showing four figures all comparatively small to the vast expanses of rock around them. A cloud blankets dark sky above and the gnarled trees frame the bottom of the picture. The atmosphere can also be found in Poussin’s Winter: The Deluge, depicting fierce weather – what appears to be the aftermath of a flood. In the background there is a thin streak of white from what must be moon light lining edge of a cloud, though at a glance looks like a flash of lightning. Both these paintings say something about nature’s raw power, an idea that influenced Turner in his paintings of stormy seas and perhaps to an extent the power of light that exhibits itself in his paintings. The painting of Turner’s that shows this power best is Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth. While it seems to be primarily abstract, with only a few small details indicating the presence of something, the effect is still substantial. The use of swift marks and tones in the shape of the waves and the undefined border between sky and sea offer a glimpse into the brutality of the storm. The darker lines draw the eye away from the centre of the painting where a bright white light sits, that which initially attracts the viewer’s gaze, and to the plain of greys. As in Rosa and Poussin’s work, the pallet is dark and limited adding to the sombre atmosphere that the painting emits. In order to capture the pure ferocity of being out in a storm, Turner famously had himself tied to mast of a boat and left there for hours, founding the painting on the basis of experience.

Unfortunately, despite Turner’s own popularity with Ruskin because his work was deemed more true to nature than the old masters, Claude, Poussin and Rosa’s landscapes began fall into the background in Britain in the late 1840s and early 1850’s due to the rise of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, fronted by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their principles in making art were based on Ruskin’s ideas after discovering his book Modern Painters. Expressing true nature for Ruskin meant recording it in precise detail and with the highest degree of finish. The Pre-Raphaelites tried to replicate this by painting outdoors in natural daylight and also with clear, bright colours on a white backdrop. Clear differences between Pre-Raphaelite landscapes and Claudian landscapes can be easily seen if only one compares them. For instance, looking at A Study in March otherwise known as In Early Spring by John William Inchbold – a follower of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites – there is not a single hint of the old ways to it. The central focus belongs to foreground, not the distant background, which has been depicted in intense detail showing the flaking bark on an old tree and hundreds of twisting branches; even grass and dirt on the ground has been portrayed with minute precision. As for the scene behind it, where Claude or Poussin, might’ve had a landscape that stretches until the horizon or some kind of mountainscape, Inchbold’s stops rather abruptly with the appearance of the brow of a hill. Even those with further stretches of landscape and, like the old masters, narrative as well, such as Frank Dicksee’s Chivalry still don’t evoke the same effect. While Claude used trees to frame his landscapes and make certain parts stand out and Poussin’s more centrally narrative works have at least a small window to one behind one character or another’s shoulder or off to the side, the trees in Chivalry shroud the distant landscape, if anything, so only the slightest hint can be seen behind it. Much like a Study in March, the viewer’s eye is centred on the foreground that, again, has been scrupulously painted by the artist, down to the details in the closest leaves and the worn appearance of the tree to which the woman is tied.

Though Samuel Palmer’s work came a little later, and doesn’t quite fall into the bracket, there still an obvious influence from Claude in his prints and paintings after around 1860 – one of the most notable being A Dream in Apennine. As the title suggests, the painting is set in Italy, hinting further to the influence of Lorrain. There is a small group of figures in the foreground, a far stretching landscape that fades to blue at the horizon and the use of trees and  darker tones to frame the scene: all iconic characteristics of Claudian landscapes. This structure is also replicated in many of his later prints such as The Early Ploughman and The Lonely Tower, showing that the old masters’ legacy managed to live on in some form – even while Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites were at work and discrediting it.

An Essay on Constable and His Painting ‘The Haywain’

Towards the end of the 18th Century and into the early 19th Century, just as John Constable was establishing himself as artist, the Romantic movement was taking hold over Europe. This movement, unlike many before it, had very few stylistic characteristics and was rather more intellectually driven, moving away from the idea of enlightenment and classical, Roman and Grecian influences of the Neo-Classical. It focussed on longing and feeling and tried to revive Northern European sensibility and a sense of the past, rejecting the industrial revolution that was developing around them, but most prominently in England. This often turned the work to Medieval and Gothic influences which were generally singular to Northern Europe, taking the viewer and the artist back to a time that was more religiously aware and morally ideal, however romanticised their ideas of the time may have been.

While Constable’s paintings work on this idea of the past and the beauty of British landscape, they are not so much focussed on a Medieval past but instead a recent agricultural one, void of industry, like that in his childhood. He expresses this in a letter to his friend Fisher, writing: ‘I should paint my own places best. I associate my “careless boyhood” to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (and I am grateful) that is I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil.” The Stour which he speaks of is a river in the Stour Valley on the border between Suffolk and Essex and in the area in which he spent most of his youth. This particularly significant as a large fraction of his paintings were done of various locations in the Stour Valley, that shows an obvious link between his images of childhood and his artwork.

One of Constable’s famous paintings, The Haywain can be taken as an example of this, the scene being a view of the Millstream in Flatford – a location for many of his scenes. It presents an image from the bank of the river, Willy Lott’s house to the left in the shade of a cluster of trees and to the right a clear open plain, that is much brighter, where one can see the tiny figures of labourers in the distance. In the centre, a cart and cattle with two countrymen in it moves up the river. Constable describes the look and feeling of that painting as the ‘sparkle of freshness’ in a summer landscape after a brief rain shower, enforcing this sensation through the use of his own chiaroscuro in the detail of light and shadow but also contributed to by the shapes of the clouds in accordance with meteorological principals and his understanding of cloud formation, making the scene more real to the viewers’ eyes. The original title to the painting (Landscape: Noon), however plain and bland it may have been, shows an indication of the passage of time and makes it the centre of attention and the object of the viewers’ contemplation with both parts of the name applying equally to the whole painting as opposed to privileging a single object, as its more well know title The Haywain does.

Though the scene has a very naturalistic look, it was mostly completed in his studio having been amalgamated from a series of oil sketches and studies of the view and the details for the area, creating a largely imagined scene and, for example, taking the woman bending to fetch water and the dog from one scene and the cart in the river from another. In those cases, the images he used were intended only for the painting however there were earlier drawings he used to express detail such as the boat in the bushes that was taken from his earlier painting The White Horse where it appeared as a ferry boat in the boathouse.

While on the surface the painting may seem quite docile and a solely descriptive image, it has been argued that there are quite strong political undertones to it like many Romantic images. Constable himself was of a very conservative political viewpoint due to his loyalty toward the way of living he had been brought up in, making him a fierce nationalist with unwavering support of his country despite the King’s insanity and the corruption in the Church of England. It is said that the small figures of workers in the background of the image showed an anxiety about labourers in the rural society of the time, being in a period characterised by intense economic depression and agricultural riots. In the book The Dark Side of the Landscape, John Barrell suggests that the aim of this was to show peaceful labourers working productively in the countryside, but without showing the potential ruggedness that might unsettle those to view it, in order to give country workers better rapport in the eyes of high society.

In conclusion, even though certain details only apply to The Haywain, the strong sense of nationalism that characterises Constable’s landscapes and the love for his country and the area in which he grew up is evident in all his paintings. In these, the recurring theme of peaceful rural and agricultural life presents itself as much as the landscape, even in less fabricated scenes done wholly from life such as his painting Boat Building near Flatford Mill.

Bibliography:

• Clarkson, Jonathan (2010). Constable. London: Phaidon.
• Cormack, Malcom (1985). Constable. Oxford: Phaidon.
• Kroeber, Karl (1975). Romantic Landscape Vision. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.