Let there be sculpture: the life and work of Jacob Epstein

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Presented by The Arts Society Horsham. Wednesday 12 February 2025: 10.45 Brighton Road Baptist Church, Brighton Road, Horsham. RH13 5BD.

This lecture will provide a detailed overview of Jacob Epstein’s colourful and unconventional life and often controversial career as a sculptor and draughtsman, setting them in their wider cultural context.

Born in 1880 in the Lower East Side of New York City to Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, Epstein moved to Paris in 1902 and settled in London in 1905, becoming a British citizen in 1911.

In due course he would become one of the grand old men of modern art (he was knighted in 1954), but not before provoking many a scandal in the British art world and beyond. Although as Henry Moore rightly observed in 1959, Epstein was the man who “took the brickbats for modern art, and as far as sculpture in this country is concerned, he took them first”, we will see that this is far from the whole story, as responses to Epstein’s work were often also fuelled by prudishness, xenophobia and even racism.

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How to book this event:

No booking necessary. Free to Arts Society Horsham members. Visitors welcome, £8 on the door.

Monica Bohm-Duchen

London-based freelance lecturer, writer and exhibition organiser. Has lectured for Tate, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Open University, Sotheby's Institute of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck College since 2005, and has led many tours. Publications include Understanding Modern Art (1991), Chagall (1998/2001), The Private Life of a Masterpiece (2001),The Art and Life of Josef Herman (2009) and Art and the Second World War (2013). She is the initiator and Creative Director of the nationwide Insiders/Outsiders arts festival (see https://insidersoutsidersfestival.org/), and contributing editor of the companion volume, Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture (2019).

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