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| Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908 Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018. |
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| Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908-1912. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018. |
Paris: Observations on Jacob Epstein's Sculpted Tomb of Oscar Wilde
By Samuel D. Gruber
[cross-posted from Samuel Gruber's Jewish Art and Monuments]
Here is one more post about the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. I've already written about some Holocaust monuments and graves of 19th-century Jewish notables. But there is at least one more sort-of Jewish monument that deserves a look--that's the boundary-breaking sculptural tomb of Oscar Wilde
carved by the young American-Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880-1959),
who beginning in 1902 made his life and career in England, where he
became a citizen in 1911.
The
circumstances of Wilde's death in exile in 1901 and the commissioning
of the tomb are well known. I am indebted to the excellent catalog essay
by Evelyn Silber, "The Tomb of Oscar Wilde,"(in Jacob Epstein:
Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre
for the Study of Sculpture, 1989, pp. 124-131).
George
Bernard Shaw had introduced the young sculptor to Robert Ross, Wilde's
literary executor, in 1905, while Ross was still publishing Wilde's
works and paying of his debts. Wilde, the Anglo-Irish writer who was in
the 1880s and 90s the chief spokesman for the Aestheticism Movement, was
at the time of his death widely reviled in England for dandyism and
homosexuality. He was, however, still revered by a loyal literary and
artistic public, and a small circle of friends were dedicated to
perpetuating his literary and critical work. Wilde was able to find a
resting place in more forgiving Paris, where he had moved after his
release from two years in prison in 1897. At Pere Lachaise, he joined
other esteemed writers in eternal repose. He would be later joined by
American writer Gertrude Stein, whose modest grave and marker are not
far away.
Still,
when Epstein's large Hoptonwood stone sculpture was installed in 1912,
the work caused quite a scene, and stirred memories of Wilde trial and
conviction in England for "gross indecency."
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| Jacob Epstein in his London studio with the Tomb of Oscar Wilde, 1912. Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), fig. 45. |
I've written before about Epstein's life, work and influence;
he
was a pioneer of modern sculpture. Here we can take a closer look at
one particular work for which he was both notorious and celebrated.
Born in the United States, Epstein was
the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants and he grew up on the Lower East
Side, where he got his first artistic training at a Settlement House. His first significant commission was to illustrate Hutchins Hapgood's Spirit of the Ghetto,
for which he produced a series of naturalistic street
scenes of mostly Jewish characters and life from the world he knew
well. As young man he would also have been familiar with the art
collections
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he moved to
London in 1902 he frequented the galleries of the British Museum. When
he turned his hand to stone carving he was much impressed by the
Assyrian sculpture at the museum.
The
flying figure on tomb of Oscar Wilde draws on subject and forms
familiar to Epstein from ancient Near Eastern art, especially the great
Assyrian Palace sculptures excavated by Austin Henry Leyard in the mid-19th century, parts of which were on view at the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum and the Louvre.
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| Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018. |
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A Lamassu, from the entrance into the kings private apartments in Nimrud; 865–860 BC. British Museum (London). Photo: Wikipedia.
|
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| Frederick
Charles Cooper. Drawing showing the winged bulls found by Layard at
Nimrud. Watercolor on paper, mid-19th century. Photo: British Museum. |
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| Study for the Tomb of Oscar Wilde, ca. 1909. Pencil, 50.8 x 35.6.
Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre
for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), fig. 47. |
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| Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908 Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018. |
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| Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908 Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018. |
Silber has noted that the
Evening Standard,
which had previously attacked Epstein's work was much more enthusiastic
about the Wilde tomb sculpture, praising the artist's "regard for his
material, and its purpose.
The work
... is as reserved in execution as it is
monumental in conception so that nothing destroyed the effect of a rectangular
block of stone which has felt itself into expression".
The Pall Mall
Gazette enthused:
Mr. Epstein is a real sculptor — a
carver not a modeller — but he is also a Sculptor in Revolt . . . This
brooding, winged figure, born long ago in primitive passions, complex and yet
incomplete, is a child of the marble, and not an enlarged copy, by some other
hand, of a highly finished plaster model . . . This is Mr. Epstein's
commentary, serious and profound, unobscured by conventional formulas, and
inspired by an acute necessity for utterance. "Go and see it at
once", is my urgent advice to all who are interested in sculpture, and
think of it, if you can, on a hilltop in Pere Lachaise, dominating all those
tawdry memorials of the easily-forgotten dead.
One
of Wilde's most famous poems is "The Sphinx." It was begun when Wilde
was a student at Oxford, and then rewritten in Paris in 1883, and worked
on until publication in 1894. It begins with a raven-like sphinx in the
corner of the poet's room and "proceeds through a series of imagined
scenes in which the sphinx is depicted as a goddess, a prophet, and a
lover." (Poetry Foundation).
Epstein's
figure is a cross between a sphinx and an angel. The sphinx (and the
related cherubim) as described in the Book of Exodus, was frequently
depicted in antiquity, and it was revived and popular by the symbolism
writers and artists. Perhaps the best known images is the 1864 painting
by Gustav Moreau of the Oedipus and Sphinx in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Moreau's imagery was an influence of Oscar Wilde. Moreau's Sphinx,
however, is decidedly female, and she thrusts her breast at the nude
male Oedipus. Epstein's figure is male, and it the prominently dangling
testicles provoked a response and calls of "immorality" (in some drawings, however, the testicles are not so pronounced).
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| Gustav Moreau. Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019. |
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| Jacob Epstein. Study for Tomb of Oscar Wilde and a frieze, ca. 1910. Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), p. 128. |
Silber quotes a letter from Epstein to Francis Dodd describing his encounter with
local authorities who were hell-bent on censoring the sculpture and literally
"covering up" its "immorality":
...Imagine my horror Dodd when arriving at the
cemetery to find that the sex parts of the figure had been swaddled in plaster!
and horribly. I went to see the keeper of the cemetery and he tells me that the
Prefect of the Seine and the Keeper of the Ecole des Beaux Arts were called in
and decided that I must either castrate or fig leaf the monument! What am I to
do? Here is the Strand business all over again. You cannot imagine how terrible
the monument looks now. The work is nearing completion and the inscriptions
will begin tomorrow. I am going to get of course Leon Bakst and any other
influential people I know here to stop all this miserable business. I feel quite sick over it
but ridicule will do the work I think. Imagine a bronze fig-leaf on the Oscar
Wilde Tomb. For that is what the guardian of the cemetery suggested might be
done . . . This is a mad world.
Yours ever Jacob Epstein>
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| Four
studies for the Tomb of Oscar wilde, 1908-1910. Pencil, 50.8 x 35.6.
Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre
for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), p. 125.
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Of
course, the figure is also a stylized version of the common winged
victory known from ancient Roman triumphal monuments and sarcophagi, and
these figures are the precursors of the ubiquitous winged angels of
later Christian art. In both cases the figures can refer to an earthly
triumph, but also a spiritual one over death.
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| Rome, Italy. Winged victory from Arch of Septimius Severus, dedicated 203 C.E. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2010. |
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| Gubbio,
Italy. Detail of Roman Sarcophagus showing clipeus supported by winged
figures, 3rd century C.E. Palazzo dei Consoli Museum. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019. |
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| Jacob
Epstein or Charles Holden. Study for Tomb of Oscar Wilde, 1909-10.
Walsall Museum and Art Gallery (Garman-Ryan Collection). Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), p. 130. |
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| Jacob Epstein. tomb of Oscar Wilde, as reprodiuced in The New Age (June 6, 1912). Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), fig. 48. |
Epstein’s
powerful and "primitive" (in the parlance of the day) work was not
immediately appreciated by many other artists and architects at the time, but
within a decade, after the horrors of World War I, his approach was widely
adopted, and one can see something of the legacy even in Pere Lachaise
Cemetery, where the war memorial for Belgian soldiers who died fighting for France,
was dedicated in 1922, and designed in similar squat, blocky and massive and
almost chronic style.
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| Paris, France. Pere Lechaise Cemetery. Belgian Soldiers WWI Memorial, dedicated 1922. Henry Lacoste, architect, with a
bronze bas-relief door by sculptor Charles Piot. The names of 103
soldiers are engraved on the rounded pillars. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018. |
Just
at the time of Oscar Wilde's exile and death, the winged figure as
guardian or messenger, became very popular in the form of cherubim (k'ruvim).
The word comes form the Akkadian Karubi, which means intercessor, an
the notion of cherubim entered the early Israelite religion from
contemporary pagan polytheistic religions. These winged figures are
widely known from Assyrian and Egyptian art, and are mentioned in the
Hebrew Bible in Genesis 3:24, and described in some detail in Exodus 37:7–9, when Bezalel is instructed to sculpt a pair of the them for the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, and in 1 Kings 6:27, when enormous cherubim are described filling the space of the Temple's Holy of Holies.
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| Ivory cherub from Arslan Tash, Northern Syria, possibly early 1st millennium BCE. Photo: Hamblin & Seely, Solomons Temple, fig. 24. |
Just around 1900 we see them increasingly represented in historical and religious art, such as James Tissot's famous painting The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, painted between 1896 and 1901, when it was exhibited in Paris with his other Old Testament scenes.
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| James Tissot, The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, btw. 1896-1901. |
Cherubim
are adopted as a possible wall decoration of the ancient Temple; the
reconstruction of the interior of the Temple by Charles Chipiez was
widely reproduced by the turn of the 20th century.
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| Temple reconstruction from Chipiez, Charles and Perrot, Georges, tLe Temple de Jérusalem et la Maison du Bois-Liban restitués d’après Ezéchiel et le
Livre des Rois (Paris, 1889). This illustration was reproduced in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (New York, 1905). |
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| Temple reconstruction by Chipiez and Perrot reproduced in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (New York, 1905). |
In
part because of the cherub's mystical appeal but also because of the
curving grace of the form, cherubs and other sorts of winged angels were
popular - like the Sphinx - with the symbolist artists, and especially
with artists working in the Art Nouveau style. A good example of this,
from 1909, just as Epstein is designing the Wilde Tomb, is the silver
model of the Ark of the Covenant by the Danish artist Joan Rohde.
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| Johan Rohde, Ark of the Covenant, silver case lined with cedar wood. Copenhagen, 1909. Danish Jewish Art, p. 5. |
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