Jacob Epstein

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Only two of Jacob Epstein's works were featured in The New Age, and these were printed individually, not included in any of the series that ran in the periodical.

Jacob Epstein, The Oscar Wilde Memorial
Supplement to The New Age, June 6, 1912

"At the Twenty-one Gallery Jacob Epstein is exhibiting both sculpture and drawings.

To understand what I think of Jacob Epstein is not difficult. When the plastic arts can no longer interpret the external world in the terms of a great order or scheme of life, owing to the fact that all great schemes or orders are dead, they exalt the idiosyncrasy or individual angle of the isolated ego. The only two factors in common between a plastic work of art and the people to whom it is supposed to appeal, have always been these: (1) the portion of the external world selected ; and (2) the terms of the great order or scheme of life, shared by, and revealed in the interpretation.

Now, when the minor and non-value-creating ego is as isolated as he is today, the second factor falls out altogether, and  leaves only the first. When therefore, the first ceases to be pure transcriptism, the art has no interest whatsoever, save for cranks and people who have some reason of their own in abetting or supporting purposeless individualism a outrance. To these, the particular angle of vision of a minor personality has some value. To me it has none.

Anthony Ludovici, "Art," The New Age, December 18, 1913

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Jacob Epstein, The Rock Drill
Supplement to The New Age, December 25, 1913

"People will admire the “Rock Drill,” because they have no preconceived notion as to how the thing expressed by it should be expressed...


They [the critics] cannot understand that the genius and sincerity of an artist lies in extracting afresh, from outside reality, a new means of expression.

– T. E. Hulme, "Mr. Epstein and the Critics," The New Age, December 25, 1913.

Jacob Epstein