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.
The rough-hewn sculptures that Epstein created early in his career, like that of the painter Jacob Kramer (1892–1962), departed from the conventions of classical Greek sculpture in a radical way that…
Let no one cross my threshold,
Nor disturb my silence;
I no longer wish to hear
The noise of people and speech
From them I crawled away
In tears, into my corner,
To listen at last in quiet
To the…
This map, in a manuscript copy of Be’er mayim ḥayim (A Spring of Living Water), a commentary on Rashi published in Worms or Friedberg in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century, is based on Rashi’s…