Collections

In Summer 2006 Leeds Museums and Galleries purchased Jacob Epstein’s Flenite Relief with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), National Art Collections Fund, MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Leeds Art Collection Fund (LACF). This work left Britain in 1966-67 and has only once been seen on public view since that date. It was brought over from the United States, where it has been in the collection of Epstein’s nephew and was immediately put on view at Leeds City Art Gallery until it closed for refurbishment in November 2006.

This work is one of half a dozen carvings which Epstein made on the theme of birth between 1910 and 1914, including the monumental ‘Maternity’ of 1910, which is also in the Leeds collection. It actually shows, on the two sides of one piece of stone, a woman in the act of giving birth. The front shows the woman’s upper body, upside down, with her arms crossed over her, and the back her lower body and the baby, as if the figures are seen from above and below.
It is similar in scale to Epstein’s ‘Birth’ of 1913-4, now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, but it is more stylized, and its material, hard, dark serpentine stone, lends itself to greater angularity, stylization and polish.

The sculpture’s first owner was the poet and critic T E Hulme, a key player in the Vorticist movement, which this work represents so well. Hulme’s interest in the hardening of organic quality is well expressed here, as are the lessons learned from effects of African carving rather than its imitation. It shows a key step in Epstein’s journey from ‘Maternity’ to the ‘Rock Drill’, which he began around this time. It is also the first of the artist’s famous ‘flenite’ sculptures, a term invented to convey the importance of material quality, a combining of the words ‘flint’ and ‘granite’, which gave its name to two other exceptional carvings, one at the Tate and one in Minneapolis.

‘Flenite Relief’ is still a daring sculpture today, not just in its subject matter, but in its form and conception: making a relief with two sides; showing sexuality and creation on the same object but in such a way that they can never be seen together; and linking birth with death through the overall shape of the gravestone.

The piece will feature in, WE the Moderns, a new exhibition at Kettles Yard, Cambridge which opens at the end of January 2007 before it returns to Leeds for an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute. Creation Myths: Epstein’s Flenite Relief of 1913 in Context, will focus specifically on this provocative sculpture and runs in Gallery 4 from 3 November 2007 to 11 February 2008.