Risqué associations

Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill
Royal Academy, until 24 January 2010
Supported by BNP Paribas and The Henry Moore Foundation

It’s an unlikely grouping, this alliance of Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill. In many ways, this should be an Epstein solo show, or possibly an Epstein and Frank Dobson show (to link two key modernist sculptors who currently deserve reassessment), but neither of those interesting permutations would have pulled in the crowds. The popular appeal in Wild Thing is Eric Gill’s unorthodox sex life and the fact that the young rebel Gaudier died so romantically fighting ‘pour la patrie’ in the first world war (currently very fashionable). It helps that Epstein also had something of a racy reputation (affairs with models), so much so that he could be described by Gill as ‘quite mad about sex’. With all this alluring biography to pique and titillate the public imagination, the art and its radicalism becomes almost incidental to the show’s success.

Perhaps the sex even manages to distract attention from the fact that the work on view in the Sackler Galleries is of very uneven quality. The exhibition begins with the least considerable sculptor of the trio, Eric Gill. Predictably, it is his Portland stone relief of a couple making love that greets the visitor. ‘Ecstasy’, as it’s called, is not nearly as erotic as ‘Votes for Women’, now lost, a much more ecstatic image, but it serves to set the tone for an exhibition that trades on its risqué associations. To the left is a stark and moving Crucifixion with naked Christ and ‘A Roland for an Oliver’, which depicts a naked woman with legs wide apart; thus sacred and profane, the twin poles of Gill’s idiosyncratic moral code.