7. ‘The Rock Drill’ (1913) by Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959)

‘The Rock Drill’: Reconstruction by Ken Cook and Ann Christopher RA after Jacob Epstein’s original version, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (1974)  Image credit: Elliott Brown

The American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein often produced controversial works which challenged ideas on what was appropriate subject matter for public artworks. 

Jacob Epstein self-portrait, c.1912, National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo by Nihil novi. Image credit: Wikipedia

His art is displayed all over the world; highly original for its time, its influence on the younger generation of sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth was significant.

Epstein's 1913 sculpture 'The Rock Drill' in its original form. Photographer unknown

‘The Rock Drill’ is one of his best known works. A protest against war? The original version, a plaster figure perched on top of an actual industrial rock drill, was first displayed at Brighton City Art Gallery from December 1913 to January 1914.

At that time, the sculpture was seen by some as a celebration of modern machinery and masculine virility. The painter and critic Percy Wyndham Lewis, co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, praised it as one of the artist’s best works. ‘The nerve-like figure perched on the machinery, with its straining to one purpose, is a vivid illustration of the greatest function of life,’ he wrote in Blast magazine.

Since then, ‘The Rock Drill’ has been interpreted much more negatively as a reflection on the dark side of humanity seen in the horrors of the 1914-18 war.

Epstein’s friend, the artist David Bomberg saw the sculpture for the first time in December 1913 and later recalled how astonished he was to see ‘perched near the top of the tripod which held the drill, a tense figure operating the drill as if it were a machine gun; a prophetic symbol, I thought later, of the impending war.’

Much later, writing in the late 1930s about ‘The Rock Drill’ in his autobigraphy Let there be sculpture and horrified by the outbreak of yet another grim conflict in Europe, Epstein himself was explicit in his pacifist views.

‘Here is the armed sinister figure of to-day and to-morrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made ourselves into.’  

Nowadays the work is accepted as a statement on the evil of human conflict. A total of seven pages are devoted to it in Paul Moorhouse’s book, The Great War in Portraits, published in 2014 by the National Portrait Gallery to accompany an exhibition in which ‘The Rock Drill’ was a major piece.

Epstein’s Torso in Metal. Image credit: Sailko; Wikipedia

Epstein later dismantled the original ‘Rock Drill’ figure, sold the drill and truncated the figure.  His horror of war caused him to reject, as his biographer Dr Raquel Gilboa puts it, ‘the aggressiveness conveyed by the metallic construction, which reflected for him the negative impact of machinery’. The tone of the sculpture was thus transformed.

 ‘In contrast to the power and virility exuded by the full-figure, the truncated version appears defenceless and melancholic, evocative of the wounded soldiers who were returning home from the trenches in startling numbers,’ wrote art critic Richard Cork in 1999.  ‘In contrast to the power and virility exuded by the full-figure, the truncated version appears defenceless and melancholic, evocative of the wounded soldiers who were returning home from the trenches in startling numbers,’ wrote art critic Richard Cork in 1999.  

His view is endorsed in Paul Moorhouse’s commentary on Epstein’s ‘Torso in Metal’ as it appeared in the National Portrait Gallery's 2014 exhibition: ‘No longer predatory, its geometric, visored features and angular body shapes retain an echo of armour, but now this seems defensive rather than assertive. Indeed, this dismembered figure seems cowed. Seen at a lower level, the bent attitude of the neck and head, previously imperious, now seem watchful and dejected.’

Another art critic, Simon Grant, writing for Tate magazine in 2021, suggested that the battle droids in film maker George Lucas’ Star Wars bear a striking resemblance to Epstein’s creation.

Epstein created ‘The Rock Drill’ without making at the time any kind of anti-war statement. He is not viewed as an intimate member of the literary and artistic set known as the Bloomsbury Group, many of whom were known pacifists.

Portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell c.1912 by the photographer Adolf de Meyer (1868-1946). Image credit: Wikipedia

Yet he lived in the Bloomsbury area of London between 1914 and 1927, and at least one of his early commissions was thanks to Lady Ottoline Morrell, one of the Group’s most flamboyant associates. Her home from 1915 at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire was a refuge for conscientious objectors and seen by many as a haven from the war.

One of her many lovers was Bertrand Russell, who was sentenced in February 1918 to six months in Brixton Prison for publicly lecturing against inviting the United States to enter the war on Britain’s side. 

 

Photograph of Jacob Epstein working on a bust of Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell    © National Portrait Gallery, London

Many years later, in 1953, Epstein would sculpt Russell, a pacifist who maintained his anti-war stand into old age. In September 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was jailed for seven days, again in Brixton Prison. He was sentenced for a 'breach of the peace' after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. The magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to 'good behaviour', to which Russell replied: 'No, I won't.'