Daemons and angels - June Rose

'I feel that I can do the best, most profound things and life is short. How I wish I was living in an age when man wanted to raise temples to man or God or the Devil.' Jacob Epstein was thirty when he wrote the impassioned words that seem to presage the lack of understanding that would dog his creative genius. Now belatedly recognized as a seminal figure in the history of twentieth-century art, the first to carve directly in stone since the medieval period, his powerful and often explicit sculptures, monumental in scale, were hailed as works of genius by a few contemporaries such as Ezra Pound and Augustus John, but provoked hostility and censoriousness from the art establishment. A mass of pure energy with huge ambition, Epstein emerged from the Jewish ghetto of New York to take the art world by storm with the astonishing originality, vitality and ambition of his early work. Determined resistance to the modern movement forced him to be more commercial - in 1946 he modelled the portrait of Winston Churchill, and in 1954 he was knighted. But behind the apparent acceptance of conservatism he returned always to the monumental type of carving with which he had begun his career. June Rose gives a full and enlightening account of his struggle for recognition, his tangled private life and its resonance in his work.

The first biography of this important sculptor for 10 years

Focuses on the controversial and iconoclastic nature of his work, its early outpouring of originality and strength

Comes at a time of increasing recognition for Epstein's genius and influence

Fully illustrated with plates of many of the major works