ABSTRACT
Nothing serves a gifted, ambitious artist working within the received conventions of his time quite so well as a reputation for being scandalous and "advanced." The reputation brings in the intelligentsia, and the conventional quality of the work brings in the money. The scandal that launched Epstein's career as an English sculptor—the episode of the "Strand Statues"—was one of those mildly humorous curiosities of Edwardian culture that are almost wholly devoid of intrinsic artistic interest. In 1907 the British Medical Association commissioned Epstein, who had settled in London only two years earlier at the age of twenty-four to execute eighteen stone carvings for the facade of its new building in the Strand. Artists like Epstein, the bulk of whose oeuvre explores so few aesthetic questions and is so unvarying in the solutions it seeks, pose enormous difficulties for the author of the kind of lengthy monograph which Richard Buckle has undertaken.
