Every now and again an exhibition comes along that not only puts great works of art on view and deepens one’s understanding of the subject under review but also upends or substantially revises the received wisdom surrounding that subject. “Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill” at the Royal Academy in London is just such an exhibition.1 Organized by the British art historian and critic Richard Cork, an authority on early British modernism, “Wild Thing” brings together some ninety sculptures and works-on-paper by the three artists who between them initiated Britain’s sculptural revolution in the first decades of the twentieth century: the Englishman Eric Gill (1882– 1940); Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), an expatriate American; and Henri Gaudier (1891–1915), an expatriate Frenchman and self-taught sculptor who added the surname of his Polish common-law wife, Sophie Brzeska, to his own.
The show recreates a pivotal moment in the history of both British and modern art and is of immense value for other reasons as well. It serves as a virtual retrospective of Gaudier-Brzeska, offering the opportunity to take the measure of an artist whose work one rarely sees outside of individual museum collections but is widely regarded as the catalytic force in British sculpture of the period. Even more important is the presence of a reconstruction of Epstein’s Rock Drill (1913–15), a work with a complicated history that has been known for most of its life only in a reduced form that has distorted, even obscured, its meaning and importance.
The
