Let There Be Sculpture by Jacob Epstein

Author:Jacob Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Read Books
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Position of the Artist.

Sculptors of Today

FOR those artists who feel the urge to creative work, the position today is hazardous and beset with difficulties.

We imagine that we have at last emerged into a period of enlightenment. That no longer can a Cézanne be misunderstood and neglected; nor a Van Gogh or a Modigliani be unable to earn a living during their lifetime. This is far from true. The creative artist of today is in exactly the same position as his predecessors. He has against him a formidable array of enemy forces, who attack him directly and obliquely. To start with, those who handle his work, the dealers. They are not content to be mere dealers. They wish to be, and often are, the dictators of the artist’s production. They admonish the artist as to what the public will like or dislike, and they can also keep the artist in poverty, so that he is easier to control. The commonest grouse of the dealer is that the artist is a self-willed person who does not know on which side his bread is buttered. I myself have often been asked to furnish the dealer with what he considers the most salable of all work, the small female nude, which can ornament a mantelpiece or a smoking-room table. I have never succumbed to this demand, and it has even set me against this form of sculpture. The really popular works of Maillol are those little nudes, of which I have seen a hundred copies at one time cast by a dealer in Paris, all ready for the market.

A landscape artist I know, whose spring and summer landscapes sold well, was advised by his dealers to go on doing spring and summer landscapes, and they looked with disfavor on his attempts to paint autumn and winter landscapes. Also the subjects which the dealer finds tragic or sinister, he often thinks unsuitable for the public.

When I had done the series of drawings for Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, to my astonishment the dealer so managed the card of invitation that it read “Fleurs du Mai.” Also, as the exhibition was held in December, another dealer remarked jocosely of these drawings, which were necessarily macabre in many cases, “Hardly Christmas cards, eh?”

The dealer demands of newcomers 33 1–3 per cent of the price of any work sold, and only artists with big reputations can reduce this to 25 per cent. In Paris the conditions are even worse, where 50 per cent or even more is demanded from newcomers.

The art racket rarely is in favor of the artist. A favorite trick is to take great care that the work does not sell. This can be easily managed, as exhibitions must necessarily be in the hands of the dealers. I once tried this out on a dealer, who had a work of mine for sale sent in by the owner. She was then told that there were no claimants for it. I had sent a friend who admired the work, and who was genuinely interested in it.

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