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The 18 statuettes (see picture at top) that adorn the second floor of what is now Zimbabwe House were the young Epstein’s first London commission. The building was designed by the great Charles Holden, who also gave us Senate House and a medley of underground stations. Epstein was asked to decorate the façade with artwork showing the great men of medicine. He thought otherwise and proceeded to sculpt, in situ, an assortment of larger-than-life, mostly naked figures called the ‘Ages of Man’. The result shocked Edwardian society. The Evening Standard, as reactionary now as it’s always been, famously described them as: “A form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see." As always with such things, they flocked in their thousands to view such an outrage. Their present defacement has nothing to do with angry crowds, however. In the 1930s it literally began raining men when a crumbling stone penis crashed to the floor. The building’s owners were ordered to secure the carvings, and all overhanging parts, be they heads, limbs or cocks, were hacked away.

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Stalking Jacob Epstein

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strand , sculpture , london , londonist , epstein , bma