This was not only a result of their, often explicit, sexual content, but also because they abandoned the conventions of classical Greek sculpture favoured by European academic critics and sculptors, to experiment instead with the aesthetics of art traditions as diverse as those of India, China, ancient Greece, West Africa and the Pacific Islands.

Such factors may have focused disproportionate attention on certain aspects of Epstein's long and productive career, throughout which he aroused hostility, especially challenging taboos surrounding the depiction of sexuality.

[10] In 1898 he organised an exhibition at the Hebrew Institute for a group of local Jewish artists and in 1899 opted to stay at Hester Street when his family moved to Madison Avenue, supporting himself by working as a tenement inspector and, briefly, as a physical education instructor.

[10] On his second full day in Paris, during October 1902, Epstein saw the funeral procession of Emile Zola and witnessed some of the anti-semitic abuse directed at the passing cortège.

[10] With a reference from Rodin, Epstein gained access to a number of society figures, notably George Bernard Shaw and Robbie Ross and to a circle of artists associated with the New English Art Club, NEAC, including Muirhead Bone and Augustus John.

[9]: 45  In 1907, Epstein moved his studio to 72 Cheyne Walk where he began working on his first major public commission, a series of statues for the new British Medical Association building in London.

[12] Throughout 1907 and 1908, Epstein created eighteen large sculptures for the second-floor façade of Charles Holden's new building for the British Medical Association, BMA, on The Strand (now Zimbabwe House) in central London.

[13][20] Near the end of 1908, without any prior discussion or advance warning, Robbie Ross announced that Epstein was the chosen sculptor for a new tomb of Oscar Wilde in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

[9]: 56 [13] The decision to carve directly in stone, then a new and radical departure for contemporary sculptors, may reflect the influence of Epstein's then friend and collaborator Eric Gill.

[14] Both Rom, and another carving called Sun Goddess, show the influence of oriental and Egyptian art on Epstein and how far he was moving away from more classical and accepted traditions of sculpture.

[13] By September 1912, after a prolonged dispute with the French customs authorities over the import duty payable, Wilde's tomb was installed in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

[9]: 83 In London, Epstein rented a room above a bookshop in Devonshire Street and used a garage in the adjacent mews to began work on Rock Drill, which was too large for the Pett Level shed.

[14] The menacing body mounted on the drill appeared to be assembled from machine parts, including a head on a shaft with the only organic feature the foetus within the creature's open rib-cage.

[12] A further three-month exemption from conscription was granted, but after a press campaign featuring objections from, among others, G. K. Chesterton and the sculptor Adrian Jones, plus a question in the House of Commons, the concession was withdrawn.

His release from active service and secondment to the newly formed Imperial War Museum was approved by Field Marshal Haig in December 1917 but promptly withdrawn after the sculptor George Frampton raised objections.

[28] The Daily Mail ran the headline "Take this horror out of the Park" while the Morning Post described Rima as "hideous, unnatural, unEnglish" and a question was asked in the House of Commons about "this specimen of Bolshevik art".

"[31] The Polish government refused to accept the work, completed a few months before Conrad died, and it was eventually, in 1960, acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Epstein's sculptures Day and Night above the entrances of 55 Broadway were criticised as indecent, ugly and primitive although some critics, notably R. H. Wilenski, regarded them as a major achievement.

"[35][36] Throughout 1934 Epstein struggled with carving a huge block of marble that proved so tough it regularly broke his tools until he had a new set of instruments made for the work.

[3] Attempts to find an alternative solution, such as removing and re-carving elements of the statues, were hindered when Epstein insulted the Southern Rhodesian High Commissioner in a press interview.

Commissioned to produce twenty drawings, Epstein created sixty illustrations that he considered among his best work in any medium, but when shown at Tooth's Gallery in December 1936, met with near universal disapproval.

Inspired by Bach's Mass in B minor, he carved Consummatum Est, a horizontal figure of the crucified Christ with the stigmata wounds on his hands and feet visible.

[9]: 231 Throughout the war, Epstein continued to paint flowers and woodland scenes of Epping Forest and hold commercially successful Christmas exhibitions of those works.

[13] First exhibited in February 1942, Jacob and the Angel, based on a Bible story, depicts two figures, one winged, locked in an embrace carved from a four-ton block of alabaster, streaked with veins of pink and brown.

[9]: 223 [44] Epstein imagined the fallen angel Lucifer as a tall, winged, androgynous figure with male genitals and a female face, that of the Kashmiri model Sunita Devi, all cast in a golden patinated bronze.

[9]: 240 In 1947, the architect Louis Osman was employed by the nuns of the Convent of the Holy Child to rebuild their bomb-damaged buildings on Cavendish Square in central London.

After Epstein accepted their concerns about the face of the Madonna and changed the head from one based on Kathleen Garman to one modelled on her friend Marcella Bazrtti, the convent began working hard to raise funds for the sculpture to be cast in lead.

[12] While the TUC leadership made no secret of their hatred of the carving, several Labour MPs were greatly impressed and the critic Terence Mulally praised it as "a tragic monument on a grand scale.

After Epstein died the four works, Jacob and the Angel, Adam, Consummatum Est and Genesis, were bought by a group led by Lord Harewood and Jack Lyons.

[57] By 1912, Epstein had begun collecting west African, ancient Egyptian, pre-Columbian American, Oceanic and other non-western artworks, having purchased pieces of Fang work, including a reliquary figure, in Paris that year.