During the 20th century, sculpture in Britain enjoyed a truly spectacular renaissance. It was boosted by the work of outstanding practitioners over several generations, from Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore in the first half of the century to Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley today. But "Rock Drill," the masterpiece that announced this dramatic renewal, was produced in 1913 by Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), a rebellious young man who had come over from his native New York to make London his home.
After growing up in the multiethnic vitality of New York's Lower East Side, Epstein quickly became open to radical ideas from cultures around the world. In Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian, his teacher nicknamed him "this American savage." So after Epstein arrived in London in 1905, he was soon regarded as the most scandalous young sculptor in Britain. When his large naked figures were revealed on the facade of the British Medical Association in the Strand, they were denounced by the Evening Standard as "a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter to see." By 1912, the Pall Mall Gazette had decided that Epstein should be described as "a Sculptor in Revolt, who is in deadly conflict with the ideas of current sculpture."
In the same year, Paris became appalled after his monumental Tomb of Oscar Wilde was installed in Père Lachaise Cemetery. The "flying demon-angel" carved on the side of this immense stone block boasted genitals so prominent that a tarpaulin was thrown over the entire memorial. It was removed only after a completely inappropriate bronze fig-leaf had been placed over the offending parts, and they were later broken off by two angry English ladies wielding umbrellas.
Even so, nothing could have prepared anyone for the shock delivered by "Rock Drill." Epstein began working on it in 1913, the annus mirabilis of his early career. He made the extraordinarily daring decision to incorporate in this sculpture a real mechanical drill, mounted on a tripod. Epstein later recalled that it was purchased "second-hand," and he admired the drill so much that it was not altered in any way. Like Marcel Duchamp, who had just started to explore the heretical concept of turning a mass-produced, commercial object into a work of art—"Readymades," he called them—Epstein believed that the machine he had bought with such boldness had its own validity as a sculpture.
But he was responsible for making the white plaster figure of the driller. This mighty apparition, whose legs curve up the drill like the arches in a Gothic cathedral, was one of the first robots to emerge in Western art. Towering over the machine, whose controls he manipulates, the lean and powerful automaton is given an unashamed phallic authority by the drill-shaft thrusting down from his loins. The driller's face has been transformed into a helmet, and another astonishing element is the mysterious unborn child installed between his ribs.
What meaning did Epstein intend "Rock Drill" to transmit? In 1914 he told his New York patron John Quinn that it conveyed a "hard, relentless, steel-like power." And Epstein later explained that it possessed "no humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made ourselves into." In 1913, however, he did not warn his friends about the impact of this sculpture when he invited them, on a cold December day, to view it in his bleak and shabby London studio. Sympathetic allies like Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a precocious French sculptor who had recently settled in London, were confronted, here, by the visionary "Rock Drill."
On some level, Epstein must have been stimulated by the national strike of 1912 staged by miners who wielded these machines across the nation. But many other ideas sprang into the minds of Epstein's young friends as they gazed up in awe at "Rock Drill." David Bomberg, a brilliant graduate of London's Slade School, who was painting admirably adventurous pictures of his own, remembered decades later that "the tense figure operating the Drill as if it were a Machine Gun" amounted to "a Prophetic Symbol of the impending war." And Pound, who was about to collaborate with Wyndham Lewis on the creation of a radical new movement in British art called Vorticism, became so enthralled by "Rock Drill" that he started expatiating on the work. Gaudier-Brzeska turned on him and snapped, "shut up, you understand nothing!"'
Epstein would have felt buoyed up by the excitement that "Rock Drill" generated among his creative allies. But World War I broke out soon afterward, and some of his closest friends left their studios to fight the enemy in France. Only in March 1915 was "Rock Drill" shown in a gallery, at the first exhibition of the newly formed London Group. Here, mounted on a suitably angular plinth, it provoked angry reactions from the critics. The Observer decided that "the whole effect is unutterably loathsome. Even leaving aside the nasty suggestiveness of the whole thing, there remains the irreconcilable contradiction between the crude realism of real machinery (of American make) combined with an abstractly treated figure." Even the celebrated painter Augustus John, who had commissioned Epstein to portray his son Romilly, commented that "Rock Drill" was "altogether the most hideous thing I've seen"'
Sadly, Epstein never displayed his reviled masterpiece anywhere else. After it was removed unsold from the London exhibition, he dismantled the sculpture. The drill itself was sold, and Epstein cut off the driller's legs and hands, transforming him into a vulnerable victim before casting the torso in bronze. A cast of this helpless torso is now in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. By the time he exhibited this melancholy fragment in 1916, Epstein had suffered the death of his 23-year-old friend Gaudier-Brzeska, killed by German forces in France. The growing awareness of World War I as a grotesque tragedy, where millions of young men were being slaughtered by the unprecedented force of new mechanical weapons, surely influenced Epstein's decision to ruthlessly alter his original idea.
When I commissioned a reconstruction of the first version of "Rock Drill," for a 1974 exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery surveying the radical achievements of Vorticism and its allies, the result impressed many of the show's visitors. The reconstructed "Rock Drill" was purchased by Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, and is admired by British sculptors as eminent as Sir Anthony Caro. For this dramatic sculpture can now be seen, with hindsight, as a haunting prophecy of modern warfare's relentless ability to massacre humanity anywhere in the world.
—Mr. Cork is an award-winning art critic and exhibition curator. His latest book is "The Healing Presence of Art."