Description:
Edition 1/10
Label Text:
Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the State of Israel, was a chemist at the British Admiralty Laboratories during World War I and a key figure in the Zionist movement. Weizmann sat for Jacob Epstein for this portrait bust in 1933. Epstein imbued Weizmann’s face with an intense expression, accentuated by hollow eye sockets that capture and absorb the ambient light, indicative of a mysterious interiority invisible to us. The visible handmarks left by Epstein as he molded the bust are striking: this is as much a portrait of an important political figure as it is a document of the artist’s craft. It is displayed adjacent to Rodin’s Head of Balzac to highlight Epstein’s debt to, and interpretation of, the style and technique of the older sculptor.
-Gülru Çakmak, Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art, University of Massachussetts Amherst
A Very Long Engagement: Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and Its Afterlives (July 29, 2017 - May 27, 2018)
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1979.6 |
