Thursday, June 28, 2012
I have a fondness for the books of Patagonian-born
Englishman W.H. Hudson, writer and ornithologist. Nature In Downland is an
evocation of the Sussex Downs, my “heimat” as it were, whilst his remembrances
of Patagonia in Far Away and Long Ago and in Idle Days in Patagonia still bear
reading. And of course there is his most celebrated work, Green Mansions, “a
romance of the tropical forest”.
Perhaps less well known is that one of the leading characters of
Green Mansions, the young woman Rima, can be discovered inhabiting the
wilderness of....Hyde Park.
Whilst I might have a fondness for Hudson, the same cannot be
said for the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose best work was The Rock Drill and
whose opus, in my opinion,then went into rapid decline with heavy and uninspired
work. He certainly appears to have been an anarchist in his younger years, though
he was very cagey about this in later years. He did admit to attending meetings
addressed by Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, knowing anarchists like Victor Dave
and Hutchins Hapgood, and dressing for a time like a “traditional anarchist”,
whatever that means! Anyway when Hudson died in 1922, there was a proposal to
set up a bird sanctuary near the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Epstein was commissioned
to create a statue of the “forest spirit” Rima, whilst the surround fell to
Lionel Pearson and the actual architectural block to Muirhead Bone. Rima looks
more like an Egyptian princess than a Latin American forest dweller. She sports
long hair flying out behind her, with a large eagle to her left and a smaller
bird to her right.
In
front of the structure is a small and stagnant pool, ringed by a lawn and a low
fence. Weather and lichen have left their ravages on the monument.
Whatever
one’s opinions of the quality of the work, it certainly did not deserve the
philistine campaign, so often seen in Britain which it then underwent (witness
a later and similar campaign against Rachel Whiteread’s work in East London).
Horror was expressed at Rima’s nudity, That wonderful paper The Daily Mail
described it as The Hyde Park Atrocity and that it should be taken away and
there was a wave of press agitation from May to December 1925, with the slab
being painted green in November. Blackshirts seem to have been involved in
attacks on the figure, with a tarring and feathering in on two occasions in
following years, and an attack on it with chemicals in 1935. It cannot be ignored that figuring in this
attack, with its accusations of “Bolshevik art”, was an unhealthy dose of anti-semitim,
as Epstein was a Polish-Russian Jew from America.
Now
the monument lies in an unfrequented part of the Park near the Serpentine
Bridge. If the fortunes of Epstein seem to have been rejuvenated with a recent
exhibitionof Vorticism, Hudson remains sadly neglected, with little recognition
for him as a premier writer on nature.
Thanks to http://parkroadstudio.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/finding-rima.html for the image
Labels: Hyde Park, Jacob Epstein, W.H. Hudson
