In 1911, young sculptor Henri Gaudier, living in Paris and making clay-modelled bronzes after Rodin, announced that “the French disgust me more and more – I have irrevocably decided to leave them to the Furies”. He travelled to London, hitched his name to that of his platonic Polish companion Sophie Brzeska, and worked as a city clerk. His fortunes turned when he met Jacob Epstein who, according to their mutual friend Ezra Pound: “... said, mustering the thunders of god and the scowlings of Assyrian sculpture into his tone and eyebrows, ‘Ummhh! Do you ... cut ... direct ... in stone?’ ‘Most certainly!’ said Gaudier, who had never yet done anything of the sort. ‘That’s right,’ said Epstein; ‘I will come round to your place on Sunday.’ So Gaudier at once went out, got three small stone blocks, and by working more or less night and day had something ready by Sunday.”

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s ‘first masterpiece’, ‘Red Stone Dancer’ (c1913)

Soon afterwards, he carved his first masterpiece: “Redstone Dancer”, a swirl of connecting shapes – triangle for face, sphere for breast, long thin rectangles for fingers, whirling curves for arms – compressed into a vital, savage, violently rhythmic figure. The block-like, totemic “Head of Ezra Pound” followed: a hieratic bust with mask face – slit eyes, cat nose – referencing ancient Polynesian statues, whose overall silhouette suggests a gigantic circumcised penis. Wyndham Lewis called it “Ezra in the form of a marble phallus”.

Earlier this year, the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition Oublier Rodin? explored how sculpture was reinvented in Paris in the decade before 1914. The Royal Academy’s Wild Thing, focused on the same period, is London’s answer. It argues that the radical transformations of Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Eric Gill definitively shaped 20th-century sculpture. Less restrained by classical tradition than their Parisian counterparts, the England-based trio sought to return sculpture to its prehistoric origins, claiming inspiration, Gaudier wrote, from “the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and admiration)”. All favoured direct carving for its truth to material; all exploited primitivist themes of fertility, sexuality, maternity.

Opening with Gill’s “Ecstasy”, a lifesize relief of a copulating couple, taking in Gaudier’s dancer and poet as iconic reworkings of the human figure, and closing with a reconstruction of Epstein’s phallic, robotic “Rock Drill”, a gleaming white body reduced to a series of armoured plates astride a real black rock drill, this is a charged, erotic display with a scholarly undercurrent. Just as modernist painting targeted the nude as motif for subversion, so early 20th-century sculpture unpicked its possibilities for abstraction, reshaping representation in shocking fashion.

Gill met Epstein in 1908 and praised him for being “quite mad about sex”, but in fact Gill himself – whose sexual partners included his daughters, sisters and the family dog – was the first to release in stone carving an unprecedentedly explicit treatment of sexuality. In 1910 he showed side by side two reliefs: a “Crucifixion” derived from Gauguin’s “Yellow Christ”, and a leering nude girl, “A Roland for an Oliver”. They are reunited here, along with other examples from Gill’s lifelong attempt to distil in visual form the unity between sacred and secular love – notably his nude, open-legged, breast-feeding “Madonna and Child” – and to infuse everyday life, in such scenes as “Boxers”, with erotic ritual.

“There is a sort of rude, elementary force and humour in your work, which is racy, of England, or even of Anglo-Saxon swordsmen and seabears,” enthused his patron Count Kessler, who commissioned “Boxers”. I have always found Gill voyeuristic, self-justifying and didactic; certainly his heaviness and deliberate plainness are emphasised here by the contrast between “Boxers” and the graceful, pared-down formalism of Gaudier-Brezska’s “Wrestlers”. Gaudier increasingly abstracted from nature – in “Bird Swallowing a Fish”, with the prey choking the predator in a deadlock anticipating the stalemate of the first world war, and in the frenzied limestone “Birds Erect”. Gill on the other hand moved towards a stylised naturalism. Both strands fed 20th-century British sculpture, whose compromises with abstraction were perhaps embodied in the career of Epstein.

Jacob Epstein’s ‘First portrait of Kathleen’ (1921)

Epstein took up carving after meeting Gill, then fell out with him and came instead under Modigliani’s influence. Epstein’s sinuous carvings in dark green serpentine stone, “Figure in Flenite” and “Female Figure in Flenite”, depicting a pregnant, elongated mother with bulbous head and stomach and almond eyes, frightening, mysterious, elegant, are primitivist highlights here.

Determined to outdo Gill’s “Ecstasy”, Epstein sculpted in simplified marble form three stages in the act of copulation – of a pair of birds. In “Doves: first version” the male alights on the female, but the birds are angular and separate. In the second version they are plumper and more sensual as he settles into place on top of her. Finally, the two bodies slot together in a compact mass of interlocking forms. Widely detested, the birds’ eloquent self-sufficiency was defended by Pound alone, who saw them “as the gods of the Epicureans, apart, unconcerned, unrelenting”.

From the doves emerged Epstein’s monolithic, geometric “Venus”, her pale slender body rising from a pair of birds, the male’s cockscomb jutting suggestively between her open legs: an image at once of female voluptuousness and aroused stiffness. This column of white marble shares much with Epstein’s next work, the macho “Rock Drill”: “the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow”, said the artist. “No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into.” Then he destroyed the piece, reworking it as the broken body of “Torso in Metal from the Rock Drill”, which has the stooping pathos of a soldier returning wounded and helpless from the front.

Gaudier was killed in action in 1915; his development towards an abstract sculptural language is modernism’s most poignantly unfinished story. Epstein never again explored machine imagery; although he had manipulated it to representational limits in the years to 1914, the human subject remained central to him, as an excellent exhibition of his later portrait bronzes at Boundary Gallery confirms. Including the stunningly expressive 1921 “First Portrait of Kathleen”, his muse and second wife, and depictions of their daughters Esther and Kitty almost disturbing in their vivid psychology (Esther committed suicide five years after the lovely fragile likeness here), this show posits Epstein as the 20th century’s great sculptor of the human soul, and is a delightful complement to the emphasis on formal experimentation at the Royal Academy.

‘Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, to January 24. www.royalacademy.org.uk
Jacob Epstein, Boundary Gallery, London, to December 23 www.boundarygallery.com