gesang reviewed Eric Gill, the Complete Sculpture by Judith Collins
Pristine
5 stars
While I really do not like some overtly sexual - not a disfavour out of morality; the elegant, sensual and innocent eroticism just makes me feel somehow uncomfortable - images in Eric Gill's works, it is undeniable that nothing can excel his types, sculptures, and especially friezes and monument engravings, in their pristine simplicity; the simplicity of which in particular never forced and never pretentious. Human beings in his sculpture are always non-corporeal and abstract in a non-obvious but essential way. They appear sometimes medieval, sometimes Buddhist, but never Greek in its usual sense, i.e. never Renaissance-humanist, even the sensual female torso of Mankind is that of an ethereal being incarnated in flesh.
Eric Gill was a complex person, infamous for his overwhelming libido that led him to his incests with his sister and his daughters, but I wasn't surprised at all when I learned that the designer of unsullied, …
While I really do not like some overtly sexual - not a disfavour out of morality; the elegant, sensual and innocent eroticism just makes me feel somehow uncomfortable - images in Eric Gill's works, it is undeniable that nothing can excel his types, sculptures, and especially friezes and monument engravings, in their pristine simplicity; the simplicity of which in particular never forced and never pretentious. Human beings in his sculpture are always non-corporeal and abstract in a non-obvious but essential way. They appear sometimes medieval, sometimes Buddhist, but never Greek in its usual sense, i.e. never Renaissance-humanist, even the sensual female torso of Mankind is that of an ethereal being incarnated in flesh.
Eric Gill was a complex person, infamous for his overwhelming libido that led him to his incests with his sister and his daughters, but I wasn't surprised at all when I learned that the designer of unsullied, refined but rational Perpetua and Gill Sans and the author of moralizing, disciplined, stern and stark Last Essays and An Essay on Typography engaged in this sort of sexual perversity. There is something dangerous, something out of human scale, something mysterious and unfathomable in the dignified curvature of his lines, be them present in stone cuts or in wood ingravings, or simply in abstract geometric form that needs to be concretised, as in the typefaces.
In might be that while the stern, mathematical-logical-metaphysically unfolding morality and pureness in the spirits was distilled and condensed into his works, the shadow lurking in his flesh was left in utter thirst of primordial desire a la Tiamat that continuously burst in the constraint of being limited in his private life. But I sense something deeper, an urge, a yearning, for the innocence of Eden. I think I need to write something longer about Eric Gill.