Ezra Pound's new order of artists: ‘The New Sculpture’ and the critical formation of a sculptural avant-garde in early twentieth-century Britain

Abstract

Ezra Pound's essay ‘The New Sculpture’, published in The Egoist in 1914, was a pugnacious, eccentric and forthright contribution to sculptural criticism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. Central to Pound's art criticism was the work of two young sculptors, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) and Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) who, like him, had chosen to launch their careers in London at the start of the twentieth century, but who were not British by birth. Drawing on what Pound describes as their ‘wild sculpture’, his essay registers a desire for a new kind of artistic community; what he describes as a new ‘order’ of artists. This paper takes ‘The New Sculpture’ essay of 1914 as a starting point for exploring the emergence of alternative identities for the modern sculptor and the formation of a sculptural avant-garde in the years leading up to the First World War. Through the example of sculptural practice, Pound envisaged a new kind of modern artist, and a different set of relations between...