Images of Christ: Standing at God’s right hand

Rowena Loverance discusses a sculpture of Christ in Llandaff Cathedral

Like Coventry Cathedral, the location of last month’s art work, Llandaff Cathedral in South Wales was heavily bombed during the second world war. When it was repaired in the 1950s, one unusual feature added to the twelfth century cathedral was a contemporary version of a medieval roodscreen, intended to break up the long view down the nave. At Coventry, this view is dominated by Graham Sutherland’s vast tapestry of Christ in Glory; at Llandaff, Jacob Epstein was commissioned to produce a three-dimensional version of the same theme. Against a hollow drum, supported on wide, wishbone-shaped arches, the sculpture would appear almost free-floating.

Before the war, Jacob Epstein would hardly have been considered an appropriate choice for an Anglican cathedral. A Jew, born in New York of Polish descent, he seemed to have specialised in outraging British critics and audiences. His great works of the 1930s, Jacob and the Angel and Adam, had been displayed, not within the sober walls of the national galleries but on the Golden Mile at Blackpool, while in 1937 his controversial forty-foot high nude statues on the British Medical Association in London’s Strand were removed on grounds of health and safety.

Despite his Jewish background, he had already depicted Christ several times. In 1919 he produced the controversial The Risen Christ (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, not on display). The gaunt bronze figure, draped in burial clothing and pointing to the wound in his hand, was consciously intended as an anti-war statement, but the artist also defended himself against some of the hostile reaction by reference to the text: ‘The Gospels show that there was intellectual power and a sense of justice as well… I have tried to indicate in my statue of Christ what I found in the Gospels.’

By 1934, inspired like so many other modernists by non-European art, he was conceiving a very different Christ in his Ecce Homo (Coventry Cathedral ruins); bound and crowned with thorns, this massive marble figure has the air of a brooding Mesoamerican deity. But for the ascended Christ of Llandaff he returned to a more ethereal mode. Whereas Graham Sutherland drew on familiar iconography for the face of his Christ, Jacob Epstein’s evokes no particular tradition. He gazes out over the heads of the congregation to the world beyond, but his arms are outstretched in welcome.

So, what textual references might Jacob Epstein have found to help him this time? Strangely enough, although there are numerous biblical references to Christ seated at the right hand of God, there is only one which refers to him standing. It comes from the vision which Stephen, the first Christian martyr, saw just before he was stoned to death (Acts 7:55-6): ‘I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’ Seated or standing may seem a trivial distinction, yet perhaps it does carry some weight. One sits down when one has finished the job. Jacob Epstein’s standing Christ, then, is still in action on our behalf.

Sitting quietly in the nave on the eve of the cathedral’s reconsecration, the artist replied to a query about why a Jewish sculptor should be fascinated by this subject: ‘All my life I have searched for truth and beauty and, in the end, I discovered that it is in the idea of the Christ that they are to be found.’

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