“There’s an incredibly poignant story behind these seemingly ordinary fragments of paper, which come from the archive of sculptor Jacob Epstein and the Garman family.
The documents had been sitting largely unattended and uncatalogued in our basement for years before Bob and Roberta Smith arrived as an artist-in-residence to make sense of it all and to give it a new permanent home on display.
I found them in a file that had been discarded as worthless by previous researchers. Having read the story of the family, however, it didn’t take long to decipher what they were.
Kathleen Garman – Epstein’s second wife – had saved them because they were the dates on which two of their children, Theodore and Esther, died in the same year.
The nature of the deaths was very shocking and Kathleen visited their graves – a trip from London to the south coast – every Saturday for the rest of her life. We discovered the books of poetry she wrote on those long visits and the story simply became darker and darker.
For the last nine years of his life, Theo had what we now term schizophrenia although he didn’t receive proper treatment. He was very close to Esther who, at 25, was four years his junior.
It seems that a family meal had been arranged after which Theo was to be committed. When the ambulance turned up, he went into a rage, a struggle ensued and he died from a heart attack. Esther saw it all and that started a chain of events that ultimately led to her taking her own life.
Shortly before a trip to Italy that summer, Esther turned down a proposal of marriage from a friend. On her return to London, she committed suicide.
This tale is at the centre of the new Epstein Archive Gallery Bob has created. Bob was very interested in how Epstein’s obsession to make art led to the destruction of a lot of his private life. He was a distant father, to say the least.
The gallery has been funded by the Museums Association's Effective Collections programme, which gave us the opportunity to commission Bob to create a massive artwork with paintings on the walls and hanging signs, all in response to what was in the archive.
The original New Ways of Curating project ended in March and there had been a real concern that the work would simply stop.
It has been a great privilege to go through all the Epstein material. We’ve had to tread a very careful line, as the stories of Theo and Esther are very delicate. We didn't want to be disrespectful.
Bob and I came at it from different angles. He became very emotionally involved while I was the dispassionate voice, a difficult route to take as a curator.”
Neil Lebeter is archive curator at the New Art Gallery Walsall. Bob and Roberta Smith’s Epstein Archive Gallery is now open to the public
The documents had been sitting largely unattended and uncatalogued in our basement for years before Bob and Roberta Smith arrived as an artist-in-residence to make sense of it all and to give it a new permanent home on display.
I found them in a file that had been discarded as worthless by previous researchers. Having read the story of the family, however, it didn’t take long to decipher what they were.
Kathleen Garman – Epstein’s second wife – had saved them because they were the dates on which two of their children, Theodore and Esther, died in the same year.
The nature of the deaths was very shocking and Kathleen visited their graves – a trip from London to the south coast – every Saturday for the rest of her life. We discovered the books of poetry she wrote on those long visits and the story simply became darker and darker.
For the last nine years of his life, Theo had what we now term schizophrenia although he didn’t receive proper treatment. He was very close to Esther who, at 25, was four years his junior.
It seems that a family meal had been arranged after which Theo was to be committed. When the ambulance turned up, he went into a rage, a struggle ensued and he died from a heart attack. Esther saw it all and that started a chain of events that ultimately led to her taking her own life.
Shortly before a trip to Italy that summer, Esther turned down a proposal of marriage from a friend. On her return to London, she committed suicide.
This tale is at the centre of the new Epstein Archive Gallery Bob has created. Bob was very interested in how Epstein’s obsession to make art led to the destruction of a lot of his private life. He was a distant father, to say the least.
The gallery has been funded by the Museums Association's Effective Collections programme, which gave us the opportunity to commission Bob to create a massive artwork with paintings on the walls and hanging signs, all in response to what was in the archive.
The original New Ways of Curating project ended in March and there had been a real concern that the work would simply stop.
It has been a great privilege to go through all the Epstein material. We’ve had to tread a very careful line, as the stories of Theo and Esther are very delicate. We didn't want to be disrespectful.
Bob and I came at it from different angles. He became very emotionally involved while I was the dispassionate voice, a difficult route to take as a curator.”
Neil Lebeter is archive curator at the New Art Gallery Walsall. Bob and Roberta Smith’s Epstein Archive Gallery is now open to the public
