Last Work

With a tooting of trumpets, the last major work of the late tempestuous British sculptor, Sir Jacob Epstein, was unveiled by his widow last week on the pink sandstone west wall of the new Coventry Cathedral.* Commissioned in 1957 by the Cathedral Reconstruction Committee, the monumental four-ton sculpture of the cathedral's patron Saint Michael Triumphing Over the Devil was completed 18 months later and partially cast in bronze by the time Epstein died last summer. Before the assembled crowd, the Bishop of Coventry, the Rt. Rev. Cuthbert Bardsley, called it "an unforgettable picture of the cost of warfare. The work is a challenge to recognize the encounter in life between the forces of good and evil."

The critics had a bit more trouble deciding on its artistic merit. Said the London Times noncommittally: "It is quite unlike anything which has been expected by many of the people who will have to live with it."

* The old cathedral was destroyed in the brutal air raid of Nov. 14, 1940, during which the Luftwaffe nearly razed the town, killed more than 500 people.

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