Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit

Eric Gill, sculptor, engraver and typographer, is perhaps the greatest British artist-craftsman of the twentieth century. His most celebrated achievements were sculpture in stone and wood - Prospero and Ariel on Broadcasting House, The Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral - but his typography and stonecutting, his sensuous wood-engravings and drawings reveal his complexity and the variety of his genius. His belief in complete sexual licence shocked his contemporaries, even Augustus John being startled by his succession of mistresses. Paradox, contradiction and ambivalence were never far from the surface in both his life and his work: reviled for his 'pantheistic lasciviousness', Gill nevertheless had a strongly spiritual side. Malcolm Yorke reassesses this cranky, eccentric but vulnerable and modest man and illustrates his life and work with over 100 examples of Gill's engravings, sculptures and erotic drawings.