‘The negro type of beauty’: Black Women modernist muses in Jacob Epstein’s Art, 1915–1959

This article attends to the forgotten histories of Black women’s work with major British sculptor Jacob Epstein, who drew inspiration from African diasporic art and cultures, in the process documenting Black lives in modern England. Though Epstein’s cultivation of modernist art drawn from African inspiration has been discussed down the years by art historians, the Black women and women of colour who chose to work with him and their significance as historical subjects has received almost no scholarly attention, except for Caroline Bressey and Gemma Romain’s 2014 Tate Britain exhibition Spaces of Black Modernism. This is in stark contrast to the alarm and dismay Epstein’s love affair with Blackness caused in the popular, high-brow and art press at the time. This essay refocuses attention on the lives of Black art models, including Hélène Yelin-Cox, Daisy Dunn, Madeleine Bechet and Malvina ‘Vena’ Fraser, working with Epstein and others in the early to mid-twentieth century. It pieces together fragments of their biographies and sets these details in historical and cultural context, as well as in relationship to Epstein and Black Modernism.