The Creation of Eve is one of Gertler’s most highly imaginative and most controversial works of the war period and marks the onset of his radical figurative work. When it was first exhibited at The London Group in December 1915, the painting created ‘a tremendous uproar’ among the public and critics alike and Gertler gained a reputation among the avant-garde, which was sustained (particularly in his exhibits at The London Group) throughout the years of the First World War.

The face of Gertler’s God, a kindly, patrician figure, is borrowed from the elderly male sitter from Rabbi and Grandchild (fig. 4), though it is highly unlikely that he sat directly for the painting. Gertler also used an earlier study of agapanthus (fig.6) to create the towering flowers in the background, but the other figures appear to have come directly from his imagination. Both subject and treatment are highly reminiscent of Blake, whose work Gertler studied both in reproduction (particularly Illustrations to the Book of Job) and at the Tate exhibition in 1913. Gertler also comes closest in this painting to the work of Stanley Spencer (whose work was also collected by Gertler’s patron Edward Marsh after Gertler arranged a meeting between them in 1913), but the two artists fell out over their views on Cézanne and were never entirely reconciled. In the autumn of 1914 as Gertler worked on the painting, D. H. Lawrence, who was then at work on his novel The Rainbow, visited
Gertler in his studio. Afterwards a description of a low relief panel carving, also called The Creation of Eve, and closely related to the painting, entered the novel: ‘Adam lay asleep as if suffering, and God, a dim, large figure, stooped towards him, stretching forward His unveiled hand; an Eve, a small, vivid, naked, female she, was issuing, like a flame towards the hand of God, from the torn side of Adam’, while ‘[ . . . ] a bird on a bough overhead, lift[ed] its wings for flight’.

Although it is difficult today to see how Gertler’s doll-like Eve could cause offence, the picture had already been refused by the NEAC on the grounds that she was ‘indecent’, and when exhibited at The London Group in December 1915 (along with two equally experimental works, Swing Boats, 1915, and Fruit Stall, 1915, both lost), the critics went ‘quite mad with rage. [ . . . ] One paper,’ Gertler wrote in surprise, ‘said that I had done them simply to shock and create a sensation!’ The Daily Telegraph (21 November 1915) called the work ‘a deliberate piece of eccentricity’, The Times condemned the ‘slimy quality’ of the paint,35 and the Pall Mall Gazette declared it ‘merely a piece of impertinence, with a seasoning of blasphemy’. The controversy was fuelled by a suspicious and increasingly jingoistic press which linked experimental modernism to a subversive, foreign culture. Moreover, many of The London Group’s more radical members (Nevinson and Bomberg among them), whose work had previously made an impact, were engaged in the war effort and did not exhibit, so that Gertler’s work stood out all the more strongly against a unified backdrop of works by the Camden Town Group painters. Gertler’s German-sounding surname didn’t help, but it was probably following an accusation by the Morning Post that the work was ‘hunnishly indecent’, that Gertler discovered that ‘Some people in a rage [had] stuck a label on the belly of my poor little “Eve” with “Made in Germany” written on it!’. It was left to Walter Sickert in the Burlington Magazine, with his usual mix of wit and erudition, to defend both artist and painting, and also to scorn the cowardice of the NEAC in rejecting the work. ‘Here is Mr Gertler, legitimate and sturdy child of the Slade school [ . . . ] left like a foundling in a copy of The Times on Mr Marchant’s doorstep. Has the old New English reached the critical age when she is no longer able to suckle her own offspring? For Mr Gertler has passed master painter and no jury of painters has the right, it seems to me, to reject him.’

‘The talk of London’, Gertler was invited to take tea with the aristocracy, who all assured him they ‘loved’ his pictures, and received ‘several offers for both Eve and the Fruit Stall’. Nevertheless, once the air had cleared, it was not until the following spring, and then only after asking Eddie Marsh to intervene, that Gertler finally sold the Creation of Eve. During this time of experimentation, Gertler found it difficult to earn money and was initially very grateful for an offer of support from Marsh, who in December 1914 had arranged to pay him a £ 5 monthly subsidy to secure the rent on his new Hampstead studio for first refusal on his paintings. A Whitehall civil servant who acted as private secretary to Winston Churchill, as well as editor of the five-volume anthology of Georgian Poetry, Marsh was also a discerning collector of modern British art. When they met he admired Gertler’s ‘Lippo Lippi cherub’ looks, but having initially thought Currie the more talented of the two, he soon came to consider Gertler ‘the greatest genius of the age’.