Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill

Forget Spike Jonze's new movie of Maurice Sendak's famous book, because this is where the wild things really are, or rather, this is where they once were. The headiest days of spirited creativity for all three artists in this show were cut short around 1915 ñ either by death, scandal or religion.

The title comes from poet Ezra Pound's description of 'bright-eyed wild thing', Henri Gaudier-Brzeszka, the Frenchman of the triumvirate, who died in the Great War, aged just 23, but the epithet could equally apply to the sexually liberated work of Polish immigrant Jacob Epstein or Eric Gill, the son of a priest who would himself later turn away from sensual pleasures (which included dog-humping, if you believe his biographer) to the service of the church. Curator Richard Cork argues that, together, they modernised British sculpture through their direct and abstract stone carvings, although splitting them apart into separate rooms hardly helps their case.

Deviant or not, Gill seems aesthetically the tamest of the trio, even though he went farthest in subject matter, daring to compare the heights of fornication to the passions of Christ. His beautiful coupling of 1910, 'Ecstasy', graphically depicts the exact moment of tightening butt-cheeks, while walking around his various Madonnas with Child reveals each to have a pert little bum ñ a part of the body not readily associated with the Virgin Mary.

Gaudier-Brzeszka's head was filled not with girls or even his preferred boys, but with Picasso's pictorial deformities and the simplicities of African art, resulting in torqued, flowing works of planar primitivism, such as the wonderful tilting forms of 'Birds Erect'. After all the burnished and smoothed surfaces, nothing prepares you for the angry angles of Epstein's 'Rock Drill', which presides over this wild bunch like a stormtrooper. They never quite managed to carve mountains as they desired, but we should remember the work and forget the weirdness.