Untitled (Head), 1930s

Carved out of a block of limestone, Untitled (Head) depicts a female visage nearly androgynous in its idealization.  The delicate features of her face, the long, straight nose, thin pursed lips and high cheekbones, are made even more diminutive by the massive bulk of the stone that serves as their backdrop.  The prominent widow’s peak of her hairline and the strong arch of her brow, two of Lovet-Lorski’s most distinctive characteristics, are elongated to accentuate the linear rhythms of the composition.  The layers of her hair are delineated by stepped striations reminiscent of archaic precedents, which meld into structural columns and connect the form architecturally to the stone’s mass.

Unlike the majority of Lovet-Lorski’s sculptures, in which the heads of the figures are tilted to the side or downward to convey a pensive mood, the woman in Untitled (Head) looks straight ahead. Her frontal positioning gives the composition a nearly perfect symmetry, in turn endowing the work with a still, eternal sensibility.  The notched surface of the surrounding limestone stands in sharp contrast to the smoothness of her skin.  In the twenties, the artist tended to finish his sculptures to a highly polished degree of refinement, but in the thirties he began to experiment with contrasts of texture and the aesthetic of the fragment.  In this respect, the work is vaguely evocative of Egyptian funerary sculptures, in which the figures were carved with an eye for three-dimensionality but were left intact in a larger piece of stone to give them physical durability and permanence.  Embodying classical ideals of stoicism and universal beauty, the sculpture ultimately exudes a surface allure that is difficult to resist.

A similar example of this approach can be seen in the 1937 sculpture Diana, which resides in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.  Carved from a piece of black Belgian marble, the work is a stylized bust of the Greek goddess Diana.  The surface of her face, neck and shoulders are polished to a high sheen, while the portions of stone surrounding her shoulders are left in a roughly hewn state.