Provenance:  Purchased directly from the Lovet-Lorski estate many years ago.  Authenticity is guaranteed.  Image dimensions are 16" x 23".  Framed dimensions are 29" x 35".  Lovet-Lorski's work has been becoming highly sought after over the years and this particular piece was never offered for sale to the public.  The painting qualifies to be auctioned off at a major auction house such as Sotheby's, etc.  This is a rare opportunity to own a Lovet-Lorski gem.  Signed LR.  No paint loss or damage.  Frame is in poor condition with major scratches around gilt edges and becoming loose.  Buyer can choose to have painting shipped framed or unframed.

Sculptor and graphic artist Boris Lovet-Lorski (1894-1973) was born in Lithuania. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Art in St. Petersburg and moved to the United States in 1920, settling in New York City.  He became an American citizen in 1925.

Boris Lovet-Lorski's sculpted heads have been described as sensitive, idealized and classically stylized with simplified, atmospheric forms and staring, pupil-less eyes, that yet capture the individual look and feeling of the sitter.  Some viewers perceive an Egyptian influence.

The sculptor is noted for bronze female figures with impossibly narrow, boyish hips, and bodies broadening as they rise to the shoulders and wide-spread arms held behind their heads like flowers on a stem.  These women were created by the artist to be mechanized, gleaming and streamlined like the latest airplanes, motorcars and other machines worshiped by 20th-Century technology and finding particular expression in Art Deco.

A tiny six-inch high plaster head of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an exception to this rule.  Obviously made from life, around 1940, it is a quite realistically wrinkled and gouged character study, with FDR weary and squinting, his facial features sliding out of sync under the burden of his duties and world affairs on the brink of the catastrophe of World War II.

Lovet-Lorski's later attempt, 1955-60, at a presidential portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower, is less realistic.  The 12-inch plaster head does not capture the general's likeness, but the sculptor, given the pressure of the duties of office, may not have been given enough time to search out and develop the features and character of Ike's too narrow, elongated head.  Or, perhaps the artist's creative luck of the moment did not enable him to move beyond a vague conception of the President's face.

Lovet-Lorski's eight-foot high, rather oddly frontal, expressionless, bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln in Decatur, Illinois, was unveiled on September 8, 1946.  It depicts Lincoln as a young lawyer addressing a jury. Lincoln had attended sessions of court in Decatur during the early years of his practice.

While Boris Lovet-Lorski's portrait drawings are related, not surprisingly, to the style of his sculptured heads, his drawings of figures and animals are very much in the Cubist-inspired, Art Deco modernist style of the 1920s and 30s. Works like A Nude with a Horse, charcoal, 9 x 12, and Adam and Eve, charcoal, 11 x 11, epitomize this latter aspect, with the figures in the second work, a compositional sketch or study, cursorily drawn in simplistic terms on either side of a crucifixion-like figure that is more like a modern technological Zeus or Mercury than Christian God or Christ.  His Study of a Woman's Head, watercolor and ink, 17 x 11, is more developed, relating to his sculpture of individuals.