Art: Dead Head

Proudly borne between grey-uniformed State troopers, an elaborately colored plaster bust was brought from the New York State Police barracks at Hawthorne, N. Y. last week and propped up before hard-boiled detectives at New York City’s police headquarters. As far as police authorities could remember, it was the first time that an attempt had been made to solve a murder by reconstructing the probable appearance of the victim with the aid of a sculptured bust.

Last May two blackamoors stumbled over something horrid at the edge of Hornbecker’s Pond near North Haverstraw, N. Y. It was a partially decomposed human head. One eye had been punched out, half of the nose severed, the lower jaw slashed. Last July a torso was found in Congers Lake, six miles away. Head and body belonged to the same person whom police surgeons described as an Italian or Jew about 45 years old with curly greying hair and the habit of smoking a pipe on the left side of his mouth. There were no other clews to his identity or his murderer.

Handsome, dapper Inspector Howard W. Nugent of the State Police at Hawthorne had a good friend in nearby Chappaqua named Frederic Victor Guinzburg who is a sculptor. Fred Guinzburg, whose wife studied psychiatry, psychology and anatomy for years before she took up lithography as a profession, went around to the country clubbish State Police barracks at Hawthorne to see what he could do with the rotting mass of flesh and bone that was once a human being.

First step was to make a clay model of the mutilated head exactly as it was found. Next, with the assistance of police surgeons, Sculptor Guinzburg began to patch up the missing features, combining them in six different models. Haverstraw’s Who was modeled: i) with the right eye closed, the left eye open; 2) squinting; 3) with a closed jaw and a hard & firm mouth; 4) with a bulbous nose; 5) with a mustache. Model No. 6, brought to New York last week, was a composite of all the others. New York City police were impressed.

“It’s Waxey Gordon!” cried a detective in the lineup. “It’s Maxie Price!” cried another.

Both Gordon and Price were found to be safe & sound in the penitentiary.

Photographs of the Guinzburg bust were broadcast to the police of New York State, in the hope that some one would identify the murdered man and thus start the law after his killer.

Frederic Victor Guinzburg may be a novice at criminology but is far from unknown as a sculptor. Grandson of the founder of the I. B. Kleinert Rubber Co. (rubber dress shields, rubber diaper pants, etc.) he inherits his talent for sculpture from his mother. Son Frederic was studying sculpture with Victor David Brenner when he went to War. Back in the U. S. in 1919, he later became an assistant director of the School of American Sculpture in New York, studied in Rome and Florence. As it has most artists, Mexico has attracted him recently. He gave a one man show of his Mexican studies in Manhattan’s Delphic Studios last winter.