Art: Lorochka

In a room in Manhattan’s swank Wildenstein Galleries six statues went on view this week. All were formalized, slickly modeled, carved from most expensive materials. One female torso had been executed in rose Milan marble, a pinkish metallic veined stone so rare that it may no longer be exported from Italy. Averaging $5,000 apiece in price, all were the work of suave, spectacled Sculptor Boris Lovet-Lorski. At the same time word came from Paris that the Ministry of Fine Arts had decided to invest French taxpayers’ money in two Lovet-Lorski pieces: a bronze nude for the Beaux Arts and a big, ivory marble head for the Musee du Luxembourg’s foreign section (see cut).

In California this was big news. For the past four years able Sculptor Lovet-Lorski (“Lorochka” to his friends) has been the darling of San Francisco and Los Angeles intellectuals, because of his frequent trips to the west coast.

Son of a rich White Russian family, Sculptor Lorochka was born in 1895 in what is now Lithuania. His family sent him to the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Art, where for some time he vacillated between painting, sculpture and architecture. When the War broke, Boris Lovet-Lorski promptly enlisted in the Grodno Hussars, for no other reason than that he liked their gaudy uniform. He was wounded twice, hospitalized in Odessa, soon found himself a personal aide-de-camp to Alexander Kerensky. On the rise of the Bolsheviks, “Lorochka” fled Russia as a cello player.

A moneyed uncle in Boston paid Sculptor Lovet-Lorski’s passage to the U. S., of which he became a citizen in 1925. With a real talent for sculpture and a full bag of social tricks, “Lorochka” had no trouble in soon making a place for himself, has not lacked money, friends or customers.

Except for his portraits, Sculptor Lovet-Lorski never uses a model, works out his slick archaic figures from his imagination and his knowledge of anatomy. He still does most of his work in Paris, cannot abide New York. In San Francisco his artistic patron is capable Robert Gump of the huge Gump store in whose galleries most of Lovet-Lorski’s sculpture is shown. Last week Patron Gump had just found a new hilltop studio for his protege at No. 1048 Broadway.

Fencing is Lovet-Lorski’s favorite sport. He trained this summer with the Austrian Olympic team to keep in practice. Besides maintaining his San Francisco studio he spends several weeks every summer in Hollywood, roistering with friends in the cinema colony. They have not been entirely misspent holidays. Some time ago he completed bronze busts of his friends Rouben Mamoulian and Edward G. Robinson, and last winter Cinemactress Marion Davies persuaded William Randolph Hearst to buy a heroic Lovet-Lorski Venus.