Art: Encausticist

At San Marino, Calif., 13 miles from Los Angeles City Hall is the Huntington Library, containing in a very small space one of the most important art collections in the world. But the city fathers of Los Angeles have a museum of their own, an imposing building containing a large collection of prehistoric bones, stuffed fish, crystals, furniture, and a few pictures. Last week it was announced that the Los Angeles Museum will soon place on exhibition a great gallery of waxworks, all of the figures to be clad in original and valuable costumes. Artistically the Los Angeles Museum is ready to take its place beside famed Mme Tussaud’s in London, the Musée Grévin in Paris.

Los Angeles boasted that its museum would have “the largest assemblage of wax likenesses of celebrities ever assembled.” This was an exuberant exaggeration. More remarkable was the fact that all the figures, half a hundred of them, are the work of a single encausticist, industrious, 23-year-old Katherine Stuberg, of Los Angeles. Encausticist Stuberg comes by her talent naturally. For three generations her family has modeled the hairless heads of statesmen, patriots, murderers and heroes in clay, cast them in wax, fitted them with wigs, glass eyes and mustaches, painstakingly tinted them to the life. Reporters visiting Miss Stuberg’s studio found the young encausticist still at work on the nose of Albert Einstein. In a special post of honor was the head of Mae West and on shelves, ready to be mounted, were the staring heads of Los Angeles’ own heroes: Will Rogers, Lon Chaney. Adolphe Menjou, Lawrence Tibbett, Bela Lugosi.