Man’s Head (Adolf Loos, idealized), 1933

The 1933 work Man’s Head (Adolf Loos, idealized) represents a pinnacle in the oeuvre of the sculptor and designer Franz Hagenauer (1906–1986). Hailing from a family of metal artists, he studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts under Franz Čižek (1865–1946), Anton Hanak (1875–1934) and Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956). Along with highly reduced and stylized figural repoussé works fashioned from sheet metal, the 1930s also yielded a group of fairly realistic works influenced by Neoclassicism. Among this group is the monumental portrait head, embossed using thick copper plate, which represents a veritable “tour de force” of this method of metal treatment. It is no coincidence that it was created the year of Adolf Loos’s (1870–1933) death, seeing as Hagenauer had also cast Loos’s death mask. The work is thus an artistic eulogy for a pioneer of modernism, which the sculptor refused to be parted from for the rest of his life.

MR, 2021