Head

Fritz Wotruba believed that art’s mission was to renew culture and society. Wotruba made both monumental works—often projects dedicated to the labor movement and to the victims of political violence—and small-scale pieces such as Head. His early style was naturalistic, but after 1948 Wotruba developed an increasingly block-like simplification reducing his figures to their bare essentials, thus freeing the depiction of the body of any incidentals. As he commented in 1959: "The metamorphosis and reduction may lead beyond recognition…. Nevertheless, man himself is and remains the motive power for the creative realization, even if nothing more of him is visible than a grimace." Wotruba carved directly into the stone or hardened clay models for his cast bronzes, and as a result his works can be distinguished by their rough, implicitly unfinished state, which he intended to convey suggestions of both the primitive and the monumental.