Marble head of a girl, looking in profile to left, her hair covered by a kerchief knotted at the front of her head.
Gelles’ early sculpture, such as this marble torso, is strongly imbued with the spirit of Rodin (who wrote admiringly of Gelles’s work), an inevitably dominant influence upon Paris-trained sculptors in the pre-1914 period. Its quiet charm is in marked contrast to the style of the earlier torso (no.18). The slightly simplified and stylised forms of the girl’s features and headscarf evoke the spirit of early Classical Greek sculpture, know in German-speaking countries as ‘der Strenge Stil’ (the Severe Style). His later work, in both marble and bronze, is more within the mainstream of Austrian sculpture.
