The Swope collection contains a number of sculptures, and one of the most popular and dramatic is “Cretan Woman” by Boris Lovet-Lorski, a Lithuanian-born sculptor, lithographer and painter who contributed significantly to the American Art Deco movement.

Her exotic, narrow, slanted eyes are a unique characteristic of the artist’s sculpted heads, which he termed a Gothic-eye. Included in his major solo exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s Cororan Gallery of Art in 1939, “Cretan Woman” exemplifies Lovet-Lorski’s approach to sculpture in the 1920s and 1930s: “Not naturalism, but stylization of the human body carried to such a degree of perfection that it creates real life, more real than the life we actually live.”