Robert Ortlieb’s Changing Face of Moses is not simply a sculpture demonstration—it is a tightly choreographed, highly sought-after performance he delivered at art schools, art centers, and artists’ guilds across his career, compressing a lifetime of creative intelligence into a riveting 29-minute arc.
As the clay transforms in his hands, Moses is rendered as a living psychological study: shifting, moment by moment, through resolve, doubt, fury, exhaustion, and hard-won authority—an exterior face tracking an interior reckoning.
Set to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the “Leningrad,” a work composed amid World War II and long associated with the ordeal and defiance of the Siege of Leningrad, the demonstration gains a haunting emotional engine—less accompaniment than moral weather.
The result is both spectacle and masterclass: a rare window into how a formidable sculptor builds form, tension, and meaning at speed—revealing, in real time, the kind of innovative, disciplined technique that helps explain how the great artists achieved work that still takes the breath away.