Art: Tales of Hoffman

In a long hall of Chicago’s Field Museum there stand the completed results of the largest sculptural commission ever given a woman, possibly the largest sculptural commission ever completed by one sculptor anywhere: 101 bronze and stone statues and busts, almost all of them life size, depicting to the best of modern belief all the races of mankind. The collection, begun in 1930, was finally completed in February 1935. Last week the sculptor, capable, grey-haired Malvina Hoffman of New York and Paris, included the story of that commission in a thick volume of-rich reminiscences.*

Sculptor Hoffman is the daughter of the late great British Pianist Richard Hoffman who at the age of 18 was engaged by Phineas Taylor Barnum to tour the U. S. with Jenny Lind. Later Pianist Hoffman married one of his pupils, extremely Socialite Fidelia Lamson of Manhattan. A lifelong friend of Malvina Hoffman is Monologist Ruth Draper, with whom she used to play in the back yard of the Hoffman house on Manhattan’s West 43rd St. It was while peering out of a front window from that same house that scrawny little Malvina first felt the surge of excitement at the sight of the nude human figure that is the driving force behind most great sculptures. A suicidal beauty across the street slipped out of her nightgown and dived into a snowbank 30 feet below, narrowly missing a passing postman.

With five children to support, funds were low in the Hoffman house. Malvina Hoffman earned money to continue her art studies by designing book jackets, wall paper, linoleum. In Paris she became a pupil, later a good friend of aging Auguste Rodin, won her first real fame with a bronze of Anna Pavlova as a dancing bacchante. Her best known works since then have been three heads of Ignace Paderewski (The Statesman, The Artist, The Friend), the colossal stone figures over the entrance to London’s Bush House and the recumbent crusader that is Harvard’s War Memorial.

Sculptor Hoffman had to use all her tact to wean the Field Museum trustees from their original scheme for the Hall of Man. Their idea was that it consist of a series of painted plaster figures, equipped with real hair and glass eyes.

High spots from the Tales of Hoffman:

¶ Once while waiting for bewhiskered Auguste Rodin to keep an appointment at his studio, Sculptor Hoffman absentmindedly squeezed two sausage-shaped rolls of clay in her hand, was amazed to find that the pressure of her fingers had accidentally formed two upright figures, embracing. Said Rodin: “This is one of those accidents which one must catch and transform into science. You will keep this and model this group one-half life-size and cut it in marble — but before you do this you must study for five years.” Five years later Malvina Hoffman finished her statue, called it Column of Life.

¶ Among the first of the African groups Malvina Hoffman finished for the Hall of Man was a family group of the Kalahari Bushmen. Sculptor Hoffman’s models, found in a native village, were approved by anthropologists from Cape Town as typical examples of the race, but in anthropological handbooks the women of the Kalahari Bushmen are invariably noted for the enormous size of their buttocks. Later German scientists complained that the modeled Kalahari Bushwoman was not sufficiently steatopygic. Seriously Malvina Hoffman replied that because of the controversy she had arranged to have the buttocks of her bronze Bushwoman made of thick flexible rubber so that they might be inflated or deflated according to which anthropologist was expected to call at the Field Museum.

¶ Model for the Field Museum’s typical Nordic male was a professional from Brooklyn, N. Y. Commended on his perfect muscular development, he replied: “I’ve won all the cups they offer for the best body proportions . . . so I decided to make a book of the best photographs that have been taken of me. Now the book has such a sale I don’t have to work any more. . . . The girls call me ‘God’s Gift to Women.’ ”

* HEADS AND TALES—Scribner ($5).