Malvina Cornell Hoffman was renowned for her figurative sculptures of non-Western racial types. She first studied painting with JOHN W. ALEXANDER and received advice from her cousin, sculptor Herbert Haseltine (1877-1962). At the age of twenty-two she decided to become a sculptor and began studying with Herbert Adams (1858-1945) and George Grey Barnard (1863-1938) at the Veltin School in New York. Later she studied, anatomy and dissection at Columbia University in New York. From 1910 to 1914 Hoffman lived in France, where she received criticism from Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), who permitted her to draw with him and to watch him carve. This experience was to have an important effect on her art, determining her early romantic-symbolist themes and sketchy, fluid approach to surface.
During the 1910s Hoffman achieved international success with sculptures devoted to the dance, including figures of the famed Anna Pavlova; a large example of her Russian Bacchanale, modeled 1912, was installed in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. During the late 1910s and 1920s she received major commissions for fountains and monuments, including the war memorial, The Sacrifice, 1920, in the Harvard Memorial Chapel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1927 she studied with Ivan Mestrovic in Zagreb, Yugoslavia.
In 1929 the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago asked Hoffman to participate in an ethnographic endeavor to document the different races of mankind. Traveling throughout Africa, Asia, and Australia and assisted by her husband Samuel B. Crimson, who took charge of measuring and photographing the people, she studied different physiognomies and created more than one hundred bronze and stone heads, busts, and fulllength figures. The project was completed in time to be a central feature of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. When the series was later put on permanent display in the Hall of Man in the Field Museum, Hoffman was praised for her dramatic realism and faithfulness to racial types. She wrote about her experiences during this project in her first book, Heads and Tales (1936).
Hoffman continued to work for another thirty years, applying her detailed, realistic style to portraits of notables, among them Ignacy Paderewski and Wendell Wilkie. She also received several architectural commissions. She wrote two other books, Sculpture Inside and Out (1939) and an autobiography, Yesterday Is Tomorrow (1965).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Los Angeles, Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, Archives of the History of Art, Malvina Hoffman Papers § Arsène Alexandre, Malvina Hoffman (Paris: J. E. Pouterman, 1930), with chronological list of principal works § Malvina Hoffman, Heads and Tales (New York: Scribner’s, 1936) § Malvina Hoffman, Yesterday Is Tomorrow, A Personal History (New York: Crown Publishers, 1965), with chronological list of works § Linda Nochlin, "Malvina Hoffman: A Life in Sculpture," Arts 59 (November 1984): 106-10.
