Hoffman, Malvina Cornell, 1885-1966

Malvina Cornell Hoffman, the American sculptor known for her life-size bronzes figures, portraits, and dance sculptures, was born in New York City on June 15, 1885. She was the youngest child of Richard Hoffman, an English concert pianist and teacher, and Fidelia Marshall Lamson Hoffman, an amateur pianist from a socially prominent New York family. From the beginning of her life Hoffman was immersed in an artistic and intellectual milieu, surrounded not only by her parents' music, but by a large circle of family and friends engaged in a wide range of artistic professions.

Hoffman was educated at home until she was nine or ten years old and then attended private girls' schools on Manhattan's Upper East Side, first as a pupil at Chapin School and then at Brearley School, then one of the city's top finishing schools. While still a teenager studying at Brearley Hoffman took evening classes in composition and watercolor at the Woman's School for Applied Design followed by a "life class" at the Art Students League of New York. She then began night classes at the Veltin School for Girls, studying sculpture with Herbert Adams and George Gray Bernard, and took Saturday painting classes with John White Alexander. Hoffman also studied painting and drawing at home with Harper Pennington, who was a family friend, and sculpture with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore and another family friend. The heavy schedule she carried as young student came to be indicative of Hoffman's career of intense artistic production. Throughout her life overwork led to periodic bouts of exhaustion and illness.

The positive reception of Hoffman's 1909 portrait bust of her father realized under Borglum's tutelage, who had urged her to translate the clay likeness into marble, encouraged Hoffman to direct her artistic talents towards sculpture. She worked on the marble bust in Phimister Proctor's studio in MacDougal Alley, an area of converted horse stables, where she frequented the studios of artists such as James Earle Fraser, Laura Gardin, Edward Deming, and Gertrude Whitney. Completed just two weeks prior to her father's death in August 1909, the portrait was included in the National Academy of Design's 1910 exhibition. Consequently, Hoffman's former teacher Alexander, who was then the president of the Academy, further encouraged her to focus all her attention on sculpture. That same year, her bust of violinist and family friend, Samuel Grimson, was awarded an honorable mention at the Paris Salon.

After her father's death Hoffman traveled to Europe with her mother in 1910, stopping in England and Italy before settling in Paris with her sights set on studying with Auguste Rodin. Although the sculptor ignored her first attempts at contact despite her letter of introduction from Borglum, Hoffman persisted and finally secured the sculptor's attention on her fifth try, showing him the two marble heads she had brought with her from New York. The talent evident in these works persuaded Rodin to accept Hoffman as a pupil.

While living in Paris, Hoffman worked as a studio assistant to the American sculptor Janet Scudder and also studied with the Italian sculptor Emanuele de Rosales, who guided her while working on her first dance sculpture, Russian Dancers (1911). The statuette was inspired by Anna Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin's performance of Autumn Bacchanale which Hoffman and her mother had seen in London. Translating the free movements of modern dance into sculpture soon became one of the main themes of Hoffman's work. Russian Dancers won first prize at the 1912 Paris salon.

In Paris Hoffman was introduced to the work of Matisse and other modernists. The chaos that she perceived when viewing their works repelled her; for the entirety of her artistic career Hoffman instead worked in a variety of naturalistic styles, drawing inspiration from the French classicist sculptors Jean-Antoine Houdon, François Rude, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Beaux-Arts artists such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frederick William MacMonnies, Herbert Ward, and Emmanuel Rosales. By aligning herself with and gaining the acceptance of established male artists Hoffman found her path to being taken seriously as an artist. In this she was guided by Janet Scudder who professed just such a strategy. Hoffman was a product of her time and place, and rather than cleaving to the new ideas she encountered in Paris she advanced her career by using the system she was born into and knew so well.

After sixteen months abroad a lack of funds forced Hoffman and her mother to return to New York in July 1911. There, at Rodin's urging, she studied anatomy and dissection at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. She also met and became good friends with Pavlova, with the dancer often posing for her while she sketched. Hoffman realized a series of posters for the Ballet Russe that grew out of these sessions. She also began working on Bacchanale (1924), a frieze of 26 plaster panels representing Pavlova in the dance in which she first made her reputation. It took Hoffman a number of years to complete the frieze, as she worked on it whenever Pavlova and male dancers from the troupe were available for sittings.

Hoffman returned to Paris in the summers to work with Rodin. She also visited and studied at bronze foundries, eventually becoming a master founder. In 1912, she completed two more dance sculptures, Bacchanale Russe, depicting Pavlova and Mordkin, and L'Après-midi d'un faune which was inspired by a performance by Vaslav Nijinsky. While in London in 1914 for an exhibition of her work at Leicester Galleries, she supervised the installation of Rodin's sculpture in an exhibition of French modern art at Grosvenor House. Moved by the English soldiers who fought along with the French during World War I, Rodin later donated the entire group of sixteen sculptures to England.

At the outbreak of World War I, Hoffman returned to New York and worked with the Red Cross. There she also formed the American chapter of Appui aux Artistes, a war relief effort for the families of French artists who were fighting in the war. She established a studio at 157 Sniffen Court in Murray Hill, Manhattan, and eventually building a private residence above it. Her landlady and main benefactor in New York was the philanthropist and collector, Carol Averill Harrington. Hoffman exhibited Bacchanale Russe ; Les Orientales, a bronze of Pavlova and Novikoff; Russian Dancers ; and her bust of Grimson at the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, where she received an honorable mention, and her dance sculptures and lithographs at Brooks Reed Gallery, Boston, in 1917.

After the war Hoffman returned to Paris where her over-life-size bronze, Bacchanale Russe, was installed in the Luxembourg Gardens in 1919, becoming the first woman to have a sculpture placed there. The sculptural group was stolen or destroyed, allegedly by Nazis, during World War II, and was never recovered. Hoffman also helped the art historian and curator Léonce Bénédite, who was also the executor of Rodin's will charged with managing the sculptor's artistic heritage, to find and reinstall the bronzes that she and Rodin had hidden in the basement of the Hôtel Biron at the outbreak of the war. That August, at the request of Herbert Hoover, then director of the American Relief Administration, she and Marie-Louise Emmet embarked on a seven-week tour of American relief efforts in Yugoslavia.

The following year Hoffman began work on The Sacrifice, a memorial dedicated to Robert Bacon, the former American ambassador to France and to all the Harvard alumni who had perished in the war. The sculpture of a dead Crusader laid out on a cross with his mother mourning at his head was commissioned by Bacon's wife Martha for Harvard Memorial Chapel. Hoffman knew the Bacons from her early days in Paris when Martha Bacon had commissioned her to produce copies of the Houdon portraits then displayed at the American Embassy. In 1923, the finished sculpture was placed in the Chapel of St. Ansgar in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City where it remained until the Harvard chapel was completed in 1932.

In 1921, Hoffman completed another bronze dance sculpture, La Péri, depicting Pavlova and Hubert Stowitts performing Paul Duka's ballet of the same name in which Iskander (Alexander the Great) encounters a Persian peri or winged spirit. In May of that year, she had her first one person show at Ferargil Galleries.

Hoffman's mother, with whom she had always lived, died in 1922. In 1924, Hoffman finally married her long-time friend Samuel Grimson and they moved into the newly constructed residence at Sniffen Court. She also completed the Bacchanale panels. And that year the American businessman, Irving Bush, commissioned Hoffman's first and most significant architectural sculpture, To the Friendship of the English Speaking People, for the Bush House, the trade center he was building in London. Commemorating Anglo-American friendship, the project comprises two monumental figures, representing England and America, jointly holding a torch aloft. The pair is set in an arch surmounting two columns forming the entryway to the building. Once the figures were installed Hoffman spent the next two months astride their shoulders eighty feet above the street as she finished sculpting their faces and hair.

In 1925, Hoffman met Ivan Meštrović, the Croatian sculptor, who was in New York for the opening of his exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. She invited him to work at Sniffen Court until he found his own studio in the city. During this time both sculptors made portraits of each other - Hoffman creating an over-life-size bronze of Meštrović now at the Brooklyn Museum, while Meštrović made a terra cotta bust of Hoffman. A few years later Hoffman traveled to Zagreb to study equestrian sculpture with Meštrović, and film him at work on his bronze equestrian sculptures of Native Americans, The Bowman and The Spearman, for Chicago's Grant Park.

Hoffman purchased the lot at 25 Villa Chauvelot (later 25 Villa Santos-Dumont) in Paris in 1927. There she built Villa Asti, her Paris home and studio, which was completed in June 1928. The next year she shipped all the finished work she had stored in Paris over the years to New York where she had her first major solo exhibition at the Grand Central Art Galleries. Comprising 105 sculptures and numerous drawings, the exhibition traveled to venues throughout the United States for the next five years.

At this point in her career Hoffman made her living primarily from portrait commissions and sales of copies of her smaller dance figures along with the occasional larger commission. Late in 1929, family connections helped Hoffman to secure what would become her largest commission - executing the sculptures for a new exhibition to be installed in the Hall of Man (Chauncey Keep Memorial Hall of Physical Anthropology) in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Along with an exhibition devoted to prehistoric humanity, it was one of two new exhibits approved in 1927 by David C. Davies, the director of the museum, that together aimed to present the entire story of humankind. Faced with declining public interest in this seldom-visited hall, museum officials and curators were especially keen to create an exhibition devoted to the living races that was not the dry taxonomic display tupically found in museums of the time. Informed by the successful role that the window and floor displays of their department store played in selling merchandise, members of the Field family felt that a lifelike, artistic exhibit would be key to attracting visitors to the Hall of Man.

Late in 1929, Hoffman met Stanley Field, the president of the museum, at a dinner party and, as she was wont to do with new acquaintances, approached him about commissioning work from her. Although Stanley Field appeared at the time to be disinterested, he soon sent his cousin, Henry Field, who was then working under Berthold Laufer, the Field Museum's chief anthropology curator, to visit Hoffman's studio and assess the suitability of the sculptor's work for the Hall of Man project. Henry Field and Marshall Field III, a major benefactor of the museum who also made a significant contribution to the Hall of Man, were cousins. Hoffman was related by marriage to Marshall Field III, through her second cousin, Evelyn I. Field. The Marshall Fields keenly supported Hoffman for the project. A few months later, in February 1930, Hoffman was invited to the Field Museum to discuss her possible involvement with the Hall of Man exhibition. At this point the museum was still working under the premise that the sculptures for the exhibit would be created by several artists, and that they would be modeled in painted plaster with real hair and glass eyes (Marshall Filed III, who championed figures in bronze had been persuaded by the curators that bronze could not adequately represent a variety of skin colors). At the meeting, Hoffman was offered the opportunity to participate in the project as one of the sculptors and she asked to think about it overnight. The next day, she argued persuasively that the display would be much more cohesive if the figures were executed by a single sculptor. Ultimately Hoffman signed a contract to be the single sculptor and to produce 20 life-size figures, 27 busts, and 100 heads in plaster, and a central sculptural group, The Unity of Mankind, in bronze.

Hoffman began working on the commission using existing plaster casts, measurements, and photographs provided by the museum. As she worked, she continued to press for the figures to be cast in bronze, arguing that bronzes with patinas toned to convey skin color would produce more lifelike sculptures than would plaster. By June of 1931, Stanley Field willingly acquisced to the change in materials. In October 1931, Hoffman embarked on what was publicized as a "worldwide tour" (but which in reality was confined mostly to Asia) photographing, drawing, and taking anthropological data of "authentic" models for her sculptures. For seven months Hoffman, accompanied by her husband who served as the expedition photographer, Jean Macao, her assistant and plaster caster, and Gretchen Green as expedition secretary, traveled through Hawaii, Japan, China, Bali, Java, Malaysia, India, and Sri Lanka.

As a group, the final 104 bronze sculptures Hoffman produced for the Hall of Man are artistic depictions of racial types which mediated between competing theories of racial and characteristic traits emerging in the early 1930s such as such pathognomy, which studied the mobile features of the human body, as opposed to the long-held theories of physiognomy which were based on measurable, stable features. Yet Hoffman also insisted that her sculptures were also portraits of individuals. Viewed on a case-by-case basis, some of the sculptures, especially those that Hoffman worked on from life, are more successful as portraits than others. Still, by weaving a narrative that emphasized the veracity of Hoffman's sculptures and that supported the notion - and one which Hoffman was far from alone in holding - that by delineating an individual's characteristics a portrait can signify a type, the Field Museum was well positioned to use them to illustrate a variety of ever-evolving racial discourses.

The Hall of Man opened on June 6, 1933, timed to coincide with the opening of Chicago's Century of Progress International Exposition. It significantly increased Hoffman's visibility and led almost immediately to two exhibitions of small-scale statuettes of the Hall of Man sculptures. Les races humaines which opened in November 1933 at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadero, was the first time than an American artist had been invited to exhibit at that museum. This exhibition gave further credence to Hoffman's figures as being both anthropologically sound and as individual works of art. The Races of Man exhibition at the Grand Central Galleries followed in January 1934. Both exhibitions were well-received, with the former becoming the first conduit for the sale of replicas of the statuettes which only increased in popularity with the latter exhibition.

Hoffman and Grimson divorced in 1936. Alone at Sniffen Court she completed Heads and Tales (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), an account of her travels for the Field Museum which became a bestseller. The following year a large exhibition of her sculptures was held at the Virginia Museum of fine Arts in Richmond. Along with her friend Louise Branch, then the proprietor of New York's English Bookshop, she also conceived of and founded Dance International, and the two women organized its first program, a six-week exposition at Rockefeller Center which include dance film showings, dance recitals, and a large exhibition on the art of dance that included Hoffman's own sculptures. Hoffman's work on dance continued with her Dance International Fountain (Dances of the Races) which was commissioned for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and installed in Perylon Circle, a spiral garden outside Perylon Hall. The fountain was destroyed after the fair ended. 1939 also saw the publication of Hoffman's second book, Sculpture Inside and Out (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1939), an instructional guide to sculpture. The textbook became widely used and also contributed to the growing number of students who came to her studio.

During World War II Hoffman again joined the Red Cross becoming the air-raid warden for her New York precinct. After the war ended, she finally returned to Paris in May 1948 after a ten-year absence. While in France she visited the site of the Épinal American Cemetery and Memorial in the Vosges Mountains where she had been commissioned to create relief panels for the exterior of the monument. In 1950, she completed the designs which were then carved by Jean Juge. The monument and cemetery were dedicated in July 1956. Her work on the Épinal project overlapped with that for the World War II Memorial Flagpole (1948) at the former I.B.M. location in Endicott, New York, which honored I.B.M. employees who had served in the Armed Forces during World War II. During the 1940s and 1950s, as she had throughout her career, Hoffman continued to sculpt portrait busts, figure, and medals. Her last major commission, completed in 1956, was for the thirteen relief panels depicting the history and evolution of medicine which she designed for the façade of Joslin Hospital (Joslin Diabetes Center). Hoffman spent her last years writing her autobiography, Yesterday Is Tomorrow (New York: Crown Publishers, 1965). She died at Sniffen Court on July 11, 1966.