Malvina Hoffman

Dancers

Hoffman became famous internationally for her sculptures of ballet dancers, such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, who often posed for her.^[8][9] In 1911, she made Russian Dancers, which was exhibited that year at the National Academy and the following year at the Paris Salon. She made a plaster bust, the last work she made of Pavlova, in 1923.^[9] Hoffman also created friezes and other works that captured the movements of dancers. In 1912, she made Bacchanale Russe. In 1917, a version of it won the National Academy's Julia A. Shaw Memorial Prize and the next year a large casting of the sculpture was on display in Paris at the Luxembourg Gardens.^[9] She has been called "America's Rodin".^[2]

World War I

Hoffman helped to organize, and was the American representative, for the French war charity, Appui aux Artistes that assisted needy artists. She also organized the American-Yugoslav relief fund for children.^[1] While working for the Red Cross during World War I, Hoffman traveled to Serbia.^[17] She made a larger-than-life-sized work of Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, with whom she studied.^[8]

Her sister, Helen, was on the board of the Red Cross, which sent clothing and medical supplies for the Serbian cause. Through her sister, she met Serbian Colonel Milan Pribićević in 1916, who inspired her when he came to the United States and delivered rousing speeches in which he asked Serbian immigrants to fight to save their homeland. Hoffman, who may have had a romantic relationship with the colonel, had an interest in "powerful, charismatic" people. She once said, "Hero worship formed a major part of my emotional life". He modeled for her sculpture of him entitled A Modern Crusader (1918).^[19] His nephew said that it capture that "he was gaunt and weary. His eyes were deep sunk in their sockets ... Only his firm mouth and his powerful chin showed no trace of the inhuman punishment which his body and soul had received during half a decade of life in the trenches."^[20] There are casts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago.^[17]

She also created the well known poster Serbia needs your help, based on the Miloje P. Igrutinović's photo of dead Serbian soldiers who had died of hunger and exhaustion on the Greek island of Vido. She made the soldier "live" on the poster and later, as a sort of an artistic installation, posted the soldier's head on the bronze statue of the Saint Francis of Assisi in front of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.^[21][22] She published her impressions about her visit in the chapter "Hunger in the Balkans" of her book Heads and Tales.^[23]

The poster Serbia needs your help later circulated around the United States, including the library of a local politician in Phoenix, Arizona, or in the Navajo reservation. That was where the priest Janko Trbović found it. One reprint of the poster, after an intricate and extended search, was donated by the basketball player Vlade Divac.^[23]

In 2018, an exhibition Who is Malvina Hoffman dedicated to her work was opened in Novi Sad, Serbia. It was part of the wider project "Serbia, war and posters" by the state government. The Hoffman exhibition, organized in cooperation with the US embassy in Belgrade, later toured the entire country.^[21][22] Among other exhibits, Hoffman's drawings which she made when she visited Serbia in 1919 were also displayed.^[23]

Interwar period

In 1919, she created a pedimental sculpture for Bush House in London. The same year, she was in Paris cataloging Rodin's works for the Musée Rodin.^[9] In 1929, her first major exhibit was held at the Grand Central Art Galleries^[9] with 105 works of art in various mediums.^[8]

During the war, she met the American Red Cross worker John W. Frothingham and his Serbian wife Jelena Lozanić. As member of the American Red Cross, she and Lozanić continued to organize the relief for Serbia (now amalgamated into Yugoslavia) during the Interbellum, regularly giving lectures on orphaned Serbian children. She welcomed Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, lending him her studio to work. In 1919, at the request of Herbert Hoover, director of American Relief Administration, Hoffman travelled to Serbia and Yugoslavia to visit US humanitarian missions throughout the state. That same year she visited the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, as the second recorded American to do so, after John W. Frotingham (some even claim the second foreign visitor in general).^[24]

After the war, she made the sculpture The Sacrifice, which was dedicated in 1923 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. In it, the head of a 13th-century crusader lay on the lap of a draped woman. It is a memorial to the late Ambassador of France, Robert Bacon, and alumni of Harvard University who lost their lives during the war.^[25] After the Memorial Church at Harvard University was completed in 1932, it was installed there.^[9][26]

Hall of Man

In 1929, Hoffman received a telegram from Stanley Field, "Have proposition to make, do you care to consider it? Racial types to be modeled while traveling round the world."^[15] The original proposal was to commission four or five artists to create painted plaster figures, as was common at the time, but Hoffman countered with a proposal to do the entire series by herself.^[15] Her counter-proposal was accepted, and she was commissioned by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois to create anthropologically accurate sculptures of peoples of diverse nationalities and races.^[15] Next, she determined to do the entire series in bronze, submitted two initial sculptures, and obtained approval to proceed.^[15]

Her initial work on the series was done in her Manhattan studio, but then she moved to her studio in Paris, where she could refer to models from the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931.^[15] She then traveled around the world — including distant places like Africa, India, and Bali — in 1931 to 1932, creating busts and figures of people^[9] and taking more than 2,000 photographs.^[27]

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Malvina Hoffman's Expedition
The Hall of Man

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She completed more than 105 sculptures, predominantly in bronze, but also in marble and stone.^[8] They included busts and full-length figures of individuals,^[8] which were installed at the museum's Hall of Man in 1933. She documented her travels for the commission in the book, Heads and Tales.^[9] It was a popular exhibit at the museum, but some critics considered it a purely anthropological study.^[8]

During the 1960s, questions began to circulate about the exhibit. According to American Historical Review, "the sculptures in the 'Races of Mankind' had perpetuated an older typological approach by presenting 'race' in the form of literally static bronze figures depicting idealized racial 'types'".^[28] The Hall of Man was deinstalled in 1969,^[29] but some of the sculptures remained on display.^[15]

In 2016, fifty recently conserved sculptures from the Mankind collection were re-installed at the museum in an exhibition called Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman.^[30][31][32]

World War II

As she had during World War I, Hoffman served the Red Cross^[17] and she raised money for the Red Cross and national defense during the war.^[34] She again supported Serbia, which was again occupied by Germany. Jointly with the mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, she participated in the fund raising events of organized by Jelena Lozanić, and in sending of the relief to the occupied territory.^[24]

In 1948, Hoffman created relief sculptures for the walls of the American World War II Memorial for the Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial in Vosges, France.^[33] It is on the site of the Battle of the Bulge (1944). There are 5,255 American soldiers buried in the cemetery.^[26]

Other

She depicted the evolution of medicine in a 13-panel bas relief for Boston's Joslin Diabetes Center. Hoffman made portrait sculptures, including those of John Muir, Wendell Willkie,^[8] Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Henry Clay Frick, and Ivan Meštrović. Her works were exhibited often at the National Academy.^[9] In 1965, she published Yesterday is Tomorrow.^[9]

Among her awards^[34] are the gold medal she won in 1924 from the National Academy, the gold medal of honor she won in 1962 for Mongolian Archer from the Allied of Artists of America, and the gold medal of honor that she won in 1964 from the National Sculpture Society.^[35] She was awarded five honorary doctorates.^[34][36] Her awards for public service include the French Legion of Honour and the Royal Order of St. Sava III of Yugoslavia.^[34]

Her work is kept in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[37] the Detroit Institute of Arts,^[38] the Santa Barbara Museum of Art,^[39] the Vero Beach Museum of Art,^[40] the Harvard Art Museums,^[41] the University of Michigan Museum of Art,^[42] the Dallas Museum of Art,^[43] the Smithsonian American Art Museum,^[44] the Nasher Museum of Art,^[45] and the Gilcrease Museum.^[46]