Word: hoffmans
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...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...