Word: malvina
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...glass fingerbowls, Flemish oak chests, potted palms, tooled leather wastebaskets and bronze andirons, they saw enough to stock all the dealers in Manhattan. Of the great art which legend maintained was "Inisfada's" glory, they saw little. Artistically respectable by most current standards was the garden-sculpture of Malvina Hoffman, auctioned off in situ among the rose bushes. For the rest, it appeared that the Bradys, in their assiduous years of collecting, had amassed a store of art faintly reminiscent of the collection owned by Major Edward Bowes...
...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...
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...
...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...