Malvina Hoffman

Career Dancers Hoffman became famous internationally for her sculptures of ballet dancers, such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, who often posed for her.

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. She made a larger-than-life-sized work of Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, with whom she studied. 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). 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." There are casts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago.

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. Among other exhibits, Hoffman's drawings which she made when she visited Serbia in 1919 were also displayed.

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. After the Memorial Church at Harvard University was completed in 1932, it was installed there.

Hall of Man alt=English: Artist Malvina Hoffman; Stanley Field, director and the nephew of the founder of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; and actress Mary Pickford at the 1934 opening of Hoffman's Grand Central Art Galleries exhibition "The Races of Man." Artist Malvina Hoffman; Stanley Field, director and the nephew of the founder of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; and actress Mary Pickford at the 1934 opening of Hoffman's Grand Central Art Galleries exhibition "The Races 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."

text=To understand the submerged passion that burns in the human eye, to read the hieroglyphs of suffering etched in the lines of a human face ... to watch the gesture of a hand or listen for the false notes and the truth in a human voice, these are the mysteries that I found I must delve into and try to unravel when I made a portrait. — —Malvina Hoffman, explaining that her sculptures were more than an anthropological study. The Hall of Man was deinstalled in 1969, but some of the sculptures remained on display.

World War II

Personal life Rear wall of Sniffen Court, Murray Hill, New York, which was the site of Hoffman's studio. She created the plaques on the wall. She was married to an Englishman, Samuel Bonarius Grimson, on June 4, 1924. Grimson had been injured by mustard gas and phosgene during World War I, and his career as a concert violist was ended when his hands were crushed during an accident with a truck during the war. After the war, he collected antique paintings and instruments. He also invented a tube for a color television. Grimson traveled with her during her search for authentic indigenous models for the anthropological series. in 1942. She was 16 years his junior. Grimson died in 1955.

On July 10, 1966, Malvina Cornell Hoffman died of a heart attack in her studio in Manhattan, which had been purchased by the philanthropist Mary Williamson Averell and provided to Hoffman for a low-priced rent.

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