In the 1950s Eleanor Milne sought out Ivan Mestrovic to study with him, just as the famous American woman sculptor, Malvina Hoffman, had done a generation earlier. Mestrovic is said to have told Hoffman she had to learn the principles and technical side of sculpture better than most men to overcome the preconception that women could not be serious artists.

At a very young age, Hoffman had enrolled in the Art Student's League in New York City to study sculpture. After the death of her father, a highly respected concert pianist, she and her mother travelled to Europe in the hope that Hoffman might receive instruction from Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor who had electrified American artists when his work had been exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In Paris for several years, she finally came into contact with Rodin who agreed to supervise her work and for whom she acted as an assistant. Working in a style clearly indebted to Rodin, Hoffman was pre-occupied with naturalism and movement, and between 1911 and 1924, created a large body of free-standing and relief sculpture focussed on Anna Pavlova, the famed Russian prima ballerina who became her friend and the inspiration behind many of her best-known pieces.

In 1926, to free herself from what she called "the cramping habits of [American] city life and social engagements," Hoffman set out on a long voyage which took her to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in order to study with Ivan Mestrovic and to North Africa in order to investigate architectural remains. While in North Africa, she began to draw members of different ethnic communities, which undoubtedly prepared her for the major commission she received in 1929 from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. She was entirely responsible for sculpting104 life-sized heads, busts and figures, chiefly in bronze, representing the "Living Races of Man" for the museum.

To complete this work, which was then exhibited in the Field Museum's Hall of the Races of Mankind, she travelled extensively to select both famous and "ordinary" members of different cultures to serve as models for the "races" and "sub-races" her anthropology advisers had determined she should depict. While most people nowadays do not believe that the concept of "race" tells us much about different cultures and communities, there is no question that this commission brought Hoffman great fame and has been cited as proof that women are capable of taking on the largest of sculptural projects.

EXTERNAL LINKS:
Hoffman's bronze of a Tamil man in the Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois.
Biographical Note. Getty Institute. Inventory of the Malvina Hoffman Papers,1897–1984.
Malvina Hoffman. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Description of Hoffman's Elemental Man, shown on this page, in catalogue of sculpture on the campus of Syracuse University. Go to #12.

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