Head Huntress

With her Siamese cat, husband, violin and 28 pieces of metal baggage, capable grey-haired Malvina Hoffman sailed into New York Harbor last fortnight. Three-quarters of the largest sculpture commission ever given a woman was completed.

Sculptress Hoffman was born in New York 45 years ago, the daughter of British Pianist Richard Hoffman who was imported to the U. S. by Phineas Taylor Barnum in 1850 as accompanist for Jenny Lind. Later he was soloist for New York's Philharmonic Society Orchestra. The Hoffmans were quickly accepted by the very stiffest New York society. But there were five children; finances were slim. Malvina Hoffman earned money to continue her art studies by painting portraits of her friends, designing book jackets, covers for sheet music, wall paper, linoleum.

In Paris grumbling old Auguste Rodin took her as a pupil. To perfect her knowledge of anatomy she practiced dissection at the Royal College of Surgeons for three years. Recognition followed. Museums in France, Britain and the U. S. bought her work; she has been decorated by both France and Jugoslavia. To the general public perhaps best known works are the stone group at the entrance of London's Bush House and the recumbent crusader that is Harvard's War Memorial.

Three years ago Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History commissioned no life-sized figures from Sculptress Hoffman to illustrate all the principal racial types of mankind for the museum's Chauncey Keep Hall of Living Man. Twenty-five of the figures will be full-length bronzes, the remainder heads and busts. With her husband. Violinist Samuel Bonarios Grimson as manager and chief photographer, and with a case full of notes and suggestions from British Anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, 42-year-old

Malvina Hoffman started out. They had already visited Africa (but found the purest examples of the racial types they were seeking in the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931), so limited themselves to Japan, China, the Philippines, the South Pacific. Seventy-five of the no statues have been completed. Only the primitive types of Siberia and South America remain undone. Chatting in the lounge room of S. S. Statendam last fortnight, Sculptress Hoffman told reporters some of her adventures :

". . . In Shanghai I made a plaster head of Dr. Hu Shih, Chinese poet and philosopher, during the Japanese bombardment. Dr. Shih himself was in great danger as he was being sought by the Japanese. When troops began sacking the city I hid the head in the bathtub and my husband and I moved it out in a basket before it was dry. Two days later the hotel was sacked. . . .

"From Singapore we went into the jungles in a Ford just as though we were driving up Fifth Avenue. We forgot all about snake boots and the accessories you buy in outing stores. . . . Mr. Grimson would go up into the forest to persuade the natives to come down out of the trees to pose. We had a grand sort of Englishman with us. 'Hi there,' he would call, 'do you want some nice beads for your wife? Very well then, come down and pose.' I had my armature and clay mounted on the trunk rack behind the car, and worked on that. The heat was awful.

". . . In the Malay Peninsula I had an uncomfortable few minutes with a Jakun who did not approve of his wife's posing. She was a primitive little thing, only 15 years old. I was using a wooden tool for modeling and as soon as he saw it he drew a long knife and laid it across his knees. I showed him the tool and proved it could not cut but he never took his eyes off me and sat there with that sharp blade just the same."

The Hall of Living Man will be ready for World's Fair visitors next spring.

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