Hoffman, Lachaise, Noguchi

A bronze bust of a Bedouin was carted up to the delivery door of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History last week and installed in the Chauncey Keep Memorial Hall. Visitors, most of whom were trying to get their feet dry, were unaware of the occasion, but it marked the final completion of the largest sculptural commission ever given a woman, possibly the largest commission ever completed by one sculptor anywhere: 101 life-size statues and busts in bronze, depicting, to the best of present anthropological belief, all the races of mankind. They were the work of able, grey-haired Malvina Hoffman of New York (TIME, Dec. 24 et ante). Aided by her husband, and by a series of bequests from rich Chicagoans, Sculptress Hoffman had spent six years on her job, circumnavigated the globe, coaxed Igorot headhunters out of trees with strings of beads, done West African types in the solid comfort of the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931. Whatever their value to science and the Field Museum, the 101 Hoffman statues are works of art that the Chicago Art Institute, one mile away, would gladly make room for any day.

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was all ready last week for another one man show of the works of Gaston Lachaise, U. S.-naturalized French sculptor (TIME, July 23). Broad-beamed, long-haired, yet extremely high strung, Sculptor Lachaise finds emotional relief in modeling monstrous female figures with breasts like melons, hips like hills. Prize piece in last week's show was a 2,000 Ib. female figure in moulded concrete known as The Mountain (see cut). Seven men and a three-ton truck worked from 10 a. m. to 6 p. m. to get it to the museum. Winches, ropes, pulleys and masses of wadding were used to hoist it from the basement of the Ettl Studios to the street level. Sculptor Lachaise was too nervous to watch but telephoned every ten minutes for a report on progress. Standing on the sidewalk before the museum he screamed with dismay when three fire engines bore down on truck and Mountain just as they were backing in to the curb. There was no collision.

"You may say that the model is my wife," said Gaston Lachaise. "It is a large generous figure of great placidity, great tranquillity. Whatever I have of tranquillity I get from my wife."

Sculpture is a heavy medium for humor. An exhibition by Detroit-born Stuart Benson at the Ferargil Galleries attracted attention last week because of a group of carved caricatures. Two were excellent, those of Adolf Hitler and of long-haired Gilbert White, the U. S.-born professional Montparnasse Bohemian (TIME, April 2). The rest of the 23 figures in the Benson show--garden figures, portrait heads, busts--were carefully wrought, eminently worthy. Like so many of his compatriots Sculptor Benson was a longtime resident of France. Left high by the receding dollar, he avoided Paris, ran a studio in the Maritime Alps, never copied Parisian sculptors. Last week he received guarded praise from New York's first-string critics.

To the Marie Harriman Gallery in Manhattan this week went shapes in polished nickel, bronze, marble, wood and plaster, the latest exhibition of the works of able young Isamu Noguchi, son of a Japanese father, a U. S. mother. The show contained the usual Noguchi melange of clever portrait heads, elaborate abstractions, projects for impossible architectural developments. In the latter manner was a strange triangular something called Monument to the Plow.

One thing no eye could escape was a glittering metallic figure entitled Death, which Sculptor Noguchi would like someone to present to the State of Texas (see cut). From a tall tripod hung a metal cable, at the end of which dangled the contorted body of a lynched Negro.

Sculptor Noguchi took his figure from a newsphotograph in The Labor Defender, official organ of the International Labor Defense, which showed the burning of the body of George Hughes, 41, at Sherman, Tex. in May 1930 (TIME, May 19, 1930). Negro Hughes had pleaded guilty to an attack upon a Mrs. Drew Farlow, a white farmer's wife. Infuriated Shermanites attacked and burned the courthouse with the result that Prisoner Hughes suffocated to death in a steel vault in the county clerk's office. From the vault his limp body was yanked out and paraded around town in a motor truck before being strung to a tree. A drugstore was ransacked for boxes, counters, sample cases to build a fire beneath the corpse. Cooked by the flames, the muscles of George Hughes's arms and legs twisted themselves up into the knots Isamu Noguchi eternally preserved in Death.

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