Malvina Hoffman

Having decided to shift from painting to sculpture, Malvina Hoffman moved to Paris in 1910, and is now known for her numerous public commissions between the First and Second World Wars. In the French capital, she studied with renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin for several years. She then returned to Europe in the 1920s to study with the sculptor Ivan Meštrovic. A version of Hoffman’s sculpture of Meštrovic appears in the background of this photograph by Clara Sipprell.

Hoffman’s best-known project came in the early 1930s, when the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago commissioned her to sculpt the series The Races of Mankind. On view at the Field between 1933 and 1969, the life-size bronzes and were seen by millions. Their making and display are now considered a case study in the troubling ways the disciplines of anthropology and museology reinforced nowdiscredited conceptions of racial hierarchy and difference.