Who Was Malvina Hoffman?

Who was Malvina Hoffman? 

A number of years ago the Heritage Commission and Historical Society collaborated in producing tri-fold flyers about local history.  Some of North Hampton’s Famous People highlighted twelve individuals, giving each person a few paragraphs.  Malvina Hoffman deserves more. 

Hoffman was a Little Boar’s Head summer resident during its heyday, brought here by her parents at the age of two weeks in 1885.  They stayed at Bachelder’s Hotel at the corner of Ocean Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue.  

Her father, Richard Hoffman, an Englishman, a child prodigy, was a composer and pianist for the New York Philharmonic Symphony for thirty years.  One of his first gigs in the U.S. was as pianist for Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale”, in her very first tour.  He married an American, Fidelia Marshall Lamson, of two prominent families and a pianist to boot.                    

When Malvina’s parents first came to LBH in the 1860s, plans were underway to build a stone chapel for summer residents.  Malvina’s father participated in the fund-raising efforts, including concerts.  St. Andrews by the Sea was constructed, a small bellows organ purchased, and Hoffman became the organist, rehearsing the volunteer choir each Saturday, for the next thirty years.

As an adult Malvina stayed at Batchelder’s until it closed in 1928; she then rented a house and continued visiting Little Boar’s Head.  In the 1940s she rented dual fish houses and made them into a studio, their first use as something other than fish houses.  For, you see, she had become an internationally renowned sculptor.

When Malvina was a child, one of her mentors on LBH was Dr. Bennett Hubbard Nash, Professor of Classic Languages at Harvard.  He and she would walk along the shore where they collected driftwood, searching as far as Big Boar’s Head for the right kinds. From this sea-seasoned wood Nash taught Mallie how to carve.  She used a penknife and learned to carve small models of canoes, boat hulls, and racing shells and furnish them with seats, oars, oarlocks, rudder and keel.  

Her father also unknowingly began to prepare her for her later work. They would take a runabout pulled by a horse named Topsy and stop at the fish houses or small bathhouse cabins that were being built, and Hoffman would explain to his daughter the process of construction. It was intended to give Mallie “some idea of the work of the world of manual labor.”  Sculpture, of course, is manual labor. 

After her schooling, including studying under Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore’s presidents, and Auguste Rodin in France, Hoffman began receiving commissions in Europe where she and her widowed mother lived.  Ballet dancers including Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova were subjects. Pavlova became a dear friend and rumored lover. 

Hoffman and her mother spent some time at Little Boar’s Head during World War I and it was there that a Cleveland architect Abraham Garfield (youngest son of President Garfield) contacted her.  Based upon her work of Pavlova and Mordkin entitled Bacchanale Russe he asked if she would create a large group in bronze for a client’s garden.  

The next year a group of French critics and museum representatives visited Cleveland, saw the work, and asked if they could acquire a bronze replica if the owner permitted another cast be made  The answer was yes; and the sculpture was given a place in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.  

Also during World War I Hoffman became Director of the Bureau of Information and Research of the NY County Chapter of the Red Cross, and at the end of the war in 1919 was sent by Herbert Hoover to the Balkans as one of the moving forces in the Relief Administration. While there she created a bust of a Serbian leader.   

The 1920s was a decade of artistic accomplishments, culminating in a major commission from the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.  She received a telegram from the Museum’s president in 1929 asking, ““Have proposition to make, do you care to consider it? Racial types to be modeled while traveling round the world.”                                     

Initially working in her studio in Paris, using models from the 1930 Colonial Exposition that had assembled peoples from France’s colonial empire at the time, she and her husband, Samuel B. Grimson, a photographer and film-maker, travelled around the world.   

In the five years of such travel and work she created 104 sculptures, 27 life-size, 27 busts, and 50 heads for the Hall of Man.  At the end of the project she felt “this collection of bronze figures and heads is a sculptor’s interpretation of Humanity, studied from three angles—Art, Science, and Psychology.”

Over 10 million people saw the Field exhibit over the next thirty years.  But times and knowledge change. In 1969, three years after Malvina’s death in 1966, it was dismantled and the museum recognized “its misguided message that human physical differences could be categorized into distinct “races.”  

In 2016 the Field Museum opened a new exhibit with fifty of Hoffman’s sculptures -- Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman. As the museum put it “This exhibition closely examines the nuance and beauty that defines the person and inspiration behind each sculpture…. Looking at Ourselves takes a hard look at the 1933 exhibition. More than 80 years later, our cultural and scientific notions of race have changed—but the consequences of racial ideologies persist.”  Hoffman’s artistic abilities continue to shine on each of the figures.

We can find out a lot about her from reminiscences by the Southworths and her own books, Heads and Tales and Yesterday and Tomorrow (she’s a good writer). For additional information: Field Museum of Natural History. Special Collections, online resources including images of some of sculptures.  Getty Research Institute, Special Collections has Hoffman’s papers.  The Wikipedia entry for Hoffman will send you on an adventure. Her great niece by marriage, Didi Hoffman, has written a biography that I am told is very good.