Malvina Hoffman - "Anna Pavlova"
A BRONZE MASK OF ANNA PAVLOVA
inscribed " MALVINA HOFFMAN" and "C.B.W."
7 3/4 in. (19.4 cm.) high, on veined black marble cube, natural patina
LITERATURE: A. Alexandre, Malvina Hoffman, Paris, 1930, pp. 19-20, cat. no. 34; M. Hoffman, A Sculptor's Odyssey, New York, 1936, p. 66, illus.; A. T. E. Gardner, American Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Greenwich, Ct., 1965, p. 159. According to the artist's records, the present bronze — a reduction of her wax portrait of 1924 - is from a small edition cast circa 1934 using both the Rudier and Cellini foundries. An example of the wax version is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Provenance: Christie's East, New York, May 21, 1991, Lot #506 and by descent to the present owner.
$7,500
Malvina Cornell Hoffman
(1885-1966)
Recognized as an important American sculptor, Malvina Hoffman was born in New York City, and was a portrait sculptor of pieces that expressed the fluid movement of dancers and lofty human values. She became especially noted for her hall-of-fame portraits including Paderewski, Pavlova, Wendell Wilkie and Katharine Cornell.
Many of her pieces she carved in stone, and some of them were enormous in scale including war monuments.
Her masterpiece is considered to be The Races of Man, done in 1933, commissioned by the Marshall Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It had one-hundred five separate pieces, cast in bronze, depicting
people from diverse cultures.
She studied with Herbert Adams and Gutzon Borglum in New York and in Paris in 1910 with Auguste Rodin from whom she learned naturalism and whose doorstep she sat on until he agreed to see her. In Paris, she associated with numerous leading intellectuals including Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Anna Pavlova, and her bronze sculptures of Pavlova, Russian ballet star, won her much attention and many commissions.
Source: Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists