“Many a vanishing race will continue to live only in the sculptures displayed in this hall [Hall of Man],” wrote the Field Museum’s department of anthropology curator, Berthold Laufer, in 1933. Global expansion was directly diminishing ethnic minorities, he warned, although he used terms of the era.
The sculptures Laufer referred to were one of the largest and most ambitious art commissions ever: 104 works, including heads, busts, and figures for the “Hall of Man” at the Field Museum of Natural History, as the Field Museum in Chicago was then known.
As far back as 1915, Laufer’s department had the idea for a new type of anthropology hall, beyond the current halls of wall-to-wall glass cabinets containing often unkempt mannequins made of plaster or sawdust, with real hair and glass eyes. Decades later, his anthropology hall vision materialized.In 1929, American sculptor Malvina Hoffman received an intriguing telegram from Field Museum president Stanley Field: “Have proposition to make, would you care to consider it? Racial types to be modelled while travelling round the world.”
Reading the telegram piqued Hoffman’s love for her art and adventure. “Sudden vistas of remote islands and mysterious horizons flooded over my imagination—escape from city life, discovery of new worlds, conflict with the elements. Infinite new windows of life seemed to open before me,” she recalled in her 1936 autobiography, “Heads and Tales.”
A Commission Like No Other
Field and the museum board were looking for four or five artists to sculpt the races of humankind, in plaster, with real hair and glass eyes. Each artist would travel to several countries and sculpt the best representative of each race. The likenesses of these people needed to be rendered as realistic heads and figures, so someone of the same race would immediately recognize them as kin. (Today it may seem absurd that one person could represent each race, but anthropologists in Hoffman’s day believed that.)
Over 100 sculptures would be made and exhibited in the museum’s new anthropology hall called the “Hall of Man.” Hoffman, however, had another idea and asked the board if she could formulate her plan that evening and pitch it to them the next day.Hoffman believed that only one artist should be commissioned so as to ensure a “homogenous ensemble”—and she wanted to be that artist.
Out in the Field
Having previously made portraits in the Balkans (in 1919) and in Africa (in 1926 and 1927), Hoffman had experience working in unfamiliar territories. In 1931, she and her husband, Samuel B. Grimson, embarked on their round-the-world expedition to seek out authentic models for the portraits.
An important aspect of the expedition was gaining the natives’ trust. “These people, generally called savages, are far more intuitive and psychic than we are. It takes but a few seconds for them to discover if we are sincere or only bluffing,” she wrote.
She recounted how a Hollywood representative recorded a group of American Indians chanting. He found out years later, from an Indian visitor, that the melodious chant wasn’t authentic. The natives repeatedly chanted one line: “Does the White man think that he can buy our secrets?”
And many times, the couple encountered ethnic groups who believed the sculpted image to be taboo.
Once a model had been found, Hoffman spent time observing the person going about daily tasks to ascertain the poses and gestures characteristic of fellow countrymen. Grimson took over 2,000 photographs, and footage of those moments. Just over 24 minutes of the “Hall of Man Expedition” footage, taken in 1931, is available on the Internet Archive website.
In her autobiography, Hoffman gives a vivid account of how she modeled her subjects in situ while traveling. “I had to efface my own personality completely and let the image flow through me directly from the model to the clay, without impediment of any subjective mood, or conscious art mannerism on my part,” she wrote. But the silent footage from 1931 gives us a visual insight into her formidable character and extraordinary talent in often challenging conditions.
In the opening shot, we see her in a makeshift studio in Japan jovially sculpting a clay bust of the Ainu man sitting in front of her, while she smokes and smiles intermittently at the camera. Indigenous to Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands of Japan, the Ainu people have been linked to prehistoric Japan.
In another clip, she’s in the Cameron Highlands, Perak, in northeast Malaysia, modeling a couple of Sakai men by the roadside, expertly resting her clay model on the back of a trunk. The Sakai people are indigenous to Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.
Later we see her in Madras (now Chennai), in southeast India, watching two Tamil men scale palm trees to tap them (an illegal activity at the time). The men are ages apart. The elder of the two looks like he’s practiced his trade for years; his sun-dried skin shows creases of age and experience, and his legs have become bandy from years of climbing trees that can be 80 feet tall. She chose to depict the younger tapper climbing. He later does a slow twirl for the camera so that she can carve the finer details of his facial features in her studio; photographs taken throughout her trip also served this purpose.
Surprisingly, Hoffman sculpted a “giraffe-necked” Padaung woman, with her piles of bronze rings round her neck, in New York. Three young girls from the Burmese Padaung or Kayan tribe (a subtribe of the Karen ethnic group found in the northern hills) had been working for the Ringling circus. Although when Hoffman asked the woman to model on Sunday, she flatly refused: “We’re Catholics,” she explained. And they all had an appointment with the Virgin Mary.
An Artist’s Prerogative
Hoffman took a calculated risk and made nothing in plaster. The first full-length models—a Blackfoot Indian and a Nordic man—she made in clay, including the eyes and hair. Seeing those statues, the museum dropped the requirement for real hair and glass eyes.
Later, she took another risk: When in Paris, she cast two full-length African males in bronze, painting their skin tones. When Stanley Field saw the bronzes in Paris, he immediately cabled Chicago demanding that funding be found to cast each sculpture in bronze.
While finishing the bronzes, she made a small-scale model of the exhibition, mapping out the partitions, wall space, flooring, and lighting and adding her bronze heads, busts, and figures. The hall was light and airy, with high ceilings and a natural wood-colored flooring that complemented the dark walnut pedestals and stands of the sculptures.
Even though she still had 20 sculptures to complete, the “Hall of Man” opened on June 6, 1933.
Art and Science
In Hoffman’s day the “Hall of Man” was a scientific endeavor, and the sculptures were titled by their ethnic groups rather than their individual names. The aim was to show physical characteristics of different races in order to immediately identify a race. In the preface of a leaflet introducing the exhibition, department of anthropology curator Berthold Laufer wrote: “Race means breed and refers to the physical traits acquired by heredity, in contrast with experience and the total complex of habits and thoughts acquired from the group to which we belong; in other words, the social heritage called culture. The behavior of a nation is not determined by its biological origin, but by its cultural traditions.”
The American Anthropology Association website describes the challenges of race in its 1998 “Statement on Race”:
“In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this [20th] century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.”
In 2013, the museum’s conservators spent 16 months restoring 87 of Hoffman’s “Hall of Man” sculptures, and in 2016 the museum added the subjects’ names to some of the sculptures.
Hoffman made a remarkable contribution in recording these indigenous people, and now 90 years on, some of those ethnic groups may be endangered, extinct, or assimilated into other groups. She tackled the commission as “a sculptor’s interpretation of Humanity, studied from three angles—Art, Science, and Psychology.”
Throughout the hundreds of portraits she made, she showed that humanity: “To understand the submerged passion that burns in the human eye, to read the hieroglyphs of suffering etched in the lines of a human face, sometimes adding beauty and depth of expression, sometimes merely tracing their record of conflict and resistance; to watch the gesture of a hand or listen for the false notes and the true in human voice—these were the mysteries that I found I must delve into and try to unravel when I made a portrait.”
The “Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman” exhibition is at the Field Museum in Chicago. To find out more, visit FieldMuseum.org
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