“A Woman Sculptor among the Primitive Races”: Gender and Sculpture in the 1930s

On June 6, 1933, the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History opened a new exhibit, the Chauncey Keep Memorial Hall of the Races of Mankind (figures 1 and 2).¹ Comprised of almost one hundred objects and representing over eighty different racial types from Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America, and the Pacific Islands, the Races of Mankind far exceeded the scope of previous and contemporary racial exhibits.² More startling still, unlike other race exhibits that relied on skulls, plaster casts, or even modeled and painted mannequins, the Races of Mankind consisted of life-size bronze sculptures. Executed by a single sculptor, Malvina Hoffman (1885–1966), the sculptures were a huge success, boasting half a million visitors in the exhibit’s first month of opening and as many as twenty-one thousand visitors a day in its first year.³ The Hall of the Races of Mankind was the most extensive use of free-standing sculpture ever mounted in a natural history museum—and remains a singular episode in the history of sculpture as well as in the history of museum exhibitions on race.⁴ The career of its maker was intimately bound up with this project, and it became known as the chef d’oeuvre of her nearly six decades as a sculptor.⁵ A press release issued by the Field Museum in 1932 attempted to capture the complicated conditions of Hoffman’s role: “the extraordinary and difficult task of coupling cold unyielding science with the warmth of the artist’s touch has been placed in the capable hands of Miss Malvina Hoffman.”⁶ The museum’s guidebook on the Races of Mankind assured its visitors that Hoffman had succeeded in this difficult task, producing works that were “scientific documents as well as works of art” and an amalgam “both of beauty and of truth.”⁷ So unusual was this collaboration between sculptor and natural history museum that reviewers sometimes lapsed into awkward matrimonial metaphors to describe Hoffman’s contribution to the study of race. Thus the famed British anatomist Arthur Keith (1866–1955) declared the exhibit the progeny of “art wedded to anthropology” as if to grant social sanction to such an unlikely union—a union that almost did not take place.⁸

Fig 1.

Hall of the Races of Mankind, ca. 1933. Getty Research Institute.

In February 1930, when Hoffman was first approached by the Field Museum for the Races of Mankind commission, she hesitated to accept the offer. Originally, the exhibit called for 164 sculpted representations of racial types, a proposition at which Hoffman balked: “no one had ever talked to a sculptor in such figures!”⁹ Within a year she was able to renegotiate her contract and bring the number of sculptures down to 104, but there were still other terms to consider.¹⁰ The commission, as it was envisioned by the Field curators and anthropologists, would require Hoffman to visit the different parts of the globe where the subjects of her racial types could be located and modeled in situ—a daunting expedition that would potentially absorb years of the artist’s productive capacity. Besides the sheer scale and scope of the commission, there were also the ramifications to her career in sculpture, for by undertaking work in a natural history museum, Hoffman exposed herself to a complex of professional risks. Though she never publicly admitted to this latter concern, one of the curators of the Field Museum, Henry Field, described Hoffman’s dilemma upon receiving the Races of Mankind commission: “I could see an inner conflict raging, and later I heard that some of her friends had advised strongly ‘against prostituting your art. This will ruin you forever and ever as an artist.’”¹¹ Though the advice of her friends is not explicit, the unexpressed worry seems to be that by agreeing to work on the Races of Mankind, by yoking art to science, Hoffman risked marginalizing her subsequent work and career. Nonetheless Hoffman accepted the Races of Mankind commission.