American Art Collaborative

The straining, athletic forms of this rare marble composition exemplify the importance of the human figure in motion for Malvina Hoffman. Throughout her long and distinguished career, Hoffman chose the body as her focus. She studied sculpture for a year in Paris with Auguste Rodin, who impressed upon her the necessity to master all technical processes of her art. Extended close study of her subjects marked all of Hoffman's work, whether her first successes capturing the performances of ballet legends or her best-known project, the 1930 commission for the Hall of Man at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. The Chicago work includes approximately 104 sculptures of subjects of all ethnicities, taken from five years of global travel.