Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

John W. Mecom, Jr., Houston

Private collection, Europe

Recorded:

The Woman Sculptor Malvina Hoffman and her Contemporaries, New York, Berry-Hill Galleries, 1984, p. 20 (illus. of artist with original model of this work).

Born in New York City in 1885, Malvina Hoffman was the daughter of the well-known concert pianist Richard Hoffman. Displaying an interest in art from an early age, she began sketching and painting as a student at the Woman’s School of Applied Design and the Art Students League. While working on an oil painting portrait of her father, she decided that two-dimensional art was not the right path for her and subsequently turned to sculpting, studying with Herbert Adams and Gutzon Borglum. In 1909, she completed her first sculpture, a marble bust of her father, which was accepted into the annual exhibit at the National Academy of Design and garnered considerable attention.

Throughout her life, Hoffman created numerous depictions of Anna Pavlova, a celebrated Russian ballerina who eventually became one of her dearest friends. Although she did not officially meet Pavlova until 1914 in New York, the sculptor began sketching her as early as 1910. During a two-week visit to London in July of that year, she attended the performance of Aleksandr Glazunov’s The Seasons at the Palace Theater. Hoffman was so captivated by the production that she returned to see the show again the following evening, remarking in her diary, “For two nights I have been out of my head during the performances of Russian dancing.”¹ Particularly striking to the artist was the concluding scene of the ballet, known as the Autumn Bacchanal, during which Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin danced a joyous pas de deux in the middle of a harvest vineyard.

Electrified by her initial encounter with the renowned dancers, Hoffman was inspired to model her first ballet-themed sculpture in 1911. This work, entitled Russian Dancers, beautifully expresses the hedonistic dynamism of the Autumn Bacchanal’s music and choreography. Displaying impishly mirthful visages, the two dancers are unreserved in their revelry, prancing and twirling in a wildly gleeful way. Their flowing costumes and curly, disheveled hair suggest a moment of rapid motion distilled in time. Likewise, the impressionistic surface quality of the bronze, redolent of Rodin’s sculptures, intensifies the frenetic energy of the scene. Characterized by a mischievous frivolity, Hoffman’s Russian Dancers captures the Dionysian spirit of the Autumn Bacchanal while celebrating the enchanting talent of Anna Pavlova.

Approximately twenty known casts of this work are thought to exist; this cast is one of the original thirteen done in 1911. Another example of Hoffman’s Russian Dancers can be found in the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.