Heads And Tales (book)
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Heads And Tales (book)
''Heads and Tales'' is a book by Malvina Hoffman first published in 1936. The book chronicles Hoffman's travels and efforts to create a series of sculptures for the Field Museum of Natural History’s Races of Mankind following being picked to do it in 1929. The parameters of the project were spelled out by Henry Field, who stated that Hoffman, “was commissioned to proceed to those lands where native races are at their purest and there register in clay and finish in bronze the living lineaments of selected types. The book, dedicated to Ignace Jan Paderewski, begins with a discussion of Hoffman’s early years and her time studying to be a sculptor, with some importance placed on her relationships with Auguste Rodin and Ivan Meštrović. Some attention is paid to the process of making sculpture, about her relationships with the Valsuani Foundry and the Roman Bronze Works, both of whom specialized in the lost wax process. The second portion of the book details with Hoffma ...
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Malvina Hoffman
Malvina Cornell Hoffman (June 15, 1885July 10, 1966) was an American sculptor and author, well known for her life-size bronze sculptures of people. She also worked in plaster and marble. Hoffman created portrait busts of working-class people and significant individuals. She was particularly known for her sculptures of dancers, such as Anna Pavlova. Her sculptures of culturally diverse people, entitled " Hall of the Races of Mankind", was a popular permanent exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It was featured at the Century of Progress International Exposition at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933. She was commissioned to execute commemorative monuments and was awarded many prizes and honors, including a membership to the National Sculpture Society. In 1925, she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1931. Many of her portraits of individuals are among the collection of the New York Historical ...
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Field Museum Of Natural History
The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), also known as The Field Museum, is a natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educational and scientific programs, and its extensive scientific-specimen and artifact collections. The permanent exhibitions, which attract up to two million visitors annually, include fossils, current cultures from around the world, and interactive programming demonstrating today's urgent conservation needs. The museum is named in honor of its first major benefactor, Marshall Field, the department-store magnate. The museum and its collections originated from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the artifacts displayed at the fair. The museum maintains a temporary exhibition program of traveling shows as well as in-house produced topical exhibitions. The professional staff maintains collections of over 24 million specimens and objects tha ...
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The Races Of Mankind
''The Races of Mankind'' is a series of 104 sculptures created for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago by sculptor Malvina Hoffman, representing the various races of human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, cultu ...kind, and unveiled in 1933. Most of the sculptures are life-sized. The works were initially housed in Hall 3, the Chauncey Keep Memorial Hall ("The Hall of the Races of Mankind"). Hoffman wrote about her travels around the world to draw and model the various different types of people in her 1936 book '' Heads and Tales''. After a period of controversy as to whether or not the exhibit was racist, it was discontinued in 1969. For decades, some of the works could be found in various places in the museum. Others were in storage. In 2015, the Field Mu ...
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Henry Field (anthropologist)
Henry Field (December 15, 1902 – January 4, 1986) was an American anthropologist and archaeologist. Early life Henry Field was born in Chicago, a great nephew of the merchant Marshall Field and a great nephew of Barbour Lathrop. His parents' marriage did not last long, and his mother, Minna Field, married secondly Algernon Burnaby of Baggrave Hall, Hungarton, Leicestershire, England, where Field grew up. He was educated at Sunningdale, Eton, and Oxford (B.A., 1925; M.A., 1930; D.Sc., 1937). Early career After being awarded his first degree, Field moved back to Chicago in 1926 to begin working for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as assistant curator of physical anthropology. Field's first participation in an expedition was in the University of Oxford/Field Museum excavation of Kish. His work included 5000 photographs of the excavations and portraits of the modern villagers. Beginning in the late 1920s the Field Museum began planning for the upcoming Chicago World' ...
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Ignace Jan Paderewski
Ignacy Jan Paderewski (;  – 29 June 1941) was a Polish pianist and composer who became a spokesman for Polish independence. In 1919, he was the new nation's Prime Minister and foreign minister during which he signed the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. A favorite of concert audiences around the world, his musical fame opened access to diplomacy and the media, as possibly did his status as a freemason, and charitable work of his second wife, Helena Paderewska. During World War I, Paderewski advocated an independent Poland, including by touring the United States, where he met with President Woodrow Wilson, who came to support the creation of an independent Poland in his Fourteen Points at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, which led to the Treaty of Versailles.Hanna Marczewska-Zagdanska, and Janina Dorosz, "Wilson – Paderewski – Masaryk: Their Visions of Independence and Conceptions of how to Organize Europe," ''Acta Poloniae Historica'' (1996), Issue 73, ...
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Auguste Rodin
François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor, generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as ''The Thinker'', ''Monument to Balzac'', '' The Kiss'', ''The Burghers of Calais'', and ''The Gates of Hell''. Many of Rodin's most notable sculptures were criticized, as they clashed with predominant figurative sculpture traditions in which works were decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic. Rodin's most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory. He modeled the human body with naturalism, and his sculptures celebrate individual character and physicality. Although Rodin was sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, he refused to change his style, and his continued output brought increas ...
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Ivan Meštrović
Ivan Meštrović (; 15 August 1883 – 16 January 1962) was a Croatian sculptor, architect, and writer. He was the most prominent modern Croatian sculptor and a leading artistic personality in contemporary Zagreb. He studied at Pavle Bilinić's Stone Workshop in Split and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he was formed under the influence of the Secession. He traveled throughout Europe and studied the works of ancient and Renaissance masters, especially Michelangelo, and French sculptors Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol. He was the initiator of the national-romantic group Medulić (he advocated the creation of art of national features inspired by the heroic folk songs). During the First World War, he lived in emigration. After the war, he returned to Croatia and began a long and fruitful period of sculpture and pedagogical work. In 1942 he emigrated to Italy, in 1943 to Switzerland and in 1947 to the United States. He was a professor of sculpture at ...
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Roman Bronze Works
Roman Bronze Works, now operated as Roman Bronze Studios, is a bronze foundry in New York City. Established in 1897 by Riccardo Bertelli, it was the first American foundry to specialize in the lost-wax casting method, and was the country's pre-eminent art foundry during the American Renaissance (ca. 1876-1917). History Bertelli was a chemical engineer from Genoa who combined his skill in chemistry with his interest in art in starting a foundry. The foundry trademarked its namesake, Roman Bronze Works in 1900. In 1908, the foundry built a home and studio for sculptor Harry Merwin Shrady at White Plains, New York. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 as the Leo Friedlander Studio. Long a sub-contractor to Louis Comfort Tiffany's Tiffany Studios, the foundry moved in 1927 to Tiffany's red brick factory in Corona, Queens, New York. The foundry's mold makers, casters, chasers and finishers, and patinaters cast sculptures from plaster and terra cotta mod ...
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Lost Wax Process
Lost-wax casting (also called "investment casting", "precision casting", or ''cire perdue'' which has been adopted into English from the French, ) is the process by which a duplicate metal sculpture (often silver, gold, brass, or bronze) is cast from an original sculpture. Intricate works can be achieved by this method. The oldest known examples of this technique are approximately 6,500-year-old (4550–4450 BC) and attributed to gold artefacts found at Bulgaria's Varna Necropolis. A copper amulet from Mehrgarh, Indus Valley civilization, in Pakistan, is dated to circa 4,000 BC. Cast copper objects, found in the Nahal Mishmar hoard in southern Israel, which belong to the Chalcolithic period (4500–3500 BC), are estimated, from carbon-14 dating, to date to circa 3500 BC. In Other examples from somewhat later periods are from Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Lost-wax casting was widespread in Europe until the 18th century, when a piece-moulding process came to predo ...
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Balkans
The Balkans ( ), also known as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throughout the whole of Bulgaria. The Balkan Peninsula is bordered by the Adriatic Sea in the northwest, the Ionian Sea in the southwest, the Aegean Sea in the south, the Turkish Straits in the east, and the Black Sea in the northeast. The northern border of the peninsula is variously defined. The highest point of the Balkans is Mount Musala, , in the Rila mountain range, Bulgaria. The concept of the Balkan Peninsula was created by the German geographer August Zeune in 1808, who mistakenly considered the Balkan Mountains the dominant mountain system of Southeast Europe spanning from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea. The term ''Balkan Peninsula'' was a synonym for Rumelia in the 19th century, the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It had a ge ...
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Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area.Sayre, April Pulley (1999), ''Africa'', Twenty-First Century Books. . With billion people as of , it accounts for about of the world's human population. Africa's population is the youngest amongst all the continents; the median age in 2012 was 19.7, when the worldwide median age was 30.4. Despite a wide range of natural resources, Africa is the least wealthy continent per capita and second-least wealthy by total wealth, behind Oceania. Scholars have attributed this to different factors including geography, climate, tribalism, colonialism, the Cold War, neocolonialism, lack of democracy, and corruption. Despite this low concentration of wealth, recent economic expansion and the large and young population make Afr ...
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