WOMAN IN ART
Relief, for collecting and distributing food and clothing to the debilitated children of Jugo-Slavia. In 1919, she made a tour of the Balkans for the American Relief Administration, where she gathered information as to the immediate needs of the country and visited the child-feeding stations. These vital human experiences seem to have been of value to the art of Miss Hoffman, rather than a hindrance.
Malvina Hoffman was married to Mr. Samuel Bonarios Grimson June 6, 1924, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in the St. Ansgarius Chapel, where at present is placed her masterpiece, "Sacrifice."
Be the artist man or woman, and be their art expressed in sculpture or painting, the dominant element in personality will be the dominant trend in their art. That fact accounts for the variety in taste, ability and appreciation. We realize that fact the more we study "one man shows." When the work is as large in character as that of Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the fact is more pronounced.
The sympathy Mrs. Whitney has shown in her helpfulness to younger artists has found a stronger expression in her war sculptures. Her work in plastic art has a vividness and pathos that can only come from one who has been an eye witness of the subject in hand, and whose heart as well as mind has been opened by the sight of suffering and agony, and thrilled with human sympathy and national patriotism that welled up at battle scenes and the hospital aftermath during the World War.
Thus her experience in France has made cold granite and marble eloquent with her message to a peace-loving world.
One hardly needs to refer to the names that signalize the heroic groups from the studio of Mrs. Gertrude Whitney. "Blindness" is pitifully human, and the Good Samaritan soldier guiding him is possessed of that spirit of brotherhood that flowered more and more as bloomed the poppies red on Flanders Fields. "Honorably Discharged" is the lame man leaning upon his crutch; he has done what he could. Each name brings a vivid rehearsal of the horrible warfare. "Chateau-Thierry," "At His Post," "Refugees," "Gassed," "Spirit of the Red Cross," all speak to the soul of the subject.
Mrs. Whitney's technique is decidedly her own, indeed it might be considered the impressionism in sculpture; as some one has expressed it, "impressions caught out of a war-ridden air," for it surely partakes of the conditions existing when she made her sketches. For heroic works seen at a distance, it is most effective. Knowing this, the artist made a bit of an
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