1946 Map of Mankind - with Original Envelope and Booklet
DESCRIPTION
A remarkable combination of cartography, sculpture, and anthropology, this large 1946 Map of Mankind surrounds the world with dozens of Malvina Hoffman's celebrated portraits of people from across the globe, preserving a striking visual record of how an earlier generation attempted to understand and classify human diversity.
Published in New York by C. S. Hammond & Company in 1946, the Map of Mankind places a brightly colored political map of the world at the center of an elaborate border illustrated with photographs of sculptures by American artist Malvina Hoffman. Symbols link the figures to geographic regions and organize them according to the racial classifications then used by physical anthropologists. The complete set was accompanied by the 24-page booklet The Races of Mankind, written by anthropologist Henry Field and revised by Wilfrid D. Hambly, both associated with Chicago's natural history museum. The booklet's text had originally appeared in 1933 in connection with the museum's new exhibition.
The sculptures themselves originated with one of the Field Museum's most ambitious exhibitions. Commissioned around 1930, Hoffman traveled extensively while creating more than one hundred portraits and figures intended to represent what anthropologists of the period called human “racial types.” Her bronzes became the centerpiece of the museum's Races of Mankind exhibition, which opened in 1933 and was ultimately seen by more than ten million visitors. Hoffman nevertheless approached many of her subjects as individuals and wrote that she wanted her sculptures to convey their dignity and individuality as well as their physical appearance.
Art, Anthropology and Changing Ideas of Race
The map is especially interesting today because it documents a scientific framework that has since been rejected. The accompanying booklet itself acknowledges contemporary disagreement over the meaning of “race” and cautions against associating physical characteristics with social status or psychological qualities, yet it continues to divide humanity into broad hereditary racial categories. The Field Museum eventually removed the original exhibition in 1969 as anthropology moved away from such typological classifications. Today the museum presents many of Hoffman's sculptures in a very different context, examining both the individuality of the people she portrayed and the problematic history of the racial theories for which their likenesses were originally used.
This example is particularly desirable as the complete original package, retaining the large color map, the illustrated 24-page Races of Mankind booklet, and the original pictorial envelope advertising the set as “Distinguished · Novel · Challenging.” Together they offer an unusually complete artifact of midcentury American popular education, combining world cartography with one of the most famous anthropological art projects undertaken by Chicago's Field Museum.
CONDITION
1200 W. 35th Street #425 Chicago, IL 60609 | P: (312) 496 - 3622