At the Smithsonian | March 27, 2024

Explore a Century of Masterpieces, From Rodin to Picasso, Brought Together by One Passionate Collector

A self-described “little man in a hurry,” Joseph Hirshhorn built a premier modern art collection

Installation view of "Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960," on display at the Hirshhorn Museum through April 20, 2025

Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo: Rick Coulby.

Angelica Aboulhosn

Freelance writer

Long before he was a financier and art collector, Joseph Hirshhorn was living in an overcrowded tenement house in Brooklyn, preoccupied with the dirty green walls.

The 12th of 13 children, Hirshhorn was a boy when his family immigrated from Mitau, Latvia, to New York, in 1905. In the city, he dreamed in pictures, lining his room with artwork he cut out of calendars. Prints from the intricate British painter Edwin Landseer, from the dreamy French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, anything to conceal that putrid, haunting green.

He marveled at the pictures “morning and night,” as he recalled in a 1976 interview. He was won over, in a moment and for the rest of his life: “This is how my art world started.”

That world is on view in “Revolutions,” an electric survey of work from 1860 to 1960 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. through April 20, 2025. Replete with bubble-gum-pink pastels, vertigo-inducing oils and spindly bronzes, the exhibition is a reminder that art, at its best, is gripping, veiled in delicacy and calibrated to shock.

“The world is more than what you see,” says co-curator Betsy Johnson. The artists in the show were responding to a society in flux—to the meteoric rise in photography, to two world wars—and were “looking for new languages, new forms of expression” as co-curator Marina Isgro puts it, to tell their stories.

Joseph Hirshhorn spoke that language. At 16, he leveraged $255 in savings to launch his career as a stockbroker on Wall Street; then, at 18, he bought two Albrecht Dürer etchings for $75 each. In his spare time, he flitted between the Whitney Museum and local galleries. His “first big love” in the art world was the American painter Louis Eilshemius, whom he called “poetic, lyrical, wonderful.” He bought pictures by Milton Avery and bronzes by Auguste Rodin. By the early 1960s, he had amassed “one of the finest collections of modern sculpture anywhere,” according to the Evening Star.

When the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opened to the public in 1974, it held nearly 6,000 works from Joseph’s collection, acquiring 6,400 more when the philanthropist died, in 1981. In “Revolutions,” timed with the museum’s 50th anniversary, Johnson and Isgro bring together 208 works by 117 artists, some iconic, others lesser known, all brimming with verve. “After I’m gone,” Hirshhorn said, “a lot of people will say, ‘This guy was crazy, but he was generous.’”

Explore a Century of Masterpieces, From Rodin to Picasso, Brought Together by One Passionate Collector — Stanton Macdonald-Wright, *Conception Synchromy*, 1914. Oil on canvas. 36 × 30 ⅛ in. (91.3 × 76.5 cm). Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Courtesy Estate of Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Peyton Wright Gallery.

That exuberance comes through in Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s Conception Synchromy (1914), a Candy Land picture of crimsons and lemon yellows, robin’s egg blues and jolts of lime. A founder of the Synchromism movement, which sought to infuse color with the emotional resonance of music, Macdonald-Wright painted with a rhythmic panache.

He admired the lyrical Michelangelo, whom he called “one of the greatest draftsmen who ever lived.” Like many of the artists in the show, Macdonald-Wright was alert to the art world’s through lines, Isgro says, “to a long history of continuities.” The work he returned to time and again was a Flemish nativity scene he happened upon in Florence, Italy. “To me, it’s worth the fare over there and back, to see that picture.”

No less cosmopolitan was Pablo Picasso, whose bronze Head of a Woman (Fernande Olivier) (1909) and citron-tinged oil Woman in a Hat (Marie-Thérèse Walter) (1934) propel the show. But it’s his 1938 sketch of Dora Maar, the artist’s girlfriend of nine years, that mesmerizes. A lattice of graphite, her face a jumble of forms—one eye seen head-on, the other in profile, lips striped like a pumpkin shell—she is stock still, impenetrable.

The likeness rings true. In her 1961 memoir, Life with Picasso, the artist’s partner Françoise Gilot recalls seeing Dora Maar for the first time, at a restaurant in Paris. Maar had “a beautiful oval face but a heavy jaw,” dark hair, tightly pulled back, and “intense bronze-green eyes.” Picasso’s picture is pure rigidity. As Gilot put it: “She carried herself like the holy sacrament.”

One of the first times Picasso spotted Maar was at a café in Paris, wearing black gloves embellished with pink flowers. As Picasso told Gilot: Maar “took off the gloves and picked up a long, pointed knife, which she began to drive into the table between her outstretched fingers to see how close she could come to each finger without actually cutting herself.” The absurdity charmed Picasso. In an instant, he was smitten.

Hirshhorn was similarly taken with Picasso. After a visit to a gallery, he asked his dealer at one time, John Levy, about Picasso and the French painter Georges Rouault. Levy warned: “Joe, they’re no good. Stay away from them.” At that, Hirshhorn wrote off his dealer. “I knew then I was in the wrong church and the wrong pew,” the art collector recalled in the 1976 interview. “That was the end of John Levy.” Hirshhorn was comfortable taking risks, not compromising his tastes.

Georgia O’Keeffe had that self-assurance about her. As one of her classmates at the Chatham Episcopal Institute said of the painter, she was a “strong-minded girl [who] knew what suited her and would not be changed.” In Goat’s Horn With Red (1945), a marvelous pastel in the exhibition, O’Keeffe melds oxbloods and brick reds, encircling a pale blue ground. The work is mercurial, lulling, like a sunset seen for a moment and never again.

“With O’Keeffe, there’s always a resonance with the body,” Isgro says. The sweeps of color, like the contours of the figure, are fluid, delicate. “The color just lives by itself,” O’Keeffe told photographer Alfred Stieglitz after admiring East Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1922. “It’s like watching a person breathe when they are asleep.” Goat’s Horn With Red is comparably lively, undulating like the tide.

Willem de Kooning had that subtlety about him. In 1926, the painter, who had just completed his studies at Rotterdam Academy, hid himself in the crew’s quarters on a ship bound for Virginia. As soon as they landed, de Kooning made off, eventually landing in Hoboken, New Jersey.

His oil Queen of Hearts (1943-46), on display in the show, is a terrifically fractured figure. Donning a green-yellow dress and rose-pink veil, she heralds his “Women” series, which would occupy him for the rest of his career. The queen is withdrawn, her wide eyes blank, unknown. Set before a brilliant blue-green background, she could just as well set sail for another country, another world, stowed in the crew’s quarters.

“Every artwork is an opportunity to see the world through a new lens,” says Johnson. In de Kooning’s hands, the queen is at once real and artifice, frozen, statue-like, between this world and the next.

Hirshhorn was enamored with the spry de Kooning, whom he called “one of the great artists.” While Hirshhorn conceded that the painter could be “cock-eyed,” he noted that the Dutchman was always straight with him. As Hirshhorn remembered, while other artists would inflate their prices and egos, de Kooning “will never talk to you that way.”

Not everyone was bowled over by de Kooning. In June 1953, a critic for the Evening Star railed against the painter’s “apparent frenzy,” his women pictured “in hot shades of pink.” Jilted, the critic pronounced: “Maybe the future will consider Willem de Kooning as an old master. But on the basis of these horrific paintings, I doubt it.”

Yet de Kooning did not set out to charm. His aim, as he asserted in a 1951 essay, was to “free art from itself.” A kind of trick, his art is by turns airy and all-consuming. For de Kooning, anxiety stirred him, like a performer gauging “how long you can stay on the stage, with that imaginary audience.”

Hirshhorn had a performer’s impulse. The financier often made up stories to get out of meetings and visit galleries. As he described himself: “I’m a little man in a hurry.”

Indeed, Hirshhorn purchased an average of two works a day from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Among his treasures is Alberto Giacometti’s The Nose (1947), a scraggly construction of bronze, iron and twine, suspended in a cage. Elongated and spear-like, the nose is taunting, a sobering response to the horrors of World War II, when Giacometti saw human beings “as ephemeral rather than physically solid,” as Valerie J. Fletcher writes in the exhibition’s catalog. The work provokes, teeming with vitriol.

If Giacometti was pointed, Lee Krasner was fiery. Her Siren (1966), an expansive oil of sap greens smeared and slashed across a bare canvas, reverberates with the artist’s sure sense of self. Ever conscious of her husband Jackson Pollock’s outsized following, Krasner would not be eclipsed. As she explained in a 1977 Village Voice interview: “I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock.”

Krasner was “both attractive and repulsive,” as fellow painter Lillian Olinsey told biographer Robert Hobbs in the early 1990s. She had a penchant for speaking her mind. At 12 or 13 years old, Krasner recalled, “I crashed into the living room just as my parents were having tea with a doctor who was a distant relative and announced that I was through with religion.” She was spirited, true to herself and straining toward an art in which, she maintained, “the inner aspect of man and his outer aspects interlock.” Hers was a consummate art, running wide and deep. If “every artwork is an opportunity to see the world through a new lens,” as Johnson insists, then Krasner gave us worlds upon worlds.

Hirshhorn took a similar view. As a collector, he sought out artists who risked much and asked questions, however outlandish.

“If you’re not curious about anything,” Hirshhorn proclaimed, in the 1976 interview, “you’re a dead cookie.” What saved him, he argued, was reading, constantly. “I was terribly interested.”

Like the walls of his tenement house, lined with calendar clippings, the museum that bears his name is born of curiosity, of being awake to the world, and terribly, marvelously interested.

“Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960” is on view through April 20, 2025, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.