by We went to the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, mostly because it was the only site that was open during a gap in our schedule. However, we both found things of interest and considered it time well spent, even though it’s a contemporary and modern art museum, which one of us doesn’t do so well with.
Joseph H. Hirshorn (1899–1981) immigrated to the U.S. from Latvia when he was eight years old. The family consisted of thirteen children and their widowed mother. Hirshorn left school at age 13 to become a newsboy, but incredibly, by the time he was 16 he had enough savings launch a career as a stockbroker. Within two years he was buying art.
the 1940s , Hirshorn had amassed a fortune from his uranium-mining investments, with an art collection to match, from French Impressionism to American modernism. When he cashed out his investments in 1955, his windfall was more than $50 million. Obviously, his art collection continued to grow.
At the museum’s inauguration, Hirshorn said,
It is an honor to have given my art collection to the people of the United States as a small repayment for what this nation has done for me and others like me who arrived here as immigrants. What I accomplished in the United States I could not have accomplished anywhere else in the world.
The collection is wide-ranging, as the accompanying pictures attest. Unfortunately, the sculpture garden was closed for renovations, so we weren’t able to see that while we were there, but it includes pieces by Auguste Rodin, David Smith, Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, and others.
The cover photo to this post is The Old Oaken Bucket, 1945, Grandma Moses.
Basquiat × Banksy
One exhibition that lured us in was Basquiat × Banksy, though in retrospect it just seemed to be bait-and-switch – like, put “Banksy” in the title, and they will come. There was a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which Banksy riffed on in his street art just outside a London museum getting ready to open a Basquiat exhibit. The painting in the Hirshorn exhibit by Banksy is a “version” of that street art, and it is the only Banksy piece in the exhibit. The rest of the exhibit featured “small works” by Basquiat, who died in 1988 at age 27 after a beating by New York City police, who allegedly caught him writing graffiti on a subway wall.
Mark Bradford: Pickett’s Charge
Another interesting installation was Mark Bradford: Pickett’s Charge, which is a monumental work that spans nearly 400 linear feet. It was installed in 2017 and was designed for the space it fills. Bradford drew inspiration for the piece from the 19th century cyclorama we’d seen at Gettysburg National Military Park. From the exhibit description,
Working with a combination of colored paper and reproductions of the original, Bradford transformed the historic Gettysburg imagery into a series of eight powerful abstract paintings. By cutting, tearing, and scraping through the layers, Bradford reveals the hidden textures and complexities lurking just beneath the surface. Each painting is more than forty-five feet long, and together they encircle the entire Third Level inner-circle galleries.
