28 October 2009
Shitload of Smith
The first image here is from Washington’s National Gallery, but the rest are from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Posted by MC in On Sculpture.
The first image here is from Washington’s National Gallery, but the rest are from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Incidentally,
Joseph Herman Hirshhorn was an entrepreneur, financier and art collector. Born in Latvia, the twelfth of thirteen children, Hirshhorn emigrated to the United States with his widowed mother at the age of six.
Hirshhorn went to work as an office boy on Wall Street at age 14. Three years later, in 1916, he became a stockbroker and earned $168,000 that year. A shrewd investor, he sold off his Wall Street investments two months before the collapse of 1929, realizing $4 million in cash.[1] Hirshhorn made his fortune in the mining and oil business. In the 1930s, he focused much of his attention on gold and uranium mining prospects in Canada, establishing an office in Toronto in 1933. Toronto was notably hostile to foreigners then—Hirshhorn later claimed that all the city's park benches had signs that read "No Dogs or Jews Allowed".
In the 1950s, he and geologist Franc Joubin were primarily responsible for the "Big Z" uranium discovery in northeastern Ontario and the subsequent founding of the city of Elliot Lake…. By 1960, when he sold the last of his uranium stock, he had made over $100 million in cash from the uranium business.
His business dealings in Canada were not without controversy. He was investigated by the Ontario Securities Commission, convicted twice of breaking Canadian foreign exchange laws, deported from Canada for illegal stock manipulation (which he later appealed and won by having himself declared a landed immigrant), and fined for an illegal securities sale and illegally smuggling cash out of Canada….
When Hirshhorn began to make money, he began to buy art, both paintings and sculpture. He amassed a collection of paintings and sculptures from the 19th and 20th centuries. Applying himself seriously to the study of art, he would question dealers, critics and curators, and visit artists in their studios. He made quick decisions on buying a piece. "If you've got to look at a picture a dozen times before you make up your mind," he once said, "there's something wrong with you or the picture."
Hirshhorn graced his Greenwich mansion with paintings by Willem de Kooning, Raphael Soyer, Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Louis le Brocquy,and Thomas Eakins, and the grounds outside with sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Henry Moore. …
In 1966, Hirshhorn donated much of his collection, consisting of 6,000 paintings and sculptures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and constituting one of the world's largest private art treasures), to the United States government, along with a $2 million endowment. The Smithsonian Institution established the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in 1966 to hold the collection; the museum opened in 1974. At Hirshhorn's death in 1981, he willed an additional 6,000 works and a $5 million endowment to the museum.
[via wikipedia]
November 9th, 2009 at 8:33 pmThanks, MC. I had no idea of the who or the what regarding the Hirshorn Collection. These are the guys that leave me feeling there's still hope for art, although they do seem a rare breed. Vincent Melzac was another controversial American collector with real taste and conviction who made an impact on the Modernist scene back in the day, even sending work up here to the old EAG.
You might know of more, but there are at least a couple of Canadian collections with top notch holdings. These are the Daves I know, Mirvish and Duffin. I can't help but wonder what will ultimately become of these collections. Mirvish is likely more connected out East, but Duffin has a connection with the AGA that unfortunately has withered. Also, Edmonton has a lot of great work dispersed amongst various collectors in the region. You could put together some amazing f*cking shows. All we need is a curator with a real eye for the stuff and an art gallery that would be willing to show it. But where would we find either one of those, I wonder?
The kibbles-n-bits-stormcloud-roadrunner is my Smith pick of the bunch.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:46 am