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Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum located in Washington, D.C. on the National Mall and designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It was conceived as the United States' museum of contemporary and modern art. The museum primarily focuses its collection-building and exhibition-planning on the post-World War II period, with particular emphasis on art created during the last 30 years. Outside the museum is a sculpture garden, featuring works by artists including Auguste Rodin and Alexander Calder.
The building itself is as much of an attraction as anything inside, likened by many to a large spacecraft parked on the National Mall.
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Encyclopedia
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum located in Washington, D.C. on the National Mall and designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It was conceived as the United States' museum of contemporary and modern art. The museum primarily focuses its collection-building and exhibition-planning on the post-World War II period, with particular emphasis on art created during the last 30 years. Outside the museum is a sculpture garden, featuring works by artists including Auguste Rodin and Alexander Calder.
The building itself is as much of an attraction as anything inside, likened by many to a large spacecraft parked on the National Mall. The building is essentially an open cylinder elevated by four massive "legs", with a large fountain occupying the central courtyard. The Smithsonian staff reportedly told Gordon Bunshaft, prior to designing the building, that if it did not provide a striking contrast to everything else in the city, then it would be unfit for housing a modern art collection.
History
In the late 1930s, the United States Congress mandated an art museum for the National Mall. At the time, the only venue for visual art was the National Gallery of Art, which focuses on Dutch, French and Italian art. During the 1940s World War II shifted the project into the background.
Meanwhile, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, now in his 40’s and enjoying phenomenal success from uranium mining investments, begins recreating his collection from classic French Impressionism to works by living artists, American modernism of the early 20th century, and sculpture. Then, in 1955, Joseph Hirshhorn sold his uranium interests for more than $50 million. He expanded his collection to warehouses, an apartment in New York, and an estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, with extensive area for sculpture.
A 1962 sculpture show at New York's Guggenheim Museum awakens an international art community to the breadth of Hirshhorn's holdings. Word of his collection of modern and contemporary paintings also circulates, and institutions in Italy, Israel, Canada, California, and New York vie for the collection. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley make a successful pitch for a new museum on Washington, DC's National Mall.
An Act of Congress establishes the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution (1966). The museum is primarily federally funded, although Hirshhorn later contributes $1 million toward building construction. Joseph and his fourth wife, Olga Zatorsky Hirshhorn, visit the White House. Groundbreaking takes place in 1969.
Abram Lerner (born 1913) is named the founding Director. He oversaw research, conservation, and installation of more than 6,000 items brought from the Hirshhorns' Connecticut estate and other properties to Washington, DC.
The museum and garden complex was designed by Gordon Bunshaft (1909-1990) and provides of exhibition space inside and nearly four acres outside in its two-level Sculpture Garden and plaza. The New York Times described it as: “a fortress of a building that works as a museum.”
Joseph Hirshhorn spoke at the inauguration (1974), saying: "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." One million visitors saw the 850-work inaugural show in the first six months.
Architecture
The museum was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft (1909-1990).
Architectural timeline
- 1969. The Hirshhorn Museum groundbreaking takes place on the former site of the Army Medical Museum (built 1887) after the brick structure is demolished. A controversy soon develops over naming a building on the historic National Mall after a living person, as well as the new federal museum's modern look and intrusively expansive sculptural grounds.
- 1971. Amid this climate of controversy, Bunshaft's original conception for the Sculpture Garden-an elongated, sunken rectangle crossing the Mall with a large reflecting pool-is abandoned. He prepares a new design based on an idea outlined by art critic Benjamin Forgey in a Washington Star article. The new adaptation shifts the garden's Mall orientation from perpendicular to parallel and reduces its size from to . The design is deliberately stark, using gravel surfaces and minimal plantings to visually emphasize the works of art.
- 1974. The museum opens with three floors of painting galleries, a fountain plaza for sculpture, and the Sculpture Garden. In preparation for the opening, Hirshhorn curators and staff spend several months scrupulously planning the locations of artworks, both indoors and outdoors. Lightweight foam-core "dummy" sculptures are used to resolve the final placement of works in the garden. The originals, many of which had been airlifted from Hirshhorn's Connecticut estate onto flatbed trucks for transport, are put into place in the weeks before the opening.
- 1981. Closed since the summer of 1979, the Sculpture Garden reopens in September after a renovation and redesign by Lester Collins, a well-known landscape architect and founder of the Innesfree Foundation. The design introduces plantings, paved surfaces, accessibility ramps, and areas of lawn.
- 1985. The Museum Shop is moved to the lobby, increasing exhibition space at its former location on the lower level.
- 1993. Closed since December 1991, the Hirshhorn Plaza reopens after a renovation and redesign by landscape architect James Urban. The area around and under the building is repaved in two tones of gray granite, and raised areas of grass and trees are added to the east and west.
Raves and criticisms
- "The whole complex has been designed as one composition... Bunshaft's design is not concerned with the grandeur of the Mall. It is concerned with the greater grandeur of his museum and it gives us an awful lot of beaux-arts pavement and pomposity that no longer seem to suit the taste and style of our times." [Preliminary design criticized] Wolf Von Eckhardt, The Washington Post, February 6, 1971.
- "The circular plan is not only clear, but also provides a pleasant processional sequence that goes a long way.... The fortress quality of the Hirshhorn suggests some rather obvious thoughts about the nature of housing art in our time. But the building's architecture... is less the product of a desire to make a statement... than it is a logical progression in aesthetic development.... " Paul Goldberger, The New York Times, October 2, 1974.
- "[The building] is known around Washington as the bunker or gas tank, lacking only gun emplacements or an Exxon sign... It totally lacks the essential factors of esthetic strength and provocative vitality that make genuine 'brutalism' a positive and rewarding style. This is born-dead, neo-penitentiary modern. Its mass is not so much aggressive or overpowering as merely leaden." Ada Louise Huxtable, The New York Times, October 6, 1974.
- "The parched severity of [the original Sculpture Garden] was not without merit, but the appeal was more to the mind than to the senses, more theoretical than practical.... The new design reinforces the identity of the garden as a welcoming urban park.... [This] park for art...serves the sculpture. The divisions of the space prove essential accents; artworks pop in and out of view as the spectator moves about the space...." Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Post, September 12, 1981.
- "[The Hirshhorn is] the biggest piece of abstract art in town-a huge, hollowed cylinder raised on four massive piers, in absolute command of its walled compound on the Mall.... The circular fountain...is a grand concoction...that for good reason has become the museum's visual trademark." Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Post, November 4, 1989.
Gallery
See also
External links
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- - Artist Yoko Ono dedicates a "Wish Tree" at the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Garden
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