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Joseph Herman Hirshhorn (August 11, 1899 – August 31, 1981) was an entrepreneur, financier and art collector. Born in Mitau, 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. 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. 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. Hirshhorn Avenue, a residential street in that city, is named after him. 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. From 1961 to 1976, Hirshhorn lived in a three-story Norman chateau in a 22-acre (89,000 m2) estate at the summit of Round Hill, a 550-foot (170 m) rise in north-central Greenwich, Connecticut, with a view of the Manhattan skyline. 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, and Thomas Eakins, and the grounds outside with sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, and Henry Moore. He allowed many nonprofit groups to use tours of his sculpture garden for fundraising. In 1966 Hirshhorn donated much of his collection, consisting of 6,000 paintings and sculptures from the 19th and 20th 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hirshhorn

The Hirshhorn Museum at the Smithsonian Smithsonian Institution P.O. Box 37012 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden MRC Code 350 Washington, DC 20013-7012 USA http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/ he Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is a leading voice for contemporary art and culture and provides a national platform for the art and artists of our time. We seek to share the transformative power of modern and contemporary art with audiences at all levels of awareness and understanding by creating meaningful, personal experiences in which art, artists, audiences and ideas converge. We enhance public understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through acquisition, exhibitions, education and public programs, conservation, and research. The Hirshhorn Museum’s founding donor, Joseph H. Hirshhorn (1899–1981), immigrated to New York from Latvia when he was eight years old. His widowed mother settled with her children (Joseph was the twelfth of thirteen) in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In time, Joseph Hirshhorn would become a financier, philanthropist, and well-known collector of modern art whose gift to the nation of nearly 6,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mixed media pieces established his namesake museum on the National Mall. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has been open to the public since October 4, 1974. At the age of thirteen, Hirshhorn left school to become a newsboy. Two years later he took his first salaried job, on Wall Street in Manhattan, earning $12 per week. At sixteen, he launched his career as a financier by using his savings of $255 to become a stockbroker. When he was eighteen, Hirshhorn acquired his first works of art: two etchings by the sixteenth-century German artist Albrecht Dürer, purchased for $75 each. This acquisition marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for collecting art, facilitated by an innate talent for making money. In the late 1940s, Hirshhorn’s mining investments in uranium-rich Canadian land cemented his status as a wealthy man. Hirshhorn eventually turned his attention to the art of contemporary masters, becoming an avid collector of works by living painters such as Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Edward Hopper, Larry Rivers, and Raphael Soyer. He socialized with many of these artists and assisted them when he could. For example, Hirshhorn helped Willem de Kooning, a good friend, finance the construction of a Long Island studio in exchange for works of art. As a collector, Hirshhorn was also interested in works by American painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Thomas Eakins, Louis Eilshemius, Ashcan School artists, and first-wave modernists in touch with European developments. Hirshhorn was a frequent and welcome visitor in the studios of those whose works he collected, and many of these visits were commemorated with photographs. One such occasion was a 1966 visit to Pablo Picasso at Mas Notre Dame de Vie, near Mougins, in the south of France. The photographer Edward Steichen was a guest of Hirshhorn and his wife, Olga, at their house, Villa Lou Miradou, in Cap d’Antibes. Hirshhorn may be most well-known as a collector of nineteenth and twentieth-century sculpture. He acquired major works by pioneers such as Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brancusi, as well as innovative contemporaries, including Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Alberto Giacometti. Developing friendships with these artists, Hirshhorn showed his enthusiasm in numerous ways, such as by visiting Moore’s studio and enjoying the lively art scene with Giacometti. The breadth of Hirshhorn’s sculpture collection was unknown to the general public until 1962, when selected works were loaned to the Guggenheim Museum in New York for a major exhibition. Several international museums and governments courted the intrepid collector, but he ultimately bequeathed his comprehensive modern art holdings to the Smithsonian Institution. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, played a supporting role by paying personal visits to the Hirshhorns. After an Act of Congress established the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1966, the Johnsons joined the Hirshhorns for the museum’s groundbreaking in January 1969, just prior to the inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon. The Horatio Alger Award, which commemorates determination, perseverance, and success in the face of adversity, was, appropriately, one of many honors with which Hirshhorn was recognized during his lifetime. Dividing his time between Washington, DC, and Naples, Florida, Hirshhorn remained a vigorous collector and patron of the arts until his death in 1981. His subsequent bequest to the museum nearly doubled the size of the collection. Today, building on this original foundation of artworks from Joseph Hirshhorn’s personal collection, the museum’s curators continue to refine and expand the collection, which today numbers more than 12,000 pieces. A consistent influx of new acquisitions invigorates and extends Joseph Hirshhorn’s legacy of passion for the art and artists of our time. http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/home/#collection=history-of-the-hirshhorn&detail=http%3A//www.hirshhorn.si.edu/bio/the-founding-donor/

Hirshhorn, Joseph H. dates 1899–1981 city New York other cities Mitau, Latvia; Brooklyn, NY; history Joseph H Hirshhorn was an art collector, financier and industrialist. Hirshhorn agreed to donate his collection of modern and contemporary art to the Smithsonian in 1966. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opened in 1974. Hirshhorn's collection included both sculpture and paintings and artists such as Henry Moore, Picasso, Thomas Eakins, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and others were represented in his collection. Hirshhorn was married four times, lastly to Olga Cunningham, who shared his passion for art. He died in 1981. Repository Archives of American Art Joseph H. Hirshhorn interview, 1976 Dec. 16 Archives of American Art Joseph H. Hirshhorn Papers, circa 1926-1982 and undated. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library Collection Archive Archives of American Art Raphael Soyer papers, 1936-1989. Archives of American Art Joseph Hirshhorn letters, 1958. Archives of American Art Joseph H. Hirshhorn Papers, c. 1961-1981. Archives of American Art Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) memorabilia, 1913. Archives of American Art Adeline Herder Papers, 1942-1999. Archives of American Art Mark Tobey papers, [ca. 1920]-1977. University of Washington Libraries Mark Tobey Papers, circa 1850-1985 http://research.frick.org/directoryweb/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=6466