The Hirshhorn Approach

Every Christmas, year after year, a glossy calendar would arrive from the life insurance company, and every year it would be almost the only spot of color in the tiny Brooklyn tenement apartment. To six of the seven kids of the immigrant Hirshhorn family living in the apartment at the time, it was just something that told the date; but to the second youngest child, it was a good deal more. When the calendar had served its purpose, he would cut out reproductions of sugary landscapes and tearful Landseer dogs and pin them on the wall beside his bed. In time, the taste of Joseph Herman Hirshhorn was to change radically, but those calendars were in a sense the beginning of one of the most spectacular art collections in private hands today.

No one knows--not even the 63-year-old Joe Hirshhorn himself--exactly how big the collection is, but there are around 1,000 pieces of sculpture and close to 3,000 paintings. The treasures jam Hirshhorn's offices in Manhattan and Toronto, are scattered through his Park Avenue apartment and Cap d'Antibes villa, decorate the gardens and even the bathroom walls of his house atop Round Hill in Greenwich, Conn., and flow over into a warehouse in Manhattan. The U.S. public has so far seen the collection only in bits and pieces, but this fall it will get a good and rewarding look. The American Federation of Arts has organized a show of paintings that will open at the Knoedler Gallery in Manhattan and then travel to 14 different cities. Manhattan's Forum Gallery will have a choice exhibition of sculptors' drawings. But most important will be this week's opening of a huge display of sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum (see color).

15 Minutes of Thought. The rise of Joseph Hirshhorn, from those bleak Brooklyn years to his start as a 17-year-old broker on the New York Curb Exchange and finally to the fortune he has made out of Canadian uranium, has long been a legend in business and financial circles. But even after this legend has faded, he will be remembered as a collector. Every top dealer on both sides of the Atlantic knows the bustling little (5 ft. 4 in.) figure with the torrent of enthusiasm. And scores of U.S. artists who are now prosperous and famous remember him as the man who had enough faith in their talent to buy their work before anyone else. For Hirshhorn never buys out of charity, nor does he depend on the advice of hired connoisseurs. He buys only what he likes--and what he likes is almost always the best.

Between business deals, often carried out on two telephones at once, Hirshhorn pores over art books, uses every spare minute to dart in and out of galleries. Though his store of knowledge about art is awesome, he seems to operate almost entirely by instinct. "There are," he says, "two types of art--good and bad. If you see a piece that you really like, it hits you in the brain, and in my case, I gotta buy it." Occasionally, Collector Hirshhorn may take a whole day, or even two, to make up his mind about a purchase. More often, "when I first go to see a piece, I decide fast whether I like it or not. I look at it hard, then I give it some thought. How much thought? Oh, 15 minutes or half an hour--never much longer than that."

Three Heads of Baudelaire. In the case of almost any other collector, this hits-you-in-the-brain approach could lead to disaster, but if disasters there are in the Hirshhorn collection as a whole, they will not be found at the Guggenheim. From the 37 Daumiers to the 17 Degas, the 27 Moores and the 15 Giacomettis; from the three heads of Baudelaire--one by Duchamp-Villon, one by Rodin, and a third by Elie Nadelman--to Leonard Baskin's mournful John Donne in his Winding Cloth, to the delicate construction by Naum Gabo, the exhibition provides one delight after another.

The show also offers two rare plaques by Thomas Eakins, some magical shadow boxes by Joseph Cornell, a fine head by Gauguin, some abstractions by David Smith, whom Hirshhorn began buying 20 years ago. From A (for Archipenko. Armitage and Arp) to Z (for Zadkine, Zajac and Zorach), the exhibition provides a splendid survey of modern sculpture, all the more refreshing because Hirshhorn collected it with no pretensions and no esthetic doubletalk, but simply out of his own compulsive love. When asked why he bought Epstein's Visitation, he explains: "It was a serene, beautiful piece which excited me." Of Kaethe Kollwitz' Piet`a, he says: "I thought it very powerful." It is--as Hirshhorn himself might have added about his whole approach to art--as simple as that.

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