Olga Hirshhorn (née Zatorsky) (April 26, 1920 – October 3, 2015) was an American collector of 19th and 20th century art and supporter of art museums.
Early life
Olga Zatorsky was born in
Greenwich, Connecticut, to immigrant parents from
Ukraine. She graduated from Greenwich High School in 1939 and married her English teacher, John Cunningham, and they had three sons together.[1] In 1964, she divorced Cunningham and married
Joseph H. Hirshhorn, who died in 1981. She owned houses in
Martha's Vineyard and
Naples, Florida, where she died, aged 95, in 2015.
Art collection
Her first purchase was a painting by
Josef Albers, and she claims that she bought it for $2,000 which she could not believe she paid that much for a painting at the time.[2] Over time she collected works by
Willem de Kooning,
Henry Moore and
Man Ray as well as works from Asia and Africa. In 1995 she donated over 600 works to the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC., estimated at the time to be worth about 10 million dollars, which surprised the art world since it had been expected that her art would go to the Hirshhorn Museum.[3] She served on the boards of the Hirshhorn Museum as well as the Corcoran Gallery.[4]
One of Hirshhorn's most noted collection was a collection of 197 small-art objects called "The Mouse House", in reference to their former location in Washington DC's historic
Miller House. Among the objects in the collection are six
Picassos, six
de Koonings, seven
Alexander Calder pieces, four pieces by
Man Ray and individual paintings by
Georgia O'Keeffe and
Salvador Dalí.[5] Hirshhorn donated her "Mouse House" collection to
The Baker Museum in Naples, Florida, in 2013.[6]
The Frick Collection contains various archives relating to Hirshhorn as well as an oral history completed in 1988.[7] In 2012, she was awarded the Patron Award by the International Sculpture Center.[8]