Art Collector Olga Hirshhorn, 1920–2015
By • October 22, 2015 0 1662
Olga Hirshhorn, 95, fourth wife of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden founder Joseph Hirshhorn, died Oct. 3 in Naples, Florida.
After their marriage, in 1964, she received an education in art from her husband and from the artists with whom they socialized: Calder, Chagall, Giacometti, Man Ray, Miró, O’Keeffe and Picasso, to name a few. She began to acquire art herself, stepping up her collecting after Joe Hirshhorn died in 1981.
In 1995, Olga Hirshhorn donated more than 600 works not to the museum with her name on it but to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Though she pledged the rest of her collection and one-third of her estate to the Corcoran, this promised gift was withdrawn after the 2005 departure of then-director David C. Levy and the cancellation of the museum’s Frank Gehry-designed wing.
A five-foot dynamo well into her 80s, Olga Zatorsky was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a chauffeur/gardener and a cook. Twenty-one years younger than Joe Hirshhorn, she first attracted his attention over the phone. Having married and separated from her English teacher at Greenwich High, she was running an employment agency and he was looking for domestic help at his Greenwich estate.
The gift of 6,000 works and an endowment that created the Smithsonian’s museum of modern and contemporary art came two years after they married. The Hirshhorn Museum opened in 1974.
Olga Hirshhorn served on the boards of the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran and the Baker Museum in Naples, which hosted the exhibition “The Mouse House: Works from the Olga Hirshhorn Collection” in 2009 (the show also traveled to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich). That collection of some 200 works was later donated to the Baker Museum.
The “mouse house” was her name for a converted, art-filled carriage house she owned on Embassy Row in Washington. She also owned houses in Naples and on Martha’s Vineyard.
She is survived by her sons John and Denis from her first marriage, to John Cunningham
