Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, D.C., houses one of the world’s major collections of modern and contemporary art. The museum has thousands of works by leading international artists of the late 1800’s and the 1900’s. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is part of the Smithsonian Institution.
The Hirshhorn Museum is an unusual circular building. Many of the museum’s paintings are by American and European masters, such as Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Anselm Kiefer, and Frank Stella. The sculpture collection includes works by Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Martin Puryear, and Richard Serra. The sculpture garden and plaza alongside the museum feature large-scale works by some of these sculptors and others, including Alexander Calder, Magdalena Jetelova, Auguste Rodin, and David Smith. The Hirshhorn’s Henry Moore sculptures make up one of the largest public collections of Moore’s work outside of England.
The United States Congress established the museum in 1966 to house the huge art collection that had been donated to the nation by Joseph H. Hirshhorn, an American financier. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden was designed by the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and opened in 1974.
