The Bruce Museum is presenting the exhibition “The Mouse House: Art from the Collection of Olga Hirshhorn,” opening Saturday, July 25, and on view through Sunday, October 18. The show reveals the private collection from the “Mouse House” in Washington, DC, owned by Hirshhorn, one of Greenwich’s most intriguing native daughters.
Hirshhorn is the widow of famed art collector Joseph H. Hirshhorn, who together with his wife founded the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden that opened in Washington, D.C., in 1974. Hirshhorn, née Olga Zatorsky, was born to working class Ukrainian immigrants, grew up in Greenwich and always has had close ties to the Bruce Museum. She recently reminisced, “Bruce Park was my playground, and the Bruce Museum was my classroom.”
After her husband died in 1981, she searched for a smaller residence to facilitate her regular visits to Washington, D.C. In 1986, she found a tiny pied-à-terre, which originally had been built as one of the earliest “automobile houses” for an electric car. She explored the one-bedroom triplex briefly, liked its charm and spirit and bought it nine days later.
Her 500-square-foot residence, located in the heart of Washington’s Embassy Row, is an integral part of the historic Argyle House, a Beaux-Arts mansion designed by associate architect of the Library of Congress Paul Pelz and built in 1900 for a wealthy, retired US Navy captain. Following a devastating fire in 1984, only a portion of the walls remained; the entire structure was reconstructed with designs by the architect Richard Ridley to replicate the building’s original grandeur. Hirshhorn’s Mouse House was not named for its mouselike scale, but because it sat in the shadow of a stone cat statue perched on the second-story ledge of the Argyle House.
She furnished her snug bijou of a space with gifts of small-scale artworks that she was given by her husband, artist friends, dealers and other collectors. These include lovely sculptures by August Rodin, Alexander Calder, Antoine-Louis Barye, Honoré Daumier, Paul Manship, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, David Smith, Louise Nevelson and Barbara Hepworth, among others.
Here, too, are paintings and works on paper by Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Sonia Delaunay, Max Weber, Adolf Gottlieb, Larry Rivers, Kenneth Noland and Saul Steinberg. She also freely interweaved Chinese and Japanese works of art.
All were lovingly installed in her Mouse House, which proudly announces itself as a private residence with its own idiosyncratic charm, not an institution of display. The Bruce Museum’s exhibition will include 200 of these works of art, and the installation will seek to evoke some of the original architecture and character of this home.
The show also will have a related, pendant exhibition beginning in August, devoted to Olga Hirshhorn’s collection of ceremonial West African gold ornaments.
The Bruce Museum is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, www.brucemuseum.org or 203-869-0376.
