Selected Works from the Hirschland Collection The Hirschland Family Collection Fifty Years of Passion for Art Inspired by an unbridled passion for art, the late Ellen and Paul Hirschland spent their half century together building an exquisite collection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture that filled their home from floor to ceiling and suffused their lives with beautiful objects, valued artist friends, and endless adventures and stories. Both Hirschlands came from collector families-Paul, in Germany, and Ellen, in Baltimore. Mrs. Hirschland was the great-niece of Claribel and Etta Cone, sisters who left their internationally admired collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art. As a teenager, Ellen enjoyed a close friendship with her great-aunt Etta, and joined her in touring galleries in Europe. She visited Henri Matisse, who invited the 17-year-old aspiring art historian to choose a favorite drawing, which he inscribed and presented to her. Ellen Hirschland led waiting-list-only adult education art tours for almost 35 years. She served as trustee of the Baltimore Museum of Art and of the Heckscher Museum. She also wrote about art, contributing several entries on major collectors to the Dictionary of American Biography and to the Museum of Modern Art's book Four Americans in Paris. A book on the Cone sisters, coauthored with her daughter, is forthcoming.

Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996)

Twilight

细节

Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996)
Twilight
signed, titled and dated 'Leon Polk Smith Twilight 1979' (on the stretcher)
acrylic on canvas
30 x 90 in. (76.3 x 228.7 cm.)
Painted in 1979.

来源

Washburn Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owners, 1981

出版

R. Smith, "Polk Smith Goes Beyond His Inspirations," The New York Times, September 29, 1995, sec. C30).

展览

New York, Washburn Gallery, Leon Polk Smith, March-April 1981 (illustrated on the cover of the catalogue). The Brooklyn Museum, Leon Polk Smith: American Painter, September 1995-January 1996.

拍品专文

"A painting like Twilight (1980), with its broad expanse of deep violet pressing down upon two narrow symmetrical wedges of black, seems to describe in abstract form a dramatically receding perspective and an openness of space reminiscent of the American Southwest, even as the two colors lock together into a plane of perfect flatness. The painting is also part of an American tradition of distilled landscape images that stretch throughout the century, from Georgia O'Keeffe to Ed Ruscha" (R. Smith, "Polk Smith Goes Beyond His Inspirations," The New York Times, September 29, 1995, sec. C30).