iHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenNational Mall
Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960
A century of upheaval across the second-floor outer ring: hundreds of works by Bacon, Dubuffet, Krasner, Lawrence, O'Keeffe and Pollock, rotated periodically and threaded with contemporary responses.
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Walk in and the first two portraits you meet were painted 136 years apart: John Singer Sargent's stately 1884 society portrait beside Amoako Boafo's electric Cobalt Blue Dress from 2020. Turn around and Brancusi's Torso of a Young Man is standing almost behind you.
Everything comes out of the Hirshhorn's own vaults: more than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings around the second-floor outer ring, hung roughly in date order from 1860 to 1960. Contemporary pieces pop up between them, like Dyani White Hawk's Lakota beadwork painting among constructivist abstractions a century older. Small sculptures by Hepworth, Arp and Ernst sit on raised podiums under even light. The hang rotates (50 works were swapped in in January 2025), so a piece below may have gone back to storage.
The Washington Post's Kriston Capps called it "a delightful romp" and "truly maximalist". The catch is the density: come to wander, not for a tidy textbook sequence. Admission is free and walk-up, and it closes on 1 November 2026.
Look for
Sargent next to Boafo
At the entrance, an 1884 Sargent society portrait hangs beside Boafo's 2020 Cobalt Blue Dress, setting up the show's push between figure and abstraction.
Janet Sobel before Pollock
Look for Sobel's 1945 painting hung near a remarkably similar 1949 Pollock, a pairing that asks who got there first.
The marionette vitrine
A wall-size case holds Aleksandra Exster's suprematist marionettes, Giacomo Balla's futurist flower sculptures and a Sonia Delaunay painting, which the Post called one of the show's most magical groupings.
Loie Hollowell, Boob Wheel (2019)
A three-dimensional painting that abstracts the body, rooted in the artist's own pregnancy.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Literacy Lab (2019)
It looks like three separate drawings for an exquisite corpse but is a single composition, and it hangs near two cubist Picassos.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Nerding Out
- Rainy Days
Skip if
You want a short greatest-hits run: it's over 200 works, densely hung.
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Image credits
8
- Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
- From the Louvre: Masterpieces of Islamic ArtCourtesy of National Museum of Asian Art
- A Museum in the MakingAndrew Jameson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenGryffindor, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- National Air and Space Museumajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- National Museum of Asian ArtDifference engine, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National Museum of Natural Historyajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- National Gallery of Artajay_suresh / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0