Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is a museum of contemporary and modern art and currently focuses its collection-building and exhibition-planning mainly on post–World War II.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution and beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The museum’s focus is on contemporary and modern art and currently focuses its collection-building and exhibition-planning mainly on the post–World War II period.

The building itself is an attraction, an open cylinder elevated on four massive “legs,” with a large fountain occupying the central courtyard. 

Virtual Tour of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

• “The Burghers of Calais” by Auguste Rodin
• “Kiepenkerl” by Jeff Koons
• “The Figure” by Jacques Lipchitz
• “The Great Warrior of Montauban” by Antoine Bourdelle
• “Sphere Within Sphere,” “Sfera con Sfera,” by Arnaldo Pomodoro

Highlights Tour of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

“The Burghers of Calais” by Auguste Rodin

“The Burghers of Calais” by Auguste Rodin is one of his most famous sculptures.

It commemorates a historical incident during the Hundred Years’ War, when Calais, a prominent French port on the English Channel, was under siege by the English for over a year and was forced to surrender.

The victors offered to spare the city if six of its leaders would surrender themselves and walk out wearing nooses around their necks, carrying the keys to the town and castle.

One of the wealthiest of the town leaders volunteered, and five other burghers volunteered to join him. It is this moment when the volunteers leave the city gates that this sculpture depicts.

Rodin captured the poignant mix of defeat, heroic self-sacrifice, and willingness to face imminent death.

“Kiepenkerl” by Jeff Koons

“Kiepenkerl” by Jeff Koons references an 1896 sandstone sculpture of a traveling peddler or “Kiepenkerl” by August Schmiemann in Münster, Germany.

Koons’s replica sculpture was constructed of polished cast stainless steel and cast in 1987. 

The statue depicts a full-length figure of a man with a basket on his back and a basket at the ground near his right leg, all in shiny finish surfaces.

“The Figure” by Jacques Lipchitz

“The Figure” by Jacques Lipchitz was inspired by the principles of Cubism. It was modeled between 1926-1930 and cast in bronze in 1958-1961.

Lipchitz’s style incorporated biomorphic shapes that model artistic design elements of life.

Biomorphic comes from combining the Greek words ‘bios’, meaning life, and ‘morphe,’ meaning form, and was introduced in the 1930s to describe the imagery in the abstract types of surrealist art.

Jacques Lipchitz was a Lithuanian Jewish sculptor whose work was influenced by cubism.

He lived and worked in France, the USA, Israel, and Italy. Lipchitz was absorbed by themes of love, motherhood, homeland, humanity, and goodness and evil, as depicted in the images of the Old Testament of Greek and Roman mythology.

“The Great Warrior of Montauban” by Antoine Bourdelle

“The Great Warrior of Montauban” by Antoine Bourdelle was commissioned in 1897 by Montauban’s village to commemorate the Franco-Prussian War.

Often referred to in France as the War of 1870, it was a conflict between France and the German states led by the Kingdom of Prussia.

The battle was caused by Prussian ambitions to extend German unification and the French fears of the shift in the European balance of power.

“Sphere Within Sphere,” “Sfera con Sfera,” by Arnaldo Pomodoro

“Sphere Within Sphere,” also known as “Sfera con Sfera,” is a series of sculptures created by sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. The sculpture depicts an enormous metal sphere with a cracked surface, revealing an intricate interior with another cracked sphere inside.

The internal layers resemble the gears or cogwheels of a machine that symbolizes the complexity of the world. The fractured cracks symbolize the fragility of our society.

Pomodoro began his series of spheres in the 1960s with Sphere no. 1 and has continued for nearly forty years designing the globe-like pieces, each depicting different maps of destruction.

Each of the outer balls is fractured, revealing an intricate interior that unveils yet another cracking orb. The internal layers’ design mimics the gears of a clock or the inner workings of a grand piano, revealing the hidden complexity.

Pomodoro created the first version for the Vatican Museum in the 1960s and later began creating similar versions for many other institutions that can now be found in choice locations worldwide.

The artist’s initial vision was that the inner ball represented the Earth, and the outer ball represented our institutions.