Exceptional Works: Morris Hirshfield

“Hirshfield has made a new world; a bold, revolutionary, colorful world of unsophisticated perspective and curiously shaped inhabitants, and one disquietingly hypnotic to those outside it.”

—Exhibition review of Memorial Showing of the Last Paintings of Morris Hirshfield at Art of This Century, New York, 1947

Morris Hirshfield

Stage Girls with Angels, 1945

Oil on canvas

50 x 36 1/8 inches (127 x 91.7 cm)

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The Polish-born American painter Morris Hirshfield (1872–1946) is widely considered to be one of the most important self-taught artists of the twentieth century. Taking up painting after his retirement at the age of sixty-five, Hirshfield quickly rose to prominence when influential New York gallerist Sidney Janis arranged a show of his work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—one of the very first for a self-taught artist. Both a sensation and controversial with critics, Hirshfield became a darling of the surrealists and Peggy Guggenheim, who acquired his work in the early 1940s.

Replete with characteristic detail, patterns, and style of figuration, Stage Girls with Angels is a marvelous example of Hirshfield’s unique oeuvre. This painting—one of only seventy-eight known works, very few of which are in private hands—was originally acquired from Sidney Janis Gallery and comes from the esteemed Zander Collection in Cologne. Hirshfield’s work is held in the collections of museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and The Jewish Museum, New York.

Morris Hirshfield, Stage Beauties, 1944. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Carroll and Donna Janis. © 2023 Estate of Morris Hirshfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York

Film still, Lady of Burlesque, 1943

An evangelist pageant, 1935

This trio of stage girls resembles that seen in Stage Beauties (1944), now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As art historian Richard Meyer notes, “A year after Stage Beauties, Hirshfield painted a related work, Stage Girls with Angels, that combines the sexual and the celestial.… Janis explicitly linked the painting to Hirshfield’s admiration for burlesque.”

Clockwise from top left: patent for a boudoir slipper designed by Morris Hirshfield, filed in 1923; Morris Hirshfield with drawings for Inseparable Friends, 1942. Photo by Arnold Newman; Hirshfield’s business card

Born to a Jewish family in a small town in Poland, Hirshfield immigrated to the United States as a teenager and began a successful career in the garment industry. After working as a pattern cutter in a women’s cloak and suit factory and working his way up to tailor, Hirshfield opened a competing shop with his brother. He later established the E-Z Walk Manufacturing Company, a wholesaler specializing in arch support and ankle straighteners. The company became extremely successful, expanding its business to ladies’ slippers based on thirty-four designs Hirshfield patented from 1913 to 1934. He retired due to illness in 1937 and took up painting.

“During all these years, although busy manufacturing,” Hirshfield recalled, “I never quite stifled my strong urge to produce artistically, to paint or carve... My first paintings … were called Beach Girl and Angora Cat.”

Hirshfield approached John I. H. Bauer, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, to look at the paintings. Bauer suggested he show them to Hudson Walker, proprietor of an eponymous gallery in Manhattan.

Sidney Janis (far left) with Leo Castelli (second from left), and Willem de Kooning (fourth from left), New York, 1959. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah

“Enter—literally—Sidney Janis, who like Hirshfield had begun in the rag trade, owning M’Lord Shirts. Janis’s financial success allowed him to reinvent himself as a respected collector and part-time curator, becoming an influential member of The Museum of Modern Art’s Advisory Committee. In his quest to identify new talent for an exhibition at the museum he offered to organize, Janis happened into the Hudson Walker Gallery one afternoon. Little interested him, however, upon departing, he noticed several artworks oddly turned to the wall. His curiosity piqued; he asked Walker to reveal the painting’s rectos.”

—Curator and art historian Susan Davidson, in “Morris Hirshfield: The Master of the Two Left Feet Steps Out in Manhattan,” 2022

“What a shock I received! In the center of this rather square canvas, two round eyes, luminously glaring into the darkness, were returning my stare!… They belong to a strangely compelling creature, which sitting possessively upon a remarkable couch, immediately took possession of me.”

—Sidney Janis, They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century, 1942

Exterior view of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939

“In an astonishing feat for an unknown, self-taught artist, both paintings were shown at MoMA the same year they were completed.”

—Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, 2022

Contemporary Unknown American Painters, Museum of Modern Art, October 18–November 18, 1939

Sidney Janis’s “contract” with Hirshfield, 1942

Following this chance encounter, Hirshfield made his artistic debut in Contemporary Unknown American Painters, curated by Janis at The Museum of Modern Art in fall 1939.

The artist and dealer established a lifelong friendship, with Janis serving as Hirshfield’s mentor, dealer, and main collector. Thanks to Janis’s influence at MoMA, the museum acquired Girl in a Mirror and Tiger (both 1940) for a show titled Modern Primitives: Artists of the People in 1941. Janis officially became Hirshfield’s agent a year later.

Janis advocated for MoMA to acquire Girl in a Mirror and Tiger (both 1940) for inclusion in the collection presentation fancily titled Modern Primitives: Artists of the People in 1941. A year later, Janis published They Taught Themselves, a book inspired by his fondness for what he called “non-professional” artists. Hirshfield’s Nude at the Window (1941) graced the publication’s frontispiece, and Hirshfield is featured more than any other artist.

“The former vaudeville dancer and the retired slipper maker were improbable partners in the New York art world of the 1940s. Their unlikely collaboration lies at the heart of a long-overlooked story of modern art and self-invention.”

—Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, 2022

Peggy Guggenheim, c.1930. Photo by Rogi André

Morris Hirshfield, Nude at the Window, 1941. Collection of Carroll Janis

Another influential figure in Hirshfield’s ascendance was the collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim, who had returned to New York with her then husband, surrealist artist Max Ernst. Their home became a center of activity for many émigré artists. In 1942 Guggenheim opened Art of This Century, her museum/gallery that would showcase her abstract and surrealist art collection. The same year, Guggenheim acquired Hirshfield’s Nude at the Window (1941) for nine hundred dollars—for comparison, she bought René Magritte’s The Key of Dreams (1935) the same year for seventy-five dollars.

Evidently intrigued with the painting, Ernst used it as a prop in a surrealist-style “performance.” He brought the painting from the living room to his studio, assembling his friends André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Marcel Duchamp to participate in a staged photograph. Photo by Hermann Landshoff

“A new spirit will be born from the present war.… Nothing seems to me to face this trial better than two pictures … New York Movie by Edward Hopper, and Hirschfield’s [sic] Nude (at the window).… Hirschfield’s nude appears in that unique light of a magician’s act.”

—André Breton, quoted in View, 1941

Morris Hirshfield, Girl with Pigeons, 1942

Hirshfield’s Girl with Pigeons (1942) was included in the 1942 exhibition First Papers of Surrealism, organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp with the support of Janis. The curator Falk Wolf has noted the connection between this painting and fellow self-taught artist Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910), which was exhibited at MoMA in 1935, 1942, and 1944, and was in Janis’s collection when Hirshfield painted his work.

First Papers of Surrealism exhibition catalogue, 1942

Spread from First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

Installation view, First Papers of Surrealism, Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York, 1942 Photo by John D. Schiff

Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Invitation, The Paintings of Morris Hirshfield, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1943

In 1943, encouraged and supported by Janis, MoMA held a monographic exhibition for Hirshfield. Organized by museum director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the show opened during a period now associated with the canonization of modernism. The exhibition—in which many of the works depicted female nudes and performers in Hirshfield’s characteristic style—was reviled by scholars and curators.

Installation view, The Paintings of Morris Hirshfield, The Museum of Modern Art, 1943

“The exhibition generated not only extensive press but considerable rancor centered on the fact that such an august institution would devote real estate to an untutored and relatively unknown artist. While the critics lambasted the museum, labeling Hirshfield ‘the master of the two left feet’ for his propensity to depict his female’s feet in such a manner (a holdover from his slipper manufacturing days) who hailed from ‘deep in the wilds of Brooklyn,’ they especially turned their ire on Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director, calling for his dismissal.”

—Susan Davidson, “Morris Hirshfield: The Master of the Two Left Feet Steps Out in Manhattan,” 2023

Morris Hirshfield, Two Women in Front of a Mirror, 1943. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Exhibition announcement for Recent Paintings by Morris Hirshfield, Julien Levy Gallery, New York, 1944

Stage Girls with Angels was included in Hirshfield's next two solo exhibitions, following his MoMA debut: at Julien Levy Gallery, New York, in 1944, and a memorial exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, New York, in 1947. The painting was most recently featured in the major retrospective Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, curated by Richard Meyer and Susan Davidson, at the American Folk Art Museum, New York—where it was installed in one of the first galleries, across from a vitrine displaying recreations of Hirshfield’s patented shoes and boudoir slippers.

“Art: You Too Can Paint,” Time magazine, 1947

Exhibition brochure for Memorial Showing of the Last Paintings of Morris Hirshfield, Art of This Century, New York, 1947

Exhibition brochure for Memorial Showing of the Last Paintings of Morris Hirshfield, Art of This Century, New York, 1947, with foreward by Sidney Janis

Hirshfield died in 1946 at the age of seventy-four. Janis wrote a tribute published in View magazine, and helped organize a memorial exhibition at Art of This Century. Davidson explains, “Hirshfield’s exposure in New York quickly vanished in the immediate aftermath of his death. The short but fulfilling career he experienced, rightly, had positioned him at the pinnacle of modernist activities in the city.… For the remainder of the twentieth century, Hirshfield’s art was mostly seen in the arena of self-taught, naïve, or primitive art.”

Installation view, 27 Artists, 209 Works, Museum Charlotte Zander, Schloss Bönnigheim, Germany, 2016. Following Hirshfield’s death, the painting remained in the care of Sidney Janis Gallery until 1994, when it was acquired by Charlotte Zander (1930–2014), an important German collector of self-taught and folk art. Focusing exclusively on this genre, Zander’s Galerie Charlotte was open in Munich from 1971 until 1995, and the collector founded Museum Charlotte Zander in Schloss Bönnigheim, near Stuttgart, in 1996.

Installation view, Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, American Folk Art Museum, New York, 2022

Cover and spread from William Saroyan, Sidney Janis, and Oto Bihalji-Merin, Morris Hirshfield, 1976

Cover and spread from Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, 2022

“Hirshfield’s paintings … seem eternally alert, with an absolute stillness and absence of narrative that seem notably modern.”

—Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 2022

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