To inaugurate its 50th-anniversary season, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents Revolutions: art from the Hirshhorn collection, 1860–1960, a major survey of artwork made during a transformative period characterized by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. In its first rotation, it presents 208 artworks in the Museum’s permanent collection by 117 artists—including Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Lee Krasner, Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock—made during 100 turbulent and energetic years.

The exhibition includes contemporary work by 19 artists, such as Torkwase Dyson, Rashid Johnson, Annette Lemieux, Dyani White Hawk, and Flora Yukhnovich, whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas and approaches arising during these 100 years remain critical today. Organized by Hirshhorn Associate Curator Marina Isgro and Assistant Curator Betsy Johnson, Revolutions will fill the Museum’s second-floor outer-circle galleries from March 22, 2024, to April 20, 2025.

Revolutions spotlights the rush of art-historical movements and genres that characterized the arc of Modernism and the ascendancy of abstraction, notably through the work of artists interested in engaging the mind, not just the eye. This breadth was evident in Joseph Hirshhorn’s founding gifts to the Museum. An industrialist, collector, and philanthropist, Hirshhorn donated nearly 6,000 works—including a significant number of sculptures—in anticipation of the Museum’s opening on October 4, 1974, and 6,400 more upon his death in 1981. Together these gifts constitute one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. Today, the Hirshhorn collection comprises more than 13,130 artworks.

Revolutions takes a primarily chronological approach to historical movements, pausing occasionally to introduce contemporary works that serve as throughlines. Artists with work on view in Revolutions include:

Berenice Abbott, Anni Albers, Josef Albers, David Alekhuogie, Alexander Archipenko, Jean Arp, Milton Avery, Francis Bacon, Giacomo Balla, Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Castera Bazile, George Bellows, Rigaud Benoit, Thomas Hart Benton, Dawoud Bey, Charles Biederman, Oscar Bluemner, Amoako Boafo, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Brown, Alexander Calder, Emily Carr, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Joseph Cornell, Carlotta Corpron, Ralston Crawford, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Stuart Davis, Dorothy Dehner, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Richard Diebenkorn, Burgoyne Diller, Arthur G. Dove, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Torkwase Dyson, Thomas Eakins, Max Ernst, Aleksandra Exster, Helen Frankenthaler, Yun Gee, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, George Grosz, Grace Hartigan, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Dyani White Hawk, Robert Henri, Auguste Herbin, Hans Hofmann, Loie Hollowell, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Hector Hyppolite, Jasper Johns, Rashid Johnson, Wassily Kandinsky, Barbara Kasten, Franz Kline, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Annette Lemieux, Fernand Léger, Nadia Khodossievitch Léger, Morris Louis, Rick Lowe, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Sally Mann, Reginald Marsh, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Joan Mitchell, Gabriele Münter, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Grandma Moses, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Alice Neel, Barnett Newman, Aliza Nisenbaum, Georgia O’Keeffe, Catherine Opie, Nicolas Party, Paul Pfeiffer, Ann Pibal, Pablo Picasso, Horace Pippin, Jackson Pollock, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Larry Rivers, Auguste Rodin, Mark Rothko, John Singer Sargent, Gino Severini, Ben Shahn, Leon Polk Smith, Janet Sobel, Joseph Stella, Clyfford Still, Rufino Tamayo, Pavel Tchelitchew, Alma Thomas, Joaquín Torres-García, Cy Twombly, Edouard Vuillard, Tsuruko Yamazaki, Flora Yukhnovich, Zao Wou-Ki.