Parliamentary Buildings
1946 · Oil on canvas
36 1/8 x 28" (91.7 x 71.1 cm)
Museum of Modern Art
WATTS INDEXThe canonical database of visual culture
Morris Hirshfield
Polish-American, 1872
PaintingNaive Art
Representation
None documented
12
Institutional Exhibitions
9
Works in Collection
20
Assets Indexed
3
Authority-backed Facts
0
Publications Referenced
90%
Profile Completeness
Cultural Positioning
Movements
- • Naive Art
Related Artists
No edges recorded
Influence Graph
No influence edges encoded yet.
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
View all exhibitions →No image
Naive Painting: A Selection from the Museum Collection
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1972
No image
Ways of Looking
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1971
No image
The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1968
No image
Art in the Mirror
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1966–1967
No image
Birds and Beasts from the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1960–1961
About
Why this artist matters now
Morris Hirshfield was an American painter who turned to art in his sixties after a career in manufacturing and garment production. His paintings, executed in oil on canvas, depict animals, nudes, and still lifes rendered in a flattened, densely patterned style that draws from folk traditions and decorative arts rather than academic training. Working in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, Hirshfield built an idiosyncratic visual language characterized by obsessive surface detail, symmetrical composition, and a disregard for perspective. His work anticipates later interest in outsider and self-taught aesthetics.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 25d ago
Graph relationships
Taste overlap and adjacency
Movement
Naive Art
Medium
Painting
Related Artists
12 in graph
Institutional
Museum Collections
Canonical record
Artworks (9)
View all 9 artworks →
Record
Images
Related artists
Adjacent in the graph
Brent Wadden
Shared movement
Krsto Hegedušić
Shared movement
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Shared movement
Horace Pippin
Shared movement
Danny Lyon
Shared movement
Tom Otterness
Shared movement
Lisa Yuskavage
Also painting
Robert Ryman
Also painting
Adolph Gottlieb
Also painting
Jasper Johns
Also painting
Neo Rauch
Also painting
Richard Artschwager
Also painting
Record
Movements and affiliations
Institutional
Representation & Collections
In collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In collection
Museum of Modern Art
New York, US
Record