AT HOME WITH: Olga Hirshhorn; The Thrill of Art, Both Fine and Flea

January 18, 1996, Thursday By BARBARA GAMAREKIAN (NYT); Home Desk

Olga Hirshhorn's normally cheery countenance was gloomy as she peered at the driving rain outside the window of her tiny carriage house in northwest Washington. Her regular Sunday excursion to the Georgetown flea market would have to be scuttled.

"Darn," she said. "I wanted to see if I couldn't get some material to match the pillows I bought last Sunday." From a cabinet, she pulled a Moroccan rug and several pillows in glorious hues of coral, gold, Chinese red and blue-green. "Aren't these colors wonderful? And I only paid $115! He wanted $120, but we flipped for it."

Olga Hirshhorn learned the fine art of wheeling and dealing from a master: her late husband, Joseph Hirshhorn, a self-made man who amassed much of his fortune exploring for oil in Canada. A collector of modern painting and sculpture, he also founded the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden here.

Mrs. Hirshhorn, 74, announced in March that she was donating her own collection of paintings, sculpture and works on paper, believed to be worth about $10 million, to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. The decision surprised many in the museum world, who had assumed she would choose the Hirshhorn.

It was not an easy decision, she said, for she is close to the staff at the Hirshhorn. But she has long had ties to the Corcoran, one of the capital's few private museums, and has served on the board of the Corcoran School of Art since arriving here with her husband in 1977.

Mrs. Hirshhorn has always had an eye for color and design but said she knew nothing about contemporary art when she first met Joseph Hirshhorn in 1961 in her hometown of Greenwich, Conn. As Olga Zatorsky Cunningham, the owner of Services Unlimited, an employment agency, she received innumerable telephone inquiries about chauffeurs and upstairs maids from "a Mr. Hirshhorn" who had just bought a mansion on Round Hill. "He was very abrupt," she said. "He'd order up a chauffeur like ordering a loaf of bread. And one day he asked me, 'Mrs. Cunningham, how old are you?' And I said: 'Forty-one. How old are you?' He said, 'I'm 64.' And then he asked, 'Mrs. Cunningham, how tall are you?' And I said 5 feet. I didn't ask how tall he was, because I knew he must be short."

Thus did romance bloom between the 5-foot-4-inch Joe Hirshhorn, who was separated from his third wife, and Mrs. Cunningham, who was separated from the schoolteacher husband she had married at 18.

Soon afterward she was invited to drop by his art-filled home. "I was overwhelmed at what I saw and said, 'My, you've got a lot of statues,' " she recalled. "He shook his finger at me and said: 'I don't have statues. I have sculpture.'

"That was my first lesson. The second lesson he taught me was to never say I didn't like a work of art, but to say I didn't understand it."

Two and a half years after they met, Mr. Hirshhorn announced, "If you lose 10 pounds I'll marry you."

"So I lost 10 pounds, very quickly I might say," she explained with a grin. "And we married about a month later."

Life with Mr. Hirshhorn, she said, was total immersion in the art world, for their friends were artists, dealers, collectors, art historians and museum people.

Slowly, she began to build her own collection, beginning with pieces given to her by her husband and artist friends. "The stories you may have heard about Joe's method of buying are true," she said. "He would go to the galleries and point to different things and say, 'I'll take that, that, that and that, and throw that little one in for Olga.' "

She delighted in her first purchase, a painting by Josef Albers. "Although I had many works of art at the time, I never had had the pleasure of choice," she said.

When she began to buy on her own she found that her credit was good. "I didn't have Joe Hirshhorn's money," she said. "But being his wife, I was able to buy things on time, and I would send different galleries $50 or $100 each month."

At her husband's death in 1981, his art collection went to the Hirshhorn Museum, and Mrs. Hirshhorn found herself with bare walls. Her own collection grew rapidly. Since his death, Mrs. Hirshhorn has lectured around the country and in India and Japan about "the Hirshhorn Museum and the Hirshhorn collection and my life with Joe and the artists we have known."

Asked what she most admired and remembered about her husband, she spoke of his sense of humor and zest for living. "For him, every day was Sunday," she said. "He wouldn't like my life style now, because he enjoyed a lot of servants around and a big house and fancy cars. I travel economy and carry my own luggage. It's easier. It's simpler."

It was she who introduced her husband to flea markets. "He thought he had died and gone to heaven," she said with a laugh, "because everything was so cheap."

She said that David C. Levy, the director of the Corcoran Gallery, shares her affinity for flea markets, recently appearing with his latest find: a vintage toaster to add to her collection of antique toasters.

"I've become very close to David and have watched the development of the Corcoran under his directorship," she said, "and I suddenly thought, That's the place for my collection! Because David really cares for that museum and that building and that art school. He wants it to be an important museum, and it will be."

And she is still collecting art. The telephone, which had already rung a dozen times this morning, rang again. It was Michael Clark, a Washington artist, who made a date to come by to hang one of his paintings, a recent acquisition. "I think I'll have him put it up there," Mrs. Hirshhorn said, pointing to a spot just below the 20-foot ceiling of her pint-size kitchen, already filled with art objects, among them a dozen antique toasters and small sculptures by Barbara Hepworth and Mark di Suvero.

A herb garden and a red ribbon at the gate welcome visitors to what Mrs. Hirshhorn calls her "Mouse House," just 500 square feet on three levels with winding stairs leading to a tiny bedroom in a turret. There, a trompe l'oeil ceiling created by Dana Westring, a Washington artist, depicts a deep blue sky studded with gold-leaf stars.

Antique necklaces frame the mirror in the bathroom, which is tucked midway up the staircase, and a peek into the medicine cabinet reveals pre-Columbian and Greek statuary. "There's always awful-looking stuff in medicine cabinets, and I thought I'd surprise my guests," she said. Over the Victorian sofa (purchased at a yard sale for $6 in 1939) hangs a 19th- century Korean portrait scroll. Across the room, in an interplay of crimson, is a Kenneth Noland target painting, a wedding gift from the artist. There are tiny Calder bronzes and mobiles, Gorky drawings and small de Koonings and Picassos and O'Keeffes, many inscribed "to Olga." And 50 or more drawings, watercolors and etchings form a collage up the staircase.

"It's all touchable, all within arm's length," she said. "It's really a fun house, but living here is an exercise in discipline. After you read a newspaper or book, you have to throw it away." A necessity, given the fact she stores her voluminous art files in the oven and dishwasher.

"Look, isn't this neat?" she asked as she rummaged through the dishwasher, where pens and pencils were stacked in the silverware container. "Here are elastic bands and staples and my money belt and my 'fuzz buster.' I'm ready for a quick getaway."

She indulges her passion for cooking at her two other art-filled houses, on Martha's Vineyard and in Naples, Fla., where she has a waterside estate with eight bathrooms, acres of grapefruit, orange and kumquat trees and a screened-in pool.

On the Vineyard, where she has had a home for six years, she spent her first three summers restoring a barn, which serves as a guest house, and remodeling "a dumb ranch-style house" by raising the ceiling and adding a bay window and a dormer. Of course, both the barn and the house display enchanting works of art.

She relishes all three of her homes and the varying styles of living they provide for her, observing, "I haven't yet decided what is going to be the house of my last illness."

Once again, the telephone rang. It was Ira M. Lowe, a Washington lawyer who advises many artists.

"I'm going there for lunch, and I told him to put a potato on," she explained. "We do it often. Last time, we each had a baked white potato and a baked sweet potato, and he boiled some new potatoes. It's wonderful: you don't realize how much fun it can be to not make a big deal out of lunch."