Morris Hirshfield’s earliest works are painted over reproductions of artwork taken off the walls of his Brooklyn apartment. Among them, Beach Girl—the first of his stiffly posed “dream girls”—would yield the derisive nickname “master of the two left feet.” Despite criticism, Hirshfield persevered, painting landscapes, biblical scenes, and especially animals. These curvy felines, zebras with forlorn expressions, and lions with thickly painted manes all gaze out at the viewer from densely decorated canvases.
Before he committed himself to painting at the age of sixty-five, Hirshfield worked in New York’s garment industry, establishing himself as a purveyor of women’s shoes with the E. Z. Walk Manufacturing Company, which he founded with his brother. In the art collector Sidney Janis’s 1942 book They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century, Hirshfield is quoted: “Even in my young days I exhibited artistic tendencies—not in painting—but in woodcarving, for at the tender age of 12 I aroused our little town by producing for myself a unique noise-maker to be used in the Jewish Purim festivals at the synagogue.”
Born in 1872 in a small Polish town near the German border, Hirshfield moved to the United States at age eighteen, part of a large wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. In New York, he found work making women’s coats. After his retirement in 1937, when he returned to his childhood passion for art, he paid close attention to the details of clothing, surrounding his nudes with lavish draperies and fabric. He also used an approach to painting similar to that for garment making, tracing preparatory drawings as if they were sewing patterns.
Angora Cat caught Janis’s curiosity while he was perusing art at Hudson Walker Gallery. As he recalled in They Taught Themselves, “In the center of this rather square canvas, two round eyes, luminously gleaming in the darkness, were returning my stare! . . . They belonged to a strangely compelling creature which, sitting possessively upon a remarkable couch, immediately took possession of me.” This work was exhibited in the 1939 exhibition Contemporary Unknown American Painters curated by Janis at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Hirshfield received a solo show in 1943, three years before he died. In 2022, the American Folk Art Museum opened Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, the most comprehensive exhibition of his work to date, featuring forty-two of his paintings—more than half of his output.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
