Abram Lerner, who died October 31 at 94, was the personal curator for Joseph Hirshhorn’s enormous collection of modern art, and later became the founding director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

A New York native, Lerner was a talented painter who befriended Joseph Hirshhorn in 1945. Lerner had just taken a job at Manhattan’s ACA Gallery when a potential client appeared.

“This little tornado stormed in,” Lerner told the Washington Post in 1983. “He never gave his name. He said, ‘You be a good boy, and I’ll take that one, that one, that one, and that one.’ Then he left. I had no idea who he was. I thought the keepers were coming to get him.”

Lerner came to learn that instant purchases were the standard operating procedure for the tycoon, who had earned millions in the stock market and Canadian uranium mines. Hirshhorn accumulated at least 12,000 works of art, mainly by 19th- and 20th-century artists. He kept a small part of the collection on display at his Connecticut estate and stored the rest.

In 1957, he persuaded Lerner to come on board as his private curator. Lerner, anxious to devote more time to painting, said he took the job with the expectation that it would be part time.

“I had no idea of the extent of his collection,” Lerner told the New York Times in 1991. Even so, others had exaggerated things.”There were two or three large rooms in a warehouse, not many warehouses as some people have written.”

Lerner also advised Hirshhorn on purchases, including a substantial number of paintings by Thomas Eakins, meant to round out the collection, which some critics had branded eccentric.

In 1966, after meeting with President Johnson, Hirshhorn announced that he was donating his art collection to the nation and that it would be housed in a museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. He made two stipulations: that the museum bear his name and that the founding curator be Lerner. If “they didn’t accept that, it would have been bye-bye Charley,” Hirshhorn said in the Post interview.

When Lerner came on board at the museum’s opening in 1974, there were skeptics who complained that he lacked a formal museum background. But he managed to silence them with a record that included 40 loan shows in the museum’s first decade.

Lerner was born April 11, 1913, on the Lower East Side, and studied art at New York University, where he got early experience curating the annual student show. He studied art in Florence, Italy, in the early 1950s on a grant from Hirshhorn’s foundation. In 1958, he had his first one-man show at Manhattan’s Davis Gallery, mostly landscapes of dunes, Roman rural scenery, and Manhattan rooftops. Working for Hirshhorn took him away from painting, and it would be three decades before he again mounted a show.

Lerner retired in 1984 and moved to his vacation home in Southampton, where he again took up painting and exhibited at the Elaine Benson Gallery in nearby Bridgehampton. In recent years he lived in a retirement community in Canaan, Conn., near his daughter, Aline Libassi, who survives him, as do two grandchildren.