Walter Hopps; Menil Collection founding director
Hyfler/Rosner
curator.
Founding director of Menil Collection dies at age 72
By PATRICIA C. JOHNSON
Houston Chronicle
March 20, 2005, 9:58PM
Walter Hopps, a legendary figure in the international art
world and founding director of the Menil Collection, died
Sunday in Los Angeles, where he had given a speech earlier
this month. He was 72.
A maverick curator with enormous respect for artists, Hopps
organized landmark exhibitions time and again over a 50-year
career that included posts as the director of the Corcoran
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and curator of 20th
century art for the Smithsonian Institution. Hopps was
hospitalized March 14 after falling and breaking three ribs.
He died in Cedars-Sinai Hospital of heart failure, according
to a friend of the family.
His long career as a brilliant if sometimes controversial
curator began in 1956 when he and artist Edward Kienholz
founded the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles to spotlight
progressive art by unknown artists from the West Coast and
across the country, from Robert Irwin to Andy Warhol.
"I think Walter Hopps is the only genius I ever knew. The
only real genius I will ever know," said Marti Mayo,
director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. "He was a
visionary; maddeningly eccentric, with a visual memory
without parallel.
"He could remember everything he ever saw in his life."
"I don't think there is anyone who presented modern and
contemporary art better than Walter," said Peter Marzio,
director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "He had
enormous respect for artists and was able to pull from their
work a timeless quality."
In 1963, Hopps was named director of the Pasadena Art
Museum, where he organized the first retrospectives of
European avant-gardists in this country, including Kurt
Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp. In another first, he brought
the world of Joseph Cornell to the public eye.
He left Pasadena in 1967 for the Corcoran and in 1972 moved
to the Smithsonian. He served as American commissioner of
the 1972 Venice Biennale, intorducing photography to that
forum with an exhibition of works by Diane Arbus.
Hopps came to Houston in 1979 at the request of Dominique de
Menil, serving as a consultant to the Menil Foundation. A
year later, he was named founding director of the Menil
Collection, the private museum internationally known for its
holdings in Surrealism, Byzantine art and modern art. He
held that post until 1989, when he resigned to become
consulting curator for the Menil Collection, a position that
allowed him to concentrate on organizing exhibits.
"He had an amazing career and such a passionate relationship
with artists," said Josef Helfenstein, Menil Collection
director since January 2004. "I am so sorry we didn't have
more time to work together."
Helfenstein and Louisa Sarofim, chairwoman of the Menil
Collection, both said his death was a loss to the Menil and
the international art community.
"He had such an extraordinary body of knowledge and was such
a great raconteur," Sarofim said. "He loved artists and was
able to convey their spirit to some of us who didn't know."
The range of exhibitions he organized for the Menil was
catholic and intense. Among them was an in-depth study of
Duchamp's Fountain (1988) and a look at formerly obscure
California artist Jay DeFeo (1990). More recently, he
organized massive traveling retrospectives of Robert
Rauschenberg (1998) and James Rosenquist (2003).
One of his current projects was preparing an installation of
work by Texas artists given to the Menil by William Hill.
"Walter ... was willing to see anything, anytime, by anybody
and thoroughly enjoyed it," artist Virgil Grotfeldt said.
Born in Eagle Rock, Calif., in 1932, Hopps attended Stanford
University, UCLA and Yale, but never received a degree.
Rather, his expertise and knowledge were garnered by
experience and his own curiosity.
As a teenager he became a friend of Walter and Louise
Arensberg, renowned collectors in Los Angeles. Through them
he met Marcel Duchamp and learned about the School of Paris.
He was essentially a self-taught art historian, with an
astounding eye for detail and an eye for revolutionary art.
His memory of works of art of whatever period - Renaissance,
German Expressionist, American contemporary - was precise.
Hopps genuinely liked artists - the who and why and what of
their creative life - spending time in their studios and
looking at their shows, sharing a leisurely meal or cup of
coffee - and promoting them any way he could.
In a lengthy 1991 profile for New Yorker magazine, writer
Calvin Tomkins described Hopps as thinking like an artist.
"His sensitivity to works of art takes in not only the works
themselves but also the dialogue that he believes can and
should occur between one work and another," Tomkins wrote.
Though art history and scholarship are important, he added,
"the primary emphasis is always on how the art looks on the
wall, and this, surprisingly, makes Hopps something of a
maverick in his profession."
In recognizing his rare mind and eye, the Menil Foundation
established the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial
Achievement in 2001 to recognize individuals "whose
exhibitions reflect the vision, spirit and innovation that
have been at the heart of Walter's curatorial skills."
The announcement was made at a gala dinner at the Menil
where the guest list was a virtual Who's Who of the art
world, from Robert Rauschenberg and Nancy Kienholz and the
country's top museum directors, to Hollywood star Dennis
Hopper.
Hopps is survived by his wife, Caroline Huber, of Houston.
Funeral services were pending.
Hyfler/Rosner
Curator Brought Fame to Postwar L.A. Artists
LA Times
Walter Hopps, an art dealer and museum curator who was
instrumental in bringing the first generation of postwar Los
Angeles artists to international prominence and whose 1963
retrospective of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp ranks as a
seminal event in modern museum history, died Sunday in Los
Angeles after a brief hospitalization. He was 72 and lived
in Houston.
Frail and in ill health for some time, Hopps had pneumonia,
according to artist Ed Moses, a longtime friend. Hopps was
in Southern California for a 45-year survey of assemblage
art by sculptor George Herms, which he organized for the
Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Artist Larry Bell said that he had unexpectedly encountered
Hopps in the coffee shop of a Venice hotel last Tuesday and
that he insisted on taking him to see his doctor.
Bell said Hopps had fallen earlier and broken several ribs,
which contributed to a buildup of fluids in his lungs. On
Saturday, Bell and Moses had hoped to visit Hopps at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, but Hopps had been moved to
intensive care and was in a coma. He died there Sunday
morning.
At the time of his death, Hopps was curator of 20th century
art at the Menil Collection in Houston, where he had been
founding director, and an adjunct senior curator at New
York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. When the surprise dual
appointment was made, Ned Rifkin, then director of the
Menil, described Hopps as "a giant among his peers in the
arena of modern and contemporary curators." He organized a
large retrospective of paintings by American Pop artist
James Rosenquist for the Guggenheim in 2002.
Hopps' most celebrated exhibition was the 1963 Duchamp
retrospective, held at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the
Norton Simon Museum) in its original home on Los Robles
Avenue. Hopps was in his first year as curator. He had been
introduced to the French expatriate's iconoclastic work in
the late 1940s, during a high school visit to the Hollywood
home of art collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg. Their
formidable collection of Cubist, Surrealist, Dadaist and
other modern art, now a centerpiece of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, included such classic Duchamp works as "Nude
Descending a Staircase" (1912).
During the Pasadena show, Hopps arranged two chess matches
with the impish artist -- one for himself and one for the
young writer Eve Babitz, who famously played her match nude.
The Duchamp exhibition was typical of Hopps' modus operandi
as a curator. He had come upon the artist by accident as an
impressionable and inquisitive youth, and he was determined
to follow his instincts; he knew from his conversations with
young artists that their interest in Duchamp's art was far
ahead of the museum establishment's. A Duchamp retrospective
was not mounted in New York, where the artist lived, until
1973, five years after his death. The Pasadena show entered
the realm of legend as a symbol of a more freewheeling, less
tradition-bound artistic climate in Southern California.
Hopps' first exhibition, organized with his first wife,
Shirley, in 1954, was itself unorthodox. Dubbed "The
Merry-Go-Round Show," it arose from his concern that a new
generation of Abstract Expressionist painters was not being
seen in L.A. Hopps rented the merry-go-round at the Santa
Monica Pier for $80, stretched tarp around the poles and
hung nearly 100 paintings by 40 artists, including Richard
Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Jay De Feo. All
were for sale, none for more than $300. Nothing sold.
Hopps and his wife regularly held informal exhibitions in
their Brentwood apartment, where occasional sales helped
keep them afloat. He briefly operated a gallery housed in a
small structure built from used telephone poles. Called
Syndell Studios, it was named in memory of a farmer who was
killed in a freak accident while Hopps was driving
cross-country. At Syndell Studios, Hopps showed the seminal
Beat generation artist Wallace Berman, and he met Herms.
In 1957 he and artist Ed Kienholz, who would become an
important figure in the development of assemblage art on the
West Coast, opened Ferus Gallery. Ferus, the first
professional space in L.A. to be principally devoted to the
Southern California avant-garde, rapidly became the most
adventurous and influential contemporary art gallery west of
Manhattan.
In addition to showing the work of established Abstract
Expressionist painters, Ferus introduced young L.A. artists
to the growing scene, including Bell, Billy Al Bengston,
Craig Kauffman and Robert Irwin. Moses had his first
exhibition at Ferus while still a student at UCLA. Hopps
once told The Times that the name Ferus -- Latin for
"uncivilized" or "wild" -- was "borrowed from an
anthropological description of an aboriginal tribe with
subhuman, irascible, possibly dangerous tendencies."
The implied link between science and art came naturally.
Hopps was a native of Glendale, born in 1932 into a family
of prominent surgeons. He was home-tutored until junior high
school, when he entered the private Polytechnic School in
Pasadena. From there he went to Eagle Rock High School.
After so many cloistered years, he described high school as
"the most exciting time of my life; all of a sudden kids,
boys, girls -- friends." It was with a class of Eagle Rock
students that he first visited the Arensberg collection, to
which he later returned on his own. The work of Duchamp,
Picasso, Brancusi, Dali, Miro and many others made a
profound impression on him.
"That was the clash," Hopps later told a Times reporter. "I
thought of myself as a rational positivist. And I couldn't
figure out why this seemingly nice, intelligent man
[Arensberg was a prosperous businessman] had devoted his
life to this collection. I started reading."
The Arensbergs had been the unofficial center of the
European emigre Dada movement when they lived in New York;
in Hollywood, where they moved in 1927, their role changed
to that of keepers of its history.
Duchamp had been the primary advisor in the development of
their collection, and for them he was the center of that
legacy. It was a legacy that encountered much hostility in
Los Angeles, where, just a few years after Hopps' first
visit to the collection, the City Council decreed that
Modern art was Communist propaganda and banned its public
display.
In 1950, Hopps enrolled at Stanford; a year later he
switched to UCLA to study microbiology. He also studied art
history. Shortly after opening Ferus, he began to teach at
UCLA Extension; over the next four years he helped to
cultivate a group of art collectors informed about the
avant-garde, including Betty Freeman, Monte Factor, Ed Janss
and Fred and Marcia Weisman.
Kienholz made a witty 1959 assemblage-sculpture portrait of
his early partner at Ferus, the title of which, "Walter
Hopps Hopps Hopps," suggested his peripatetic energy. Its
allusion to Beat era slang for illegal drugs also described
a problem that followed Hopps for many years.
Part homage, part satire, the sculpture was made from a gas
station advertising sign that featured a cutout of the
Bardahl motor oil man. Kienholz turned the clean-cut image
into a picture of a slippery salesman of Modern art. Hopps,
with his trademark horn-rimmed glasses, black suit and
skinny necktie, is shown pulling open his jacket as if he
were a sidewalk slicker hawking hot merchandise to
unsuspecting passersby. Instead of jewelry or watches,
however, he reveals vest-pocket pictures of paintings by
Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.
Turn around the sculpture -- at 6 feet, 6 inches tall,
appropriately just larger than life -- and the back features
a spine made from animal vertebrae, a rotary dial telephone
and annotated lists of important people in the L.A. art
world.
Kienholz left the gallery to pursue his own work, and Irving
Blum, a Knoll furniture salesman, became Hopps' partner in
Ferus. Conflicts between them -- which later resulted in
Shirley Hopps' becoming Shirley Blum -- led to Hopps'
departure. In 1962 he was hired by Thomas Leavitt to become
curator of the Pasadena Art Museum. In addition to the
Duchamp retrospective, Hopps organized the first museum show
of Frank Stella's paintings, a landmark survey of box
assemblages by Joseph Cornell and "The New Painting of
Common Objects," a groundbreaking 1962 survey that heralded
the emergence of Pop art. When Leavitt departed the museum
in 1964, Hopps was elevated to director; at 31, he was the
youngest art museum director in America.
He was asked to resign four years later, the first of many
times that jobs ended badly or in a cloud of complications.
He was celebrated for his curatorial abilities and his
working relationships with artists, but was a notoriously
poor administrator.
Perhaps the most famous art-world story about Hopps
concerned his chronic lateness. During his tenure at the
Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the staff made lapel
buttons that said, "Walter Hopps will be here in 20
minutes."
"He didn't like museum bureaucracies," Moses said. "All his
files at the Pasadena Art Museum were kept under the carpet.
When he left there, he didn't let anybody know about the
files. Later, when they rolled up this giant carpet, they
found very careful files and letters."
Hopps was named director of the Corcoran in 1970 and fired
in 1972. His seven years at the National Collection of Fine
Arts (now the National Museum of American Art) were marked
by chronic absenteeism, which prompted Director Joshua
Taylor to pay his curator only for the time he spent inside
the building. Hopps joined Houston's Menil Foundation in
1980 -- artistically an excellent fit, given the
collection's strength in Surrealism -- and became founding
director of its celebrated museum in 1987; but patron
Dominique de Menil despaired of her director's
administrative failings. He was made chief curator and a new
director was hired. In 2001 the Menil Foundation inaugurated
the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, a $25,000
prize bestowed biennially by an international jury.
Hopps once estimated that he organized more than 250 museum
shows during his career. Most were well received. Among his
great successes was a pair of Robert Rauschenberg surveys --
one for the National Museum on the occasion of the 1976
American Bicentennial, the other, in 1991, for the Menil.
Among his rare failures was 1984's "The Automobile and
Culture," a show for L.A.'s then new Museum of Contemporary
Art that ironically ended up demonstrating what little
influence automotive imagery had on Modern art.
"With him goes a certain breed of unorthodox curator," said
painter and Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens, who lived in
Los Angeles during Hopps' heyday at Ferus and the Pasadena
Museum. "Museums now are much more business-based and
focused on the bottom line. There are fewer margins for
error, so you don't have guys like Hopps who are not
organization people -- much to their credit. He might have
been the last of the breed."
Hopps is survived by his second wife, Caroline Huber. A
memorial service is being planned.
Times staff writer Suzanne Muchnic contributed to this
report.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: PERIPATETIC: Ed Kienholz's 1959 assemblage-
sculpture, "Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps," is part satire, part
tribute to his former partner. PHOTOGRAPHER: Whitney Museum
of American Art PHOTO: 'A GIANT AMONG HIS PEERS': Hopps
estimated that he had organized more than 250 shows. Behind
him: Peter Phillips' "The Art-O-Matic Loop di Loop."
PHOTOGRAPHER: Los Angeles Times