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ArtForum,
Feb,
1996 by
Hans-Ulrich
Obrist
In Calvin Tomkins' 1991 New Yorker profile "A Touch for the Now,"
curator Walter Hopps comes across as an eccentric maverick. We learn of
his preferred schedule (his workday begins not long before sundown and
stretches into the morning hours) and near-mythic disappearing acts (his
elusiveness prompted employees at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington,
D.C., where he served as director in the '70s, to make buttons reading
"WALTER HOPPS WILL BE HERE IN 20 MINUTES"). It was his
relentless perfectionism, however - preparators will recall the habitual
groan "Wrong, wrong, wrong" that greeted their best efforts -
that cemented the impression of the curator as a mercurial iconoclast.
Indeed, while Hopps' legendary nonconformity may overshadow his curatorial
accomplishment, his independence is not unrelated to his achievement. In a
40-year career spent in and out of the museum world, during which he has
organized well over 100 exhibitions, he has never succumbed to
administrative logic or routine (he once said working for bureaucrats
while a senior curator at the National Collection of Fine Arts - now the
National Museum of American Art - was "like moving through an
atmosphere of Seconal"). Hopps, in retrospect, manages to come across
as both consummate insider and quintessential outsider.
Hopps opened his first gallery, Syndell Gallery, while still a student at
UCLA in the early '50s, and soon achieved acclaim for his "Action
1" and "Action2" overviews of a new generation of
California artists. Later, his Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles would bring
attention to such artists as Ed Kienholz, George Herms, and Wallace
Berman. As director of the Pasadena Museum of Art (1963-67), Hopps mounted
an impressive roster of exhibitions, including the first U.S.
retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell and the first museum
overview of American Pop art ("New Paintings of Common Objects")
- not to mention Marcel Duchamp's first one-man museum show.
Yet Hopps has enjoyed as much success outside institutional settings as
within them. Shows such as "Thirty-Six Hours," in which he hung
the work of any and all comers over a two-and-a-half-day period, are case
studies in curating art outside museum settings, Even today Hopps works in
multiple contexts: while serving as consulting curator for the Menil
Collection in Houston, he also puts in time as art editor of Grand Street,
a literary journal that he has helped turn into an artists' showcase.
Hopps' flair as an impresario is matched only by his knack for hanging
stunning shows. As Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, put it, his success comes from "his sense of the character of
works of art, and of how to bring that character out without getting in
the way." But Hopps also sees the curator as something like a
conductor striving to establish harmony between individual musicians. As
he told me when I sat down to interview him in Houston in December, in
anticipation of his Kienholz retrospective that goes up this month at the
Whitney, it was Duchamp who taught him the cardinal curatorial rule: in
the organization of exhibitions, the works must not stand in the way.
HANS-ULRICH OBRIST: You worked in the early '50s as a music impresario and
organizer. How did the transition to organizing exhibitions take place?
WALTER HOPPS: They both happened at the same time. When I was in high
school, I formed a kind of photographic society, and we did projects and
exhibits at the high school. It was also at that time that I first met
Walter and Louise Arensberg.
But some of my closest friends were actually musicians, and the '40s were a
great time of innovation in jazz. It was a thrill to be able to see
classic performers like Billie Holliday around the clubs in Los Angeles,
or the new people like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.
The younger musicians I knew began to try to get engagements and bookings,
but it was very hard in those days. Black jazz frightened parents; it
frightened the officials. It was worse in this way than rock 'n' roll. It
had a subversive quality.
I had the good luck to discover the great baritone-saxophone player Gerry
Mulligan. Later, I had the chance to go on a double date with his
wonderful trumpet player, Chet Baker. You know, those guys had a different
sort of social life than would normally be the case. Somehow I managed a
jazz business and the small gallery near UCLA, Syndell Studio, at the same
time I was in school.
HUO: For contemporary artists there was an incredible lack of visibility.
WH: Right. In Southern California there were only two occasions during my
youth when any of the New York School people were shown. And the critics
damned them. One was an incredible show of New York School artists,
"The Intrasubjectivists," that Sam Kootz and others were
involved with putting together. And there was a show by Joseph Fulton, a
predecessor of mine at the Pasadena Art Museum. He brought in a beautiful
show with Pollock and Enrico Donati - a mix of the new Americans and sort
of more Surrealist-oriented things. De Kooning was in it, Rothko, and so
on.
The only critical writing we normally had access to was Clement Greenberg's
- who was so contentious and arrogant - and the beautiful writing of
Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess. Hess constantly looked for every reason
he could to champion de Kooning, as you know. We had virtually no critics
like that in Southern California at the time. There was also Jules
Langsner, who championed the abstract minimal kind of hard-edged painting
- John McLaughlin, etc. He just couldn't accept Pollock.
HUO: How were these shows received?
WH: What impressed me was that the audience was there - younger artists and
people who were not officially part of the art world then were really
intrigued. It had a real human audience.
HUO: It seems like a paradox - there had been little to see, then suddenly
around '51, there was a climax in art on the West Coast, You've talked
about a project of organizing a show of works all created in 1951.
WH: I would see the crest of great Abstract Expressionist work as extending
from 1946 through 1951. This is true for New York and also, on a smaller
scale, for San Francisco. During this period, most of the important
Abstract Expressionist painters in America were working in top form. I
really wanted to do a show about 1951, with 100 artists represented by a
single major work apiece. It would have been fabulous. Lawrence Alloway,
in London, understood what was going on in a way that many people in
America did not. He had great insights about the new American art, I'll
give him that.
HUO: Previously you've mentioned Stieglitz's 291 Gallery as a source of
inspiration for your exhibitions.
WH: Yes. I knew a little bit about what had gone on there at 291. Stieglitz
was the first person to show both Picasso and Matisse in America. Even
before the Armory Show, you know.
HUO: So before Arensberg.
WH: Yes. Arensberg's collection really began in 1913, at the time of the
Armory Show. Several collections start then: Duncan and Marjorie Phillips'
collection in Washington begins then; and Arensberg's began. Katherine
Dreier was crucial. She, with Duchamp and Man Ray, had the first modern
museum in America. And it was actually called the Modern Museum, although
it was mostly known as the Societe Anonyme.
HUO: The year 1913 leads us somehow back to the discussion we had during
lunch, when you gave 1924 as a second very important date.
WH: Oh, yes. Nothing really happened in museums until around 1924. It took
that long. Then in New York and San Francisco, a little bit in Los
Angeles, a little bit in Chicago - among certain collectors within those
museums things began to happen. Soon after Arensberg moved to Southern
California, he had the idea of founding a Modern-art museum with his
collection out there - combining some other collections with his. But it
was fated not to happen. There were not enough collectors of Modern art to
support such a project in Southern California.
HUO: So '24 is also the year he left New York?
WH: Yes. To me, the Arensbergs coming to Southern California gave it the
cachet, the license, to do anything, even though the public and the
officials were so contrary about contemporary art. Even during my time,
right after World War II - in the late '40s and early '50s - the politics
of the McCarthy era were very hard on art in the institutions in Southern
California. Picasso and even Magritte - Magritte, who had no politics, who
was, if anything, a kind of patron of the royalists - had their work taken
down as being subversive and communistic in the one museum we had in Los
Angeles. There was plenty of weak contemporary art in Southern California.
The whole school of Rico Lebrun. There were all these Picasso-like people
and lots of insipid variations on Matisse; it just made you sick. There
was more authenticity and soul in some of the landscape painters.
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