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Walter Hopps hopps hopps

ArtForum, Feb, 1996 by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

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.

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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.

Walter Hopps hopps hopps

ArtForum, Feb, 1996 by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

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