Walter Hopps hopps hopps

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.

But things slowly began to creep in. In Southern California, the hard-edge painters, like John McLaughlin, began to be accepted in exhibitions. The public didn't like it, but they would be hung by the museums, for example by James B. Byrnes, the first curator of Modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. San Francisco was the other place in the United States where great Abstract Expressionist art was beginning to be shown seriously, like Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, as presented by a brilliant and pioneering curator of Modern art, Jermayne MacAgy.

HUO: Was Richard Diebenkorn shown?

WH: Diebenkorn was their student. He also began to be shown, as well as David Park and others.