The Dream Colony: A Life in Art

by Walter Hopps, Deborah Treisman, Anne Doran

Overview

Art Forum’s Best of the Year List

A panoramic look at art in America in the second half of the twentieth century, through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it.

An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery in L.A. at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz, where he turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists. Ferus was also the first gallery ever to show Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and was shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman’s edgy art. At the Pasadena Art Museum in the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art—before it was even known as Pop Art. In 1967, when Hopps became the director of Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art at age thirty-four, the New York Times hailed him as "the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation)." He was also arguably the most unpredictable, an eccentric genius who was chronically late. (His staff at the Corcoran had a button made that said WALTER HOPPS WILL BE HERE IN TWENTY MINUTES.) Erratic in his work habits, he was never erratic in his commitment to art.

Hopps died in 2005, after decades at the Menil Collection of art in Houston for which he was the founding director. A few years before that, he began work on this book. With an introduction by legendary Pop artist Ed Ruscha, The Dream Colony is a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632865298
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/06/2017
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	224,445
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Walter Hopps (1932–2005) was a curator and museum director who worked at the Pasadena Art Museum, the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts, the Menil Collection, which he helped create, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Deborah Treisman is the fiction editor of the New Yorker. She hosts the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast and was the editor of the anthology 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker. She was formerly the managing editor of the art and literary quarterly Grand Street, for which Hopps was the art editor.
Anne Doran has written for Art in America, Artforum, and other publications. She worked as an editor at Grand Street. Her artwork has been shown around the world.

Table of Contents

Foreword Deborah Treisman xi

Introduction Ed Ruscha xv

1 Childhood 1

2 First Encounters with Music and Art 21

3 Early Days of Curating: Jazz and Syndell Studio 38

4 The Ferus Gallery 62

5 Wallace Herman 73

6 The Creation of Ferus II 82

7 Barnett Newman 88

8 Ferus II and John Altoon 96

9 Edwin Janss 105

10 Frank Stella and Andy Warhol 117

11 Edward Kienholz 126

12 The Pasadena Art Museum 146

13 Marcel Duchamp 157

14 The Pasadena Art Museum, Part II 170

15 The 1965 Sao Paulo Bienal 177

16 Frank Lobdell and Joseph Cornell 185

17 Leaving Pasadena, and the Institute of Policy Studies 196

18 The Corcoran Gallery of Art 208

19 Three Photographers 217

20 The 1972 Venice Biennale 229

21 The National Collection of Fine Arts 232

22 Robert Rauschenberg 237

23 The Menil Collection 256 Acknowledgments 273

Walter Hopps: A Selected Chronology by Caroline Huber 275

Illustration Credits 299

Index 302

Editorial Reviews

06/15/2017
Readers interested in 20th-century art will enjoy this memoir by influential gallery owner and curator Walter Hopps (1932–2005). Reluctant to write his autobiography, he chose to be interviewed by Deborah Treisman (fiction, The New Yorker) and Anne Doran (artist & writer, Grand Street; Art in America), who recorded hours of tape before Hopps's untimely death cut short the project. The editors carried on, conducting additional interviews and working with archival materials. This title is especially strong in its coverage of Hopps's childhood years in Southern California and career throughout the late 1960s, by which time he had already started two galleries and launched groundbreaking shows. Stories flow from every page: about his talented and eccentric family in Los Angeles of the 1920s-30s; reminiscences of artists famous (Marcel Duchamp, Edward Kienholz) and obscure; of art collectors (Walter and Louise Arensberg; Edwin Janss) and institutions (the Corcoran Gallery; the Menil Collection). Learned but far from stuffy, Hopps merged life and career into one passionate, improvisatory, gonzo experience, his voice and personality present here. VERDICT To date there is no book-length Hopps biography, so this title will help to fill the gap for both scholars and general readers.—Michael Dashkin, New York

Library Journal

2017-03-28
Intimate memories from an acclaimed curator and museum director.Walter Hopps (1932-2005), lauded for his vision, imagination, and mesmerizing storytelling, felt uncomfortable about writing his life story. He agreed, though, to tape more than 100 hours of interviews with artist and editor Doran, with the aim of distilling from them his autobiography. That task has been ably carried out by New Yorker fiction editor Treisman (editor: 20 Under 40: Stories from the New Yorker, 2010), who worked with Hopps in the 1990s on the art and literary magazine Grand Street. Hopps' exposure to modern art came when he was 15 and visited the home of art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg; "the minute I walked through their front door," he recalled, "it was as if I'd passed through the looking glass." Growing up near Los Angeles, Hopps was drawn to the art scene there and "the new cultural frontier" in San Francisco. In 1952, he opened a small gallery in Los Angeles to mount group shows of the artists he admired, and a few years later he established the Ferus Gallery and its offshoot Ferus II. At the age of 27, he became the first curator of the Pasadena Art Museum, moved on to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the Corcoran, and, in 1980, worked with Dominique de Menil to establish her own museum in Houston. Besides imparting a shrewd and entertaining chronicle of his adventures in collecting and exhibiting modern art, Hopps shares warm, animated memories of the many major artists he came to know, including the modest and "hugely intelligent" Marcel Duchamp, whose work he exhibited in Pasadena; Joseph Cornell, diffident, shy, with "the soul of a Balanchine"; Walker Evans, "always such a gracious man"; Barnett Newman, "fascinated by nature, and the experience of nature"; and Andy Warhol. "I never meet another artist who was so good, aesthetically and historically," Hopps writes, "and yet so acutely engaged with disengagement." Sharply drawn sketches and illuminating anecdotes make this book a treat for art lovers.

Kirkus Reviews

Hopps's atmospheric account captures three decades in the art world with such passion and perception that . . . we may very well wish we could have hung out with this dynamo and heard him talk more about art.” —Washington Post

“In The Dream Colony: A Life in Art, [Walter Hopps's] lively posthumous memoir, we learn all manner of detail from Hopps's life . . . A very good read.” —Wall Street Journal

“The colorful tale of this natural-born curator gets told in his own gift-for-the-yarn cadences.” —Best of the Year, ArtForum

“Stories flow from every page . . . Learned but far from stuffy, Hopps merged life and career into one passionate, improvisatory, gonzo experience, his voice and personality present here.” —Library Journal

“A scintillating and revelatory volume . . . Hopps was a genuine original whose influence will continue to radiate.” —Booklist

“A wealth of recollections . . . [Hopps's] idiosyncratic voice rings true in The Dream Colony.” —Art in America

“For those unfamiliar with Hopps, this semi-auto-biographical story will be even more delightful—if only for the anecdotes and images . . . [The Dream Colony] should be treasured by art enthusiasts of all stripes.” —ArtNet

“Walter Hopps was everyone's model of what a curator should be. His landmark exhibitions stay in the mind's eye decades later. Now we have his memoir, a record of Walter's unique personality, his astonishing range of interests and curiosities, and the depth of his feeling for and commitment to the art of his time. Essential reading.” —David Salle

“Walter Hopps was a celebrated museum curator and director, but he had many of the qualities of an artist—he was original, he was inspired, and he was famously late for appointments. He knew the best stories about artists, or at least about Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg and other members of the avant-garde with whom he worked closely. His memoir offers an unusually intimate glimpse at the post-war American art scene. For once, you didn't have to be there, because Hopps was there and tells all.” —Deborah Solomon, author of AMERICAN MIRRO: THE LIFE AND ART OF NORMAN ROCKWELL

“The Dream Colony immediately provides its reader with the exhilarating conviction that you are in the presence of both the craziest and most sane person you will ever be lucky enough to know. Walter Hopps's prodigious gifts as a storyteller are every bit the equal to the adventures that defined a singularly brilliant and deeply principled life in art.” —Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York

“Walter Hopps was one of the greatest talkers I've ever known, and he's at his quirky best in The Dream Colony—a superb evocation of the art world he knew and loved, and a joy to read.” —Calvin Tomkins, NEW YORKER staff writer and author of DUCHAMP: A BIOGRAPHY

“Walter Hopps, the marvelous mad maven of modern art in America, was one clean gleam of a man—never less than completely inspired and always witty in the extreme. Treisman and Doran have accomplished a small miracle, delivering his voice pitch-perfect to the page. Truly like capturing lightning in a bottle!” —Lawrence Weschler, author of WAVES PASSING IN THE NIGHT

From the Publisher