The dream colony : a life in art

Format:

Book

Title:

The dream colony : a life in art

Author:

Hopps, Walter author interviewee

ISBN:

9781632865298

Publication:

New York, NY : Bloomsbury USA, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.

Physical Description:

xix, 312 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

General Note:

Includes index.

Contents:

Childhood -- First encounters with music and art -- Early days of curating: jazz and Syndell Studio -- The Ferus Gallery -- Wallace Berman -- The creation of Ferus II -- Barnett Newman -- Ferus II and John Altoon -- Edwin Janss -- Frank Stella and Andy Warhol -- Edward Kienholz -- The Pasadena Art Museum -- Marcel Duchamp -- The Pasadena Art Museum II -- The 1965 São Paulo Bienal -- Frank Lobdell and Joseph Cornell -- Leaving Pasadena, and the Institute of Policy Studies -- The Corcoran Gallery of Art -- Three photographers -- The 1972 Venice Biennale -- The National Collection of Fine Arts -- Robert Rauschenberg -- The Menil Collection.

Summary:

"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, a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.

Personal Subject:

Hopps, Walter.

Hopps, Walter. (OCoLC)fst00009423

Subject(s):

Art museum curators -- United States -- Biography.

Geographic Term:

United States.

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Biographies.

Added Author:

Treisman, Deborah, 1970-

Doran, Anne, 1957-

Ruscha, Edward

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Monmouth Public Library	921 Hopps, W. 2017	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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.

Author Notes

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 has been the fiction editor of the New Yorker since 2003, and was deputy fiction editor for six years before that. She hosts the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast , and was the editor of the anthology 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker . From 1994 to 1997 she was 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 , ARTnews , Atlantica , and Time Out New York . From 1996 to 2004 she was an editor at Grand Street . Her artwork has been shown in New York at Invisible-Exports and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and in Europe at the Stedelijk Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou, among other venues.

Reviews (3)

Kirkus Review

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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Instead of writing a memoir, intrepid curator Hopps (1932-2005) chose writer, and editor Anne Doran to record more than 100 hours of Hopps' wittily recounted stories about his life. Treisman, who would become the longtime fiction editor for the New Yorker, was first recruited to distill Hopps' spoken autobiography back in 1994, an arduous undertaking that has produced a scintillating and revelatory volume. Born into a medical California family, Hopps, though gifted in math and science, was enthralled by art and music and opened his first gallery while still in college. He then founded, with the radical artist Ed Kienholz, the now-legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and made his way to the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Menil Collection. Hopps emerges as prescient, caring, imaginative, exuberantly unconventional, energetic (often chemically stoked), and downright rascally. Hopps vividly portrays the artists he championed, including Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Wallace Berman. His ebullient stories about the wild frontier of twentieth-century art collecting also feature movie stars, the CIA, binges, dives, the Venice Biennale, and a psych ward. A risk-addicted renegade with deep empathy and appreciation for artists, Hopps was a genuine original whose influence will continue to radiate.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

Library Journal Review

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 © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Deborah TreismanEd Ruscha

Foreword	p. xi
Introduction	p. xv
1 Childhood	p. 1
2 First Encounters with Music and Art	p. 21
3 Early Days of Curating: Jazz and Syndell Studio	p. 38
4 The Ferus Gallery	p. 62
5 Wallace Herman	p. 73
6 The Creation of Ferus II	p. 82
7 Barnett Newman	p. 88
8 Ferus II and John Altoon	p. 96
9 Edwin Janss	p. 105
10 Frank Stella and Andy Warhol	p. 117
11 Edward Kienholz	p. 126
12 The Pasadena Art Museum	p. 146
13 Marcel Duchamp	p. 157
14 The Pasadena Art Museum, Part II	p. 170
15 The 1965 Sao Paulo Bienal	p. 177
16 Frank Lobdell and Joseph Cornell	p. 185
17 Leaving Pasadena, and the Institute of Policy Studies	p. 196
18 The Corcoran Gallery of Art	p. 208
19 Three Photographers	p. 217
20 The 1972 Venice Biennale	p. 229
21 The National Collection of Fine Arts	p. 232
22 Robert Rauschenberg	p. 237
23 The Menil Collection 256 Acknowledgments	p. 273
Walter Hopps: A Selected Chronology by Caroline Huber	p. 275
Illustration Credits	p. 299
Index	p. 302

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (3)

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Library Journal Review

Table of Contents