Walter Hopps (1932-2005)
“I really believe—and, obviously, hope for—radical, or arbitrary, presentations, where cross-cultural and cross-temporal considerations are extreme, out of all the artifacts we have…in terms of people’s priorities, conventional hierarchies begin to shift some. But I mean beyond that—where special presentations can jump around in time and space, in ways we just don’t do now. I really believe in these kinds of shows.”
–Walter Hopps
It was Walter Hopps’ relentless perfectionism—preparators will recall the habitual groan of “Wrong, wrong, wrong” that greeted their best efforts—that cemented the impression of the curator as a mercurial iconoclast. Indeed, while Hopps’ legendary non-conformity 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 Studio, while still a student at UCLA in the early 1950s, and soon achieved acclaim for his Action 1 and Action 2 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 (1963–1967), Hopps mounted an impressive roster of exhibitions, including the first US 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. Until his death, 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, then 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. He once said, in anticipation of his Kienholz retrospective 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.*
*Quote and text taken from A Brief History of Curating (JRP|Ringier)
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