HName: Blum, Shirley Neilsen         née Neilsen     Blum-Resek, Shirley [2005]

DateBorn: 1932

Placeborn: Petaluma, CA

Datedied:

Placedied:

HDescrip: Scholar of Northern Renaissance art, particularly of donor influences.  Blum was born Shirley Neilsen to Melvin Louis Neilsen and Anna Keyes (Neilsen).  Her father was a medical doctor. She attended Stockton College until 1952 and then the University of Chicago, receiving an M.A. in 1955.  The same year, she married the gallery dealer Walter C. Hopps (1933-2005) in a ceremony at the Watts Towers in LA.  Walter Hopps founded the Ferus Gallery--the Los Angeles Gallery that gave early exposure to Ed Rusha, Billy Al Bengston and Ed Kienholz--with partner Irving Blum (b. 1930) in 1958.  After further graduate study at Radcliffe College between 1955-1956, she moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she pursued her Ph.D.  Shirley Hopps was an instructor in humanities and art history at the University of Chicago,1961-1962, returning to California and University of California, Riverside, as an assistant professor in 1962.  The same year, she witnessed the installation of Andy Warhol's famous soup cans at Ferus.  Her Ph.D. was granted from UCLA in 1964.  She began an affair with her husband's partner, Blum;  Walter Hopps left the Gallery to become the director of the Pasadena Museum (today the Norton Simon Museum). In 1966 she co-authored a catalog for a joint exhibition between UC Irvine and UC Riverside, Jawlensky and the Serial Image.  She divorced Hopps and married Blum in 1967. Now Shirley Blum, she was promoted to associate professor of art history at Riverside.  A revision of her Ph.D. thesis appeared in 1969 as the book Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage, part of the California Studies in the History of Art series.  When her husband relocated his gallery to New York, Blum accepted a position for a year as Dana Professor of Fine Arts, 1973, at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY.  She was appointed professor of art at the State University of New York College at Purchase, in 1977. Blum authored a second exhibition catalog, The Window in Twentieth-century Art for the SUNY-Purchase gallery in 1986. She retired Professor Emerita from Purchase.

Though Blum was trained and published as a northern Renaissance specialist, her proximity to the unfolding of modern art of the 1960's gave her equal authority to write on that area.  Her dissertation and subsequent book represented ground-breaking work in the examination of how commissioners of Netherlandish art determined the outcome of the work.

HCountry: United States

HBiography: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art.  Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 119; Nelson, Steffie. "Rebirth of the Cool." Swindle no. 12, http://swindlemagazine.com/issue12/the-ferus-gallery; Klein, John. "The Dispersal of the Modernist Series." Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 1 (1998): 132; McKenna, Kristine; Neville, Morgan. The Ferus Gallery. Steidl / Edition7L, 2008.

HBibliography: [dissertation:] A Study of Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Triptychs. University of California, Los Angeles, 1964; Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969; and Coplands, John.  Jawlensky and the Serial Image. University of California, Irvine, Art Gallery, 1966; and Delehanty, Suzanne. The Window in Twentieth-century Art.  Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase, 1986.