Hopps, Walter C

Date born:  1933

Place Born:  Eagle Rock, CA

Date died: 2005

Place died: Los Angeles, CA

Seminal curator of 20th-century art and founding director of the Menil Collection in Houston. Hopps hailed from a family of California doctors. A chance visit to the modern art collection of Walter Arensberg (1878-1954) and his wife Louise Arensberg (1879-1953) in Los Angeles piqued his interest in modern art.  He became close friends with the Arensbergs. He attended Stanford, Harvard and Yale universities without ever securing a degree.  As a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hopps and two friends opened a gallery space called Syndell Studio. In 1955 Hopps married Shirley Neilsen [later Shirley Neilsen Blum, (q.v.)] in a ceremony at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Ferus Gallery's one-person shows included Craig Kauffman and Ed Kienholz. In 1957, he and Kienholz opened another gallery, Ferus Gallery, together with partner Irving Blum (b. 1930), showing the work of a new generation of artists Ed Ruscha, Ken Price, Robert Irwin and Billy Al Bengston. The Ferus became a seminal space for modernist art in California.  Hopps organized exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum (today the Norton Simon Museum) in 1959,  joining the staff in 1962.  He rose from curator to director. At the Pasadena Art Museum, he was responsible for the first American retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp (1963) and Joseph Cornell. He was selected to be United States commissioner for the Sao Paolo Biennale in 1965.  Hopps divorced his first wife (she married Blum, with whom she'd been having an affair for some time) in 1967, joining the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967. Again he identified and showed cutting-edge modern art, such as Gene Davis, street art from Los Angeles, and Chicago's Hairy Who group.  Hopps was named director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art where he featured Paolo Soleri's architecture, and an installation of David Smith's extending outside the building.  Hopps was fired from the Corcoran in 1972, reportedly because of his habit of leaving for extended periods of time without notifying staff.  He worked at the Smithsonian American Art Museum under Joshua C. Taylor (q.v.), acting as the U.S. commissioner for the Venice Biennale in 1972.  Dominique de Menil (1908-1997), the visionary Houston collector, hired Hopps in 1980 to assist in building a museum for the collection of art that she and her late husband assembled. Hopps urged the selection of Renzo Piano, assigning the architect to design flexibly lit galleries, resulting in the innovative system of roof shutters which the Menil is today. He married a third time, to Caroline Huber in 1983. Hopps was director of the Menil from its opening in 1987 until 1989 when he became curator of solely 20th-century art. He mounted retrospectives of Yves Klein, John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol and Max Ernst. His closeness with Kienholz resulted in a retrospective of that artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996.  The following year he organized a Rauschenberg retrospective with Susan Davidson at the Guggenheim Museum which traveled to the Menil.  In 2001, the Menil established the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2002, he was named adjunct senior curator of 20th-century art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. There he and Sarah Bancroft mounted a James Rosenquist retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2003.  He died of pneumonia after having sustained a fall in 2005.

An eccentric personality, nearly every person who worked with him remarked he would disappear for hours or days at a time, unexplained.  Hopps tapped into many of the indigenous American modernist art movements, exploiting them to the fullest.

Home Country:  United States

Sources:  [obituaries:] Richard, Paul. "Walter Hopps, Museum Man With a Talent For Talent." Washington Post March 22, 2005 [see correction], p. C01;  Lamb, Yvonne Shinhoster.  "Walter Hopps; Curator Of 20th-Century Art." Washington Post March 22, 2005,p. B06;  Smith, Roberta. "Walter Hopps, 72, Curator With a Flair for the Modern." New York Times March 23, 2005 , p. C15.

Bibliography: Marcel Duchamp: a Retrospective Exhibition. Pasadena,CA: Padadena Museum of Art, 1963; The Art Show [of Ed Kienholz].  Washington, DC: Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1968;