[2] Ian Dunlop, The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art, American Heritage Press, New York, St Louis, and San Francisco 1972, p. 8.
INTERVIEWS BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST
This publication is dedicated to pioneering curators and presents a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist: Anne d’Harnoncourt, Werner Hofmann, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén, and Harald Szeeman are gathered together in this volume. Their contributions map the evolution of the curatorial field, from early independent curating in the 1960s and 1970s and the experimental institutional programs that developed in Europe and America at this time, through Documenta and the expansion of biennales.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (*May 1968) joined the Serpentine Gallery (London) as Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects in 2006.
Walter Hopps
Born in 1932 in California. Died in 2005 in Los Angeles.
This interview was conducted in 1996 in Houston, Texas. It was first published in Artforum, New York, in February 1996, under the title “Walter Hopps, Hopps, Hopps.”
It was originally introduced by the following text:
In Calvin Tomkins’ 1991 New Yorker profile “A Touch for the Now,” curator Walter Hopps comes across as an eccentric maverick. We learn of his preferred schedule (his workday begins not long before sundown and stretches into the morning hours) and near-mythic disappearing acts (his elusiveness prompted employees at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, where he served as director in the 1970s, to make buttons reading “Walter Hopps Will Be Here in 20 Minutes”). It was his relentless perfectionism, however—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. Even today 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, 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. As he told me when I sat down to interview him in Houston in December, in anticipation of his Kienholz retrospective that goes up this month 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.
HUO You worked in the early 1950s as a music impresario and organizer. How did the transition to organizing exhibitions take place?
WH They both happened at the same time. When I was in high school, I formed a kind of photographic society, and we did projects and exhibits at the high school. It was also at that time that I first met Walter and Louise Arensberg. But some of my closest friends were actually musicians, and the 1940s were a great time of innovation in jazz. It was a thrill to be able to see classic performers like Billie Holliday around the clubs in Los Angeles, or the new people like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie. The younger musicians I knew began to try to get engagements and bookings, but it was very hard in those days. Black jazz frightened parents; it frightened the officials. It was worse in this way than rock ’n’ roll. It had a subversive quality.
I had the good luck to discover the great baritone-saxophone player Gerry Mulligan. Later, I had the chance to go on a double date with his wonderful trumpet player, Chet Baker. You know, those guys had a different sort of social life than would normally be the case. Somehow I managed a jazz business and the small gallery near UCLA, Syndell Studio, at the same time I was in school.
HUO For contemporary artists there was an incredible lack of visibility.
WH Right. In Southern California there were only two occasions during my youth when any of the New York School people were shown. And the critics damned them. One was an incredible show of New York School artists, The Intrasubjectivists, that Sam Kootz and others were involved with putting together. And there was a show by Joseph Fulton, a predecessor of mine at the Pasadena Art Museum. He brought in a beautiful show with Pollock and Enrico Donati—a mix of the new Americans and sort of more Surrealist-oriented things. De Kooning was in it, Rothko, and so on.
The only critical writing we normally had access to was Clement Greenberg’s—he was so contentious and arrogant—and the beautiful writing of Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess. Hess constantly looked for every reason he could to champion de Kooning, as you know. We had virtually no critics like that in Southern California at the time. There was also Jules Langsner, who championed the abstract minimal kind of hard-edged painting—John McLaughlin, etc. He just couldn’t accept Pollock.
HUO How were these shows received?
WH What impressed me was that the audience was there—younger artists and people who were not officially part of the art world then were really intrigued. It had a real human audience.
HUO It seems like a paradox—there had been little to see, then suddenly around 1951, there was a climax
