Walter Hopps, unfiltered
Let’s start with that “if you could ask anyone to dinner” game.
I’d seat Walter Hopps first and surround him with all the artists he loved. The table would be impossibly large and round — Hopps was equitable that way.
Legendary before he arrived in Houston in 1982 to help Dominique de Menil create her museum, Hopps helped shape the trajectory of avant-garde American art in the second half of the 20th century. During his 20s, as a co-founder of the adventurous Ferus Gallery in his hometown of Los Angeles, he introduced a pantheon of now iconic artists — including Andy Warhol — before representing them was profitable. Then he shook up institutions such as the Pasadena Art Museum in California and D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art as a curator and director the likes of which haven’t been
seen again. His influence still resonates. Although Hopps died in 2005, folks who had never heard of him could sense his iconoclastic taste last year, when Menil curator Michelle White pulled some surprises from the museum’s upstairs treasure rooms for “Holy Barbarians: Beat Culture on the West Coast.”
The show featured the wild California friends Hopps championed during the McCarthy era, including John Altoon, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms and Edward Kienholz, his partner at Ferus.
Kienholz’s amusing sculpture “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps” stood front and center in White’s show, defusing the highly charged, political tone of the weird, initially controversial works.
Keniholz assembled “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps” from a now vintage Bardahl motor-oilman signboard, filling it with private jokes, including strange compartments on the back that suggest Hopps’ thoughts and innards. I love that piece. So I was delighted to see it again on the cover of Hopps’ recently published memoir, “The Dream Colony: A Life in Art” (312 pages; Bloomsbury, $30).
The book’s belated timing mirrors Hopps’ reputation: He was chronically late. (In 1970, his staff at the Corcoran Gallery went so far as to create buttons that read, “Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes.”)
Editor Deborah Treisman and interviewer Anne Doran began collaborating with Hopps several years before he died to compile the book. They used a technique they had established during the 1990s when all three worked for the literary journal Grand Street.
But he died before they were finished, and it shows.
Treisman, now the New Yorker’s fiction editor, keeps Hopps’ voice so unfiltered, dangling prepositions and all, that readers might imagine they’re sharing a few drinks with him at a bar. That’s a good thing.
The book begins smoothly, with absorbing family stories and a colorful recounting of Hopps’ youth.
His paternal grandfather built a citrus plantation in Mexico before the revolution. His parents, socially conscious Los Angeles doctors, expected him to follow their path. Rheumatic fever kept Hopps homebound for a chunk of his youth, however, and during that time he discovered a more thrilling, subversive world in art and jazz.
His father encouraged his interest in photography, but before Hopps was old enough to drive, he was also sneaking out to jazz clubs with a fake driver’s license and making his way to galleries as far away as San Francisco.
Los Angeles’ gallery scene was conservative then: Most people considered paintings by René Magritte and Pablo Picasso too “communistic” to display. Hopps was equally smitten by Miles Davis and Marcel Duchamp. He’d listen to or look at anything.
He also stole away to study. He precociously introduced himself to the wealthy and childless art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, who became important mentors. They opened their library to him and jump-started his lifetime of major art-world connections.
Kienholz made “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps” in 1959, the gallery days. The repetitive title refers partly to the formality of Hopps’ full name — Walter Wain Hopps III. Kienholz, a rugged guy from the Northwest, found it funny.
But Hopps was also literally jumping around a lot, between multiple projects and jobs. He promoted jazz concerts, worked at night in a psych ward, had a day job in a lab, took and taught classes — much of it to keep the gallery afloat. He and his first wife lived in the back of the gallery, often with the likes of Dave Brubeck crashed out on their couch. Hopps sometimes took drugs to keep going, and ended up struggling with addiction for more than a decade.
Hopps describes his Kienholz portrait in great detail in the book.
“Actually, it wasn’t just a portrait of me,” he says. “Ed was thinking in general about the kinds of things that art dealers and curators can get themselves into — how these characters are mediators, even hustlers, who enter into the lives of artists and affect the work, for better or for worse.”
Veteran Houston artists say it was always for the better with Hopps.
“There was no one like him,” Michael Galbreth told me. “He meant so much to us.”
Hopps knew the real stories behind a lot of art legends — because he’d been there. He was an astute and master storyteller who veered off on long tangents but always managed to circle back to his point. “The Dream Colony” reads like that, which makes some of the book no easier to untangle than a dream.
Though Treisman wrangles a chronological order from 23 chapters, Hopps didn’t think that way. Moments of his life tumble over each other, so readers are left with an intriguing portrait of the teller but a somewhat abstract view of the valuable art history embedded there. A “selected chronology” at the back helps to unravel the timeline.
The Houston chapter comes last and seems the least complete, a shortcoming Treisman acknowledges in her foreword.
Thankfully for us, pretty much any Houston-scene veteran still loves to talk about him.
Mythically devoted to artists, Hopps was respectful and encouraging regardless of where they stood in the pecking order. He frequently ate lunch with a close-knit group that included Lucas Johnson and Virgil Grotfeldt, both now deceased, and Art Guys Jack Massing and Galbreth — often at Cosmo’s, a Heights cafe that was dependable but never hip.
“He didn’t differentiate with all the fame (stuff),” Galbreth said. “It was not like he was giving all these people major shows. Artists live on the deep edge of survival, and he was just interested and thoughtful.”
Hopps did acquire works for the Menil, and he intended to start a series of solo shows featuring local artists. He got only one done, in 2000, that launched Sharon Kopriva’s career. “I just got lucky,” she said. She wafted in out of present tense talking about him, as if she still felt his presence: “He looks at art from the inside-out. … He was brilliant, and a great listener. Sometimes people ask a question and want a one-sentence answer. Not Walter … . His clock may have started at 3 in the afternoon and stopped at 5 a.m., but that was only a problem for people who worked for him. Never for artists who got calls at 1 a.m.”
Graphic designer Don Quaintance, who worked with Hopps for 25 years, recalled him as a consummate night owl, too.
“We would often start working after dinner in his office in the back of one of the gray Menil bungalows,” he said. “Walter was terribly superstitious: Never ride in a red car, never put a hat on a bed. He was also plagued by a form of OCD. The work sessions would always start with sharpening to a precise point a jar full of No. 2 yellow pencils.”
Talk about Hopps tends to focus on his eccentricities, and how he “cursed a blue streak and could be a brutal boss,” Quaintance added, “but that take, which also comes across strongly in his memoir, tends to overshadow his incredible lucidity and his grasp of every aspect of art history. He was on a mission to educate every listener.”
Even near the end of his life, after a brain aneurysm slowed him down, Hopps could remember every work of art he’d seen, where he’d first seen it and the artist’s intent.
Hopps loved wild company but was himself sophisticated and gentlemanly. Even reserved. He knew everyone who “mattered” internationally — “who would fund projects and lend artworks,” said Patricia Covo Johnson, Lucas Johnson’s widow and the Chronicle’s former, longtime art critic.
He was also opinionated and knowledgeable “to where you listened,” she added. “A criticism from Walter was something you took to heart.”
Galbreth and his art partner Massing would drop everything when Hopps called, as he often did, and said simply, “This is Walter. I’m coming over.”
They kept Diet Cokes in the fridge for him.
“He wasn’t supposed to smoke, but he’d just kind of sneak away, come to our house, sit down at the dining table and talk. See what we were working on,” Galbreth said.
He loved Hopps’ devilish sense of humor, and that Hopps wasn’t above the task of judging a logo contest the Art Guys staged to create their brand.
That was a stunt “so asinine it was perfect,” Galbreth said. “So much of what we did was just playing with people. But nothing shocked him. I mean, how are you going to shock Walter after Warhol?”
Hopps himself could shock people, too. He smoked in the museum — godawful herbal cigarettes nobody ever dared to call him on.
Not even Menil facilities manager Steve McConathy. That sounds especially outrageous now, when visitors can’t even talk there on their cellphones or take pictures.
McConathy, who was among the other early Menil hires, came to the museum as an electrical contractor who knew nothing about art. Hopps tested him once, calling him into a small, dark gallery to see Duchamp’s famous urinal — a landmark work of “found art.”
“This is a sculpture. What do you think about that?” Hopps asked him.
McConathy replied, “Well, Walter, you’d better put it on a taller pedestal because somebody coming back here could use it.”
A day later, it was on a taller pedestal.
“The Dream Colony” ends with a crowded group portrait by Houston photographer George Hixson, taken in 2001 at Kienholz’s Heights studio the night before the Menil honored Hopps by naming an award for him.
Everybody who meant something to Hopps came to town. Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper and James Rosenquist are in the picture alongside Lucas Johnson, Grotfeldt, Galbreth, Massing, Kopriva, James and many others.
That image hints, oh so enticingly, at how much more Hopps might have shared in his book, especially about art in Houston, if he’d lived longer.