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The dream colony : a life in art / Walter Hopps ; edited by Deborah Treisman, from interviews with Anne Doran ; introduction by Ed Ruscha.

by Hopps, Walter, author, interviewee.

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New York, NY : Bloomsbury USA, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.

Art museum curators -- United States -- Biography.

xix, 312 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

Childhood -- First encounters with music and art -- Early days of curating: jazz and Syndell Studio -- The Ferus Gallery -- Wallace Berman -- The creation of Ferus II -- Barnett Newman -- Ferus II and John Altoon -- Edwin Janss -- Frank Stella and Andy Warhol -- Edward Kienholz -- The Pasadena Art Museum -- Marcel Duchamp -- The Pasadena Art Museum II -- The 1965 São Paulo Bienal -- Frank Lobdell and Joseph Cornell -- Leaving Pasadena, and the Institute of Policy Studies -- The Corcoran Gallery of Art -- Three photographers -- The 1972 Venice Biennale -- The National Collection of Fine Arts -- Robert Rauschenberg -- The Menil Collection.

"An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery in L.A. at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz, where he turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists. Ferus was also the first gallery ever to show Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and was shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman's edgy art. At the Pasadena Art Museum in the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art--before it was even known as Pop Art. In 1967, when Hopps became the director of Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art at age thirty-four, the New York Times hailed him as "the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation)." He was also arguably the most unpredictable, an eccentric genius who was chronically late. (His staff at the Corcoran had a button made that said WALTER HOPPS WILL BE HERE IN TWENTY MINUTES.) Erratic in his work habits, he was never erratic in his commitment to art. Hopps died in 2005, after decades at the Menil Collection of art in Houston for which he was the founding director. A few years before that, he began work on this book, a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century"--

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