Art Forum's Best of the Year List

“An intimate tour through fifty years of American art history” (New Yorker) through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it-with an introduction by legendary artist Ed Ruscha

An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz. Ferus turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists, premiered Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, and was at one point shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman's edgy art. 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. 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 Cocoran had a button made that said "Walter Hopps will be here in twenty minutes.") Erratic in his work habits, he never wavered in his commitment to art.

A few years before his death in 2005, Hopps 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.