Last week we met Walter Hopps, a microbiology major at UCLA who in 1957 started what became one of the most important art galleries in the history of southern California.
The Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Blvd. took as its mission the exhibition of contemporary art when many places, certainly museums, would not show it. For example, in 1962 Ferus hosted the first exhibit of Andy Warhol’s paintings anywhere on the west coast.
The Ferus Gallery brought to prominence LA artists like Ed Kienholz, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Wally Berman, and Ed Ruscha. It also gave southern Californians their first in-person encounters with New York artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Frank Stella.
Hopps wasn’t finished making his mark on the art world, however. In 1962, he left the Ferus Gallery to become a curator and then director of the Pasadena Art Museum, now known as the Norton Simon Museum.
His big splash at the Pasadena Museum came in September and October the year he was hired when he put together the first big exhibition of Pop Art anywhere. It was called “New Painting of Common Objects,” sort of leaning into the visual impact of Pop Art, the vocabulary of which was made up of things regularly encountered in common culture. The exhibit can be seen as the point at which the movement called abstract expressionism finally gave way and new artists with an entirely different, but no less controversial vision began their ascendancy. Still, west coast artists would be regularly shunted to the sidelines of mainstream art for several more years. Shortly after that, Hopps mounted the first retrospective museum exhibit of famed French artist Marcel Duchamp.
Hopps went on to be the director of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC; a curator at the Smithsonian; a U.S. Commissioner at the Venice Biennale; the Director of the Art Museum at Rice University; the Director of the Menil Collection (also in Houston); and a curator at the Guggenheim.
Artforum magazine said that Hopps, in retrospect, managed “to come across as both consummate insider and quintessential outsider.” He died in LA in 2005, having amply demonstrated the impact that one person—and not even an artist—could have on the art world.