Oral history interview with Henry Tyler Hopkins, 1980 Oct. 24-1980 Dec. 17

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Henry Tyler Hopkins, 1980 Oct. 24-1980 Dec. 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Henry Hopkins
Conducted by Wesley Chamberlin
At The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, CA
October 24, December 3, & December 17, 1980

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Henry Hopkins on October 24, December 3 & December 17, 1980. The interview took place at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, CA, and was conducted by Wesley Chamberlin for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

WESLEY CHAMBERLIN: Henry, one of the things I want to ask is, and this is always a basic question, is there anything in the background of your family, or your beginnings in Idaho Falls, which would lead you to believe that we'd be sitting in the office of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco?

HENRY HOPKINS: Well, probably not anything that specific. But I would say in fairness that from the time that I started doing drawing, as many young children will, fooling around with paints, fooling around with clay and so forth and so on, I had reasonable support in that manner. My father, who was an agronomist, had in his late high school and college days enjoyed drawing. He'd never had any real training or anything else, but he did some cartooning for the yearbook in his college. He had a great friend who was a mushroom fancier. They would go out and draw various kinds of mush-rooms in the forest, then tint them in with watercolor. So he was not uninterested in the fact that I was interested in drawing. I'll admit I wasn't very good at that moment. But I was never discouraged in that interest, and that's, of course, from very early on. Like, again, other boys of that age at the time, when I got to junior high school and we had the opportunity for an elective subject, I wanted to take drama. For some reason my parents didn't like the idea of my taking drama, so I took an art class instead.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: We're talking about the early forties.

MR. HOPKINS: I would be in the seventh grade, maybe even earlier than the forties. I'll have to figure out when that is. About 1940, as a matter of fact. But the instruction was really abysmal. My home town was a city of about 15,000 people. The woman teaching art was a woman who - who knows where her training came from. We spent a lot of time copying things out of catalogs and books that had nothing to do with art history. Most of the time we spent making posters for school activities. I nonetheless enjoyed that, but I wasn't benefiting from it. I'd say that probably there were two experiences which had the most bearing early in my life having to do with art that certainly had carried through. When I was in about the second, third, or fourth grade, a company, I think it was New York Graphics (I think it was before Harry Abrams), would send around to rural school areas all kinds of reproductions, prints of various great works of art, Rembrandt's Man in the Gold Helmet, Boy with a Rabbit, Pinkie, and so forth and so on. They would put them up in the auditorium of the junior high school in town, and it was an art event. People would come out in the evening and they would walk around like they were going to an art gallery, an art museum, although I had no idea what that meant at that time. And my mother would take me two or three times. She enjoyed looking at them and I enjoyed it. We would talk about things a bit and then our teacher the next day, or the next two or three days, would bring them into the classroom and read the descriptions that went with them. At the end of that exercise, after about a week, there would be a little fund-raising activity which would raise usually about twenty dollars, or thirty dollars, for which the school would buy the favorite print, the one that the kids voted for. Each year we would add a new print to our school collection. So there was an attachment to art history through reproductions over a period of time. I imagine it begins that way for a lot of people.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: That's how art historians see art, I think, through little slides.

MR. HOPKINS: I've often wondered, as art education has become more complex and as we get into all kinds of activities, both to get people involved in the production of and appreciation of art, I look back to those days still with very fond memories, with the simplest kind of education. And yet, when you didn't know better, when you didn't really know real objects, surface texture, techniques and so on, of simply getting acquainted with names in art, personalities in art, and approaches in art, that painting could mean something other than just being a picture - it was a pretty good education. But we had very patient teachers in those days.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: And fairly disciplined children.

MR. HOPKINS: Well, if we weren't, they disciplined us.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: When one reads your résumé, the first place where art seems to rear its head is in college where you transferred from the College of Idaho as a Psychology major, to go to the Art Institute of Chicago for Art Education. Now what occasioned that?

MR. HOPKINS: Well, biographically, that's correct. But it's much longer ranging than that. We were talking about taking classes in junior high school. There was a woman in town, Helen Opperly was her name, who was a trained artist. By training I mean that she'd had an art education somewhere, I don't know where. She would in the summertime teach private classes. We would sit in a little studio on regular figure drawing benches with a true board in front of us, and some real paper and work in charcoal and work in pastel. As itinerant watercolorists and other artists would float through Idaho, she would invite them to come and talk to the class. So I did learn something there. In that case, from the stand-point of technique and picture-making, not history and theory and education. But that was an enjoyable experience. When I went on to high school it was a typical situation where if you were interested in doing something about art, or perhaps if somebody was really interested in dance, a male figure interested in dance, it was not an outlet that you talked about very much or displayed very much. The whole emphasis was on sports of one kind or another. So you had kind of hidden, secret passions, kind of closet art ability. I didn't take classes in high school but I did continue to draw and got my first set of oil paints and a few things like that. In the process I won the state's annual Poppy Poster contest, if you remember what that was. I don't know whether Californians ever had that thing or not. Every year the veterans on Poppy Day would ask students, high school students and junior high school students, to make posters to help sell these things. It was a national phenomenon. It was a local thing in your school, and then it was a city-wide and then statewide competition. So much to everyone's amazement, including my own, without being in art classes, I won the Poppy Poster contest that year. That gave me a certain notoriety. The competition wasn't too tough, but nonetheless it was a surprise.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Oh, maybe Dick McLean was out there making one, Charles McGill-

MR. HOPKINS: I think if you looked around you'd find out there were a lot of artists in different states around the country doing that. I guess the key in terms of my life was that I simply didn't know; there was no one at my school who was adept at counseling in those areas. I was broad enough based in my interests, I had been doing some drama at that time, I was a reasonably good student, a little bored, but a reasonably good student, and I had a lot of diverse interests. But I had none of the sense of one-directedness in the sense that many of my friends had. I had a good friend who became a very good doctor, and a good friend who's become a very good dentist, a couple of friends very good lawyers, a couple of very good chemists, the kinds of careers that one would anticipate, and a lot, of course, have become very good farmers, that had to do with the makeup of my community. But nobody at that time was really going on to an art school, so there wasn't much way to help anybody or to counsel or advise. In fact, it was not even my ambition. So I went off to the College of Idaho in 1946, which was the year I graduated from high school, with no idea of what I was going to do, except that since friends of mine had talked about medicine I decided that I would begin as a pre-med student. They had a small art department, it was a very small private college, but they had an art department, a weak one, in retrospect. I did not take classes there either, but a man who was the head of the department allowed me when I wasn't taking classes to come in and paint. He was friendly and I got to know him and his wife, who happened to be my French teacher. I was terrible in French, really hideous in French, so they counseled me to a certain extent and seemed to feel that I had some talent. I had in the interim, another amusing step, in my freshman year while I was taking premed, I hated chemistry but I loved zoology, primarily because of the fact that you would do zoological drawings, and I got so involved in doing my drawings that I dropped out of chemistry to spend more time doing my drawings. So I did extraordinarily well in zoology, having nothing to do with zoological knowledge, but I could make nice renderings of interiors of fish. So at the end of the first year there, I had become a psychology major, primarily because the woman who was teaching psychology was quite a wonderful woman, an elderly woman named Edith David. She was so interesting as a human being, I'd taken a basic class from her and I enjoyed it so I took more and more and I thought, well, this is kind of an interesting direction. And as I got into my second year, I was doing a certain amount of drama, stage sets, practically everything because it was a very small school, and Albion Aspenwalt wrote to my parents and said, "Get this kid out of here and get him into an art school." His wife, who was trying to teach me French, supported that view. And so when I got hone that summer we had a serious conversation. I was very angry that they had been tampering in my life. So I went home that summer and we talked about it at greater length.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: With your family?

MR. HOPKINS: With my family. My father who, in his business, traveled a lot, Chicago was one of the main bases of his operations, and he and mother had traveled there a lot off and on and had gone to the Art Institute frequently and enjoyed it very much as a museum and knew about the school. So I began to get some catalogs from different places, including California schools. I went back to the College of Idaho for a third year, and things kind of jelled during that period of time. I recognized that, so I got a degree in psychology. How was I going to use it? I wasn't really committed to it or dedicated to it, so I'd better really think about this. I did have the support of my parents, emotional, philosophical, as well as financial, so we talked about various schools. For some reason, I guess typical Western or Mid-western attitude, they were opposed to California as being lotus-land and thought it would be better to go to a good solid school like the Art Institute of Chicago, and so I went there. So I went off to the school of the Art Institute of Chicago with every intention of enrolling actually in Goodman Theatre, theatre design, stage design, which I did have a certain passion for. And my counselors there, the first day, told me you can do that if you want to do it, but if you do not do that, if you become a good artist, you can always do stage design. If you become a stage designer you can't become a good artist. That was their reading on things. I felt very much a fish out of water in the big city. Most of the kids who were in my first year class were students who had been from the Chicago area, or urban area, and had had a lot of pre-training. They'd gone to the Junior School of the Art Institute. I'd keep looking at their drawings and paintings and wondered what I was doing there. We had to send in a portfolio for acceptance, and they did accept me, and so-

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Do you mean what you had made out of the zoological drawings?

MR. HOPKINS: Well, I didn't send the zoological drawings. I might have had a better - or for whatever reasons, maybe the students. Who knows. But it was philosophically a good time. It was just after the end of World War II. There were a lot of men coming back from the service, others too young for that, for World War II. But they were coming back from the service, so the mixture of people, there were older guys, older girls, younger guys, younger women. So it was a very nice composite student body and I got acquainted reasonably quickly, had good friends. I was there for three years because I had my academics before that time, so I could work day and night just on my art. I chose to take an art education degree, which, again, is coming out of conservative Idaho heritage, having something to protect yourself, to fall back on. So I did that and it was okay. When I say it was okay, I got good grades and a few other things. Another interesting step in terms of how I got into museum work is that at that time, the artists whom I most admired were artists like Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Tom Benton, all of the American Regionalists whom I had seen a lot of in the magazines and various other things over the years. Then when I got to the Art Institute there were actually paintings on the walls.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: They were pretty big in 1946, particularly in the Midwest.

MR. HOPKINS: Especially in the Midwest. I didn't know anybody who painted who was older than I was and I assumed was an artist of some stature. I wasn't looking for gods or heroes necessarily. But I know that working there during that period of time, I was getting to be a very good figure draftsman and I was getting to be a very good compositor, and I was putting down paint pretty well and had a certain color sensitivity. So it was all moving along in a fairly good system. I finished up my B.A. degree, B.A.E., Bachelor of Art Education. One of the processes was to do student teaching. I did student teaching at Evanston Township High School, a very good high school in that Lake Michigan area, a lot of bright kids. I enjoyed that teaching. I actually had by that time good training in some of the art education classes I'd taken. I remember a great many specific events, but I remember that when I first got to the school, one of our first papers in our art history class was to go out to the gallery at the Art Institute and write about the painting that we admired most in the museum and the painting we admired least in the museum. I remember the painting that I liked most was a Grant Wood painting, which I eulogized. The painting I hated most of any painting in the museum was Matisse's Still Life on a Pink Tablecloth, so that tells you how life changes. I finished my B.A. degree in three years, and had been asked to come teach at Evanston Township High School, which was an honor in a sense. If I had been able to do that, I wonder what my life would have been like. I got called into the service on the draft in the Korean War, and I couldn't plead that I had school because I was finished for that moment. They wouldn't accept teaching as a valid excuse to get out of the draft then. So they put me in the service.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: This was 1952.

MR. HOPKINS: 1952.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: One year ahead of me on that. I was in Germany in 1953-55, until the end of 1955. I was one year after you there.

MR. HOPKINS: Again, it was a very funny, fluke situation, because it's a funny thing to say, but being a native Idahoan and from a relatively conservative state, draft resistance was not a subject we even really talked about at that time, or thought about. It was a natural course of affairs that I was going into the army, to go somewhere, and it had to be the army because that's where I was drafted. Again, you wonder about the fates, because I was put into a signal corps group that trained in San Luis Obispo, California. It had been an old National Guard camp, some of them were comfortable in the old regular army barracks.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Camp Cook, right?

MR. HOPKINS: No, it was just called Camp San Luis Obispo. It was a small camp that had been reactivated during the Korean War because the terrain was so much like Korea, those kind of rolling hills.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: It's probably a penal institution now.

MR. HOPKINS: God knows what it is at the moment, but it felt like that at that time. I wear glasses, my eyes are pretty lousy, so I guess they didn't want me as a frontline infantryman shooting somebody else, or a tank man or something else. But for whatever reason they put me in the signal corps. I was just sick to my stomach, because if there's anything in the world I can't stand, its electronics, radio, code and all those various things. So I thought, well, what am I going to do? I was so naive, I had no idea how the army worked. I really didn't know what happened after they said, do this. So they offered to send me to what they called photography school, which is code-breaking and working with codes and things of that kind. So that sounded really interesting. It would be stimulating one way or another. They closed the school the week that my class was supposed to go on to that school. I went back into the kind of counseling office and they said, well, you can be a pole lineman, you can be a radio operator, you can be a clerk typist, you can be this, you can be that. There happened to be a lot of photographs around the walls of the room I was sitting in, and I don't know why I did, but I asked where those had come from. They said, well, they came from the photo school and that was part of the signal corps. I said, "Photo school," and they said, "Yes, you can go to photo school," which happened also to be in San Luis Obispo. So I stayed on there another twelve weeks to be trained in photography, which was another kind of adjunct to stuff that went along. But to be in photography was obviously much more interesting than being in other things. And then this horrible moment of decision comes, as you well know from your own experience, where you sit in a big room and they either send you to Korea or somewhere else. At that moment everyone was going to Korea. I think out of the 300 men who were in the room, six of us went to Germany. So they sent me to Germany, Augsburg, as a photographer. Well, that's pretty cushy duty for a private, by then, private, first class. So two things, really of importance, happened in the interim. It was the first time I had been to Europe. I had the kind of job that was essentially a nine-to-five job, so I could be out on the town in the evenings. One of my duties was to drive back and forth between Munich and Augsburg relaying messages and things of that kind. So I would get into Munich every other week. Two things really positive. One, they gave me permission to have a section of signal corps warehouse, about as big as this office, to make into a painter's studio. That was pretty generous for the service, so I had this room of my own and did paint. The other thing, obviously, was being in Europe and seeing works of art in museums. The whole postwar thing hadn't happened yet. It was still pretty much bits and pieces, but really going to museums and really looking at works of art on the wall, going on leave to Paris and London and so forth.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Let me interrupt here. You got part of a warehouse for a painter's studio. You thought of yourself as an artist, you still thought of yourself as a painter, not a photographer?

MR. HOPKINS: Well, no, I always, yes, there was no question about that.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: The two didn't come together yet, you didn't think of photography as something other than as a job.

MR. HOPKINS: Well, I should say specifically a few things. I did think of myself, if I thought of myself in any way whatsoever, as a person very interested in paint. So I guess you could say I thought of myself as a painter. I did approach photography as a job because in that context, it really was a job, and we were not obviously trained in art photography. It doesn't mean we couldn't - even then we had a lot of good times in the lab, doing paper cutouts and photographing those and then composites and making photomontages and various other things. But it was a kind of creativity, it was still in the process of the work. I had wonderful assignments. Saturday morning I would go over and photograph all of the girls who had been rounded up during the week on morals charges and document them. I would be sent out to photograph CI underwear on various lines hanging all over Augsburg. They were cutting into the business of the post laundry or something. It wasn't very exciting photography that I'd been asked to do. But simply being in that environment got me much more involved in history than I had been before because you'd see a Renaissance building with Renaissance work, and you'd see a Baroque building with Baroque work, and you got schools and times and places kind of in a context. I found even at that time, as I was getting through with the eighteen-month duty in Germany, that I was getting more conservative in my paintings. I was getting interested in earlier techniques, looking at the Flemish artists and some of the others. Then the real stroke came when I came back from the service and went back to the Art Institute of Chicago for a Master's degree, more of the kind of self-rehabilitation thing, and getting set for a teaching job, and the whole thing of [Jackson] Pollock, [Franz] Kline, [Willem] de Kooning, [Clyfford] Still, [Robert] Motherwell had all happened during the time I was gone. You remember that issue of Life magazine that said, "Here's Jackson Pollock, the world's greatest artist"? That's when I was in Germany. I was totally out of touch. There was no way other than through magazines like Life and Time and a few other things that I could even keep any vague sense of what was happening in America. As I was saying earlier, in Chicago they had this wonderful exhibition. There is now a Biennial, it's their American show. They invite X number of American artists to show what's happening during each period of time. When I left it was all Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, [Edward] Hopper, figurative Philip Guston, and figurative Stephen Green, and all of those things I really took to. When I came back the show was actually up when I arrived, with all Pollock and Kline and de Kooning.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: This was 1950, the excavation was the big de Kooning. About half the board resigned in disapproval.

MR. HOPKINS: I'm not sure it was even as early as 1950. I have a feeling, although I can't remember exactly, that it was in 1954, as a matter of fact.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Well, it was 1950.

MR. HOPKINS: It could well have been, but I know it hit me. I sound like an artist because I did see some excitement, certainly, and I saw some validity, and I saw some real vigor and what have you that was so foreign to my eye, to my sensibility, to the way my hand worked and everything else. It was a real shock. I couldn't get close to it, not that quickly. I also found when I came back that the students who I had been in school with had by that time gone on to one place or another. A whole new crop of young bravos were there who were very energized by this whole thing. They really knew and felt differently about it. I really felt uncomfortable among them with my attitude. I got very immersed in history and took as many art history courses during that year as I could with a wonderful elderly woman named Kathleen Blackshear, who taught art history from the artist's perspective, a rare kind of course. It was not like a university art history course, kind of the ignorance of the object, but it really taught you the object orientation. They were wonderful classes. But in the process of that year of study, and the greater involvement with history, and actually taking my M.A. degree in art education, then I had to start making a living.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Was the M.A. in art education still thinking for a career?

MR. HOPKINS: Well, at that time I think probably I would have to say in fairness that the M.A. was simply habit. Because I would admit to the fact that when I came back to school for my Master's degree, I felt that technically I had learned what I could learn from school in terms of my capacity to paint. I did take some classes in sculpture and other things I hadn't had a chance to work with, but it was a stop action year. It was also the year when I was married.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: What year was that?

MR. HOPKINS: That was 1954. At that time my first wife was a girl from Idaho Falls I had kind of grown up with, a friend through high school and college days, early college days. I simply was at a point of, it was relatively late, twenty-five or twenty-six, maturation rites and taking care of myself, and I felt pretty good. I was rather interested in staying in the Chicago area. I hated Chicago winters, and I liked the energy of Chicago, and I very much liked the urban aspect of it. My wife, Joanne's, family had just moved to La Jolla in Southern California. Her father was a dentist, and he had retired. So we were to drive a car from Idaho down there to see them in La Jolla. So while I was down there I did some job interviewing.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: You were still at the Art Institute during this time?

MR. HOPKINS: I finished my degree in 1953. I finished my work at the Art Institute in 1955. I went there in the fall of 1954. I was married. Went there in the fall of 1954, stayed there until June of 1955, graduated with my M.A. in June of 1955. By the way, that year, even though I was painting the way a lot of the other kids were painting, I was one of six candidates to win a fellowship.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: This was in art history?

MR. HOPKINS: This was in painting.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: So you still thought of yourself as a painter.

MR. HOPKINS: I was going to paint. The other that was-

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -that was how to make a living.

MR. HOPKINS:You have to remember that out of my personal background, making a living was the primary thing. That was the way I was brought up. And though I can remember on one occasion during my high school days, on a sleepless night I was tossing and turning and I heard my parents in their room discussing back and forth, and I heard my father say, "Well, you'll probably have to support him most of his life. He probably won't make a living doing what he's doing." That irritated me, because of his thoughts of my ability.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -impotence there.

MR. HOPKINS: And pleased me, recognizing that it was a task that he would take on if that happened to be the case. Pretty reassuring for anybody. But I was obviously determined that that wouldn't be necessary.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: He must be very relieved.

MR. HOPKINS: There's no question. But what I never really had in my early days was intensive conversation with my parents about goals, about this and that. There were times when we would get together and talk about things, we were a very close family, but three or four comments at different moments in time can make a big difference in your life, and how you feel and how you perceive your life to be. I was married in the fall of 1954, went back to the Art Institute for my Master's in art education, although I was still taking primarily painting courses, along with some education courses. My wife became pregnant with our first child, Victoria, so when school was over at the end of that year, we went back to Idaho where my family was still, and her folks had a summer place up there. I drove the car down to Southern California and went to the San Diego School District area, and they told me of this school in the County of San Diego where there might be a good position, which was Grossmount Union High School, actually a very good high school. I didn't know anything about it at the time. What got me to California is a little bit like how I became a photographer, or how I became this or how I became that, more the fates than anything else. I had written letters when I was finishing up school to a variety of places, mainly small colleges, like Humboldt State, which was small at that time, and some other places, put in my application and straightforward presentation. I had put some feelers out, but no specific job application, no specific interview, at least, if college arts existed, I didn't know it at that time and wasn't able to deal with it. I applied at Grossmount Union High School. It happened that the teacher had decided not to come back that fall. One of those fluke things. They called and said, yes, we'd like to have you come and teach. I was very diverse, which I've considered a tremendous asset all along the line. The fact that I had been in the service as a photographer, I had some design experience, and I had a lot of painting experience, and some sculpture experience, and while it's not an important part of teaching education, without putting any label on it, it was an intuitive interest of mine, and I had actually taught classes all the way through high school and all the way through college. I would teach in summer programs. I would teach puppetry and I would teach bits and pieces of design, anything and everything that would fit into those park programs. I think generally, when I went to Grossmount, it was an interesting situation because it was a three-person art department, very big for a high school. A woman named Marjorie Hyde was the head of it, who is still down in the Grossmount area, a pretty good painter. And a man involved in design and photography. I taught basic classes in design, photography and painting. I think I was a pretty good teacher.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Did you teach any art history? Did they have art history in high school?

MR. HOPKINS: I didn't teach art history. Strangely enough, I did some lecturing to the general faculty in art history that we would have in our faculty program, gave an art historical presentation, and I was lecturing a certain amount in the San Diego area on different aspects of art history to women's club groups and things of that kind, and still painting. When I was a student in Chicago I had one small exhibition in a bar and grill, the name of which I've forgotten.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: My first exhibition was in a Quaker day school.

MR. HOPKINS: But it was a bar and grill where they did those things, and the Chicago Times critic actually came and reviewed it, about five lines. He didn't say anything necessarily good or bad, but he indicated it was there. It was one of those things again, in a big city you get five lines of review in a major newspaper-

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -send home to mom.

MR. HOPKINS: I was continuing to paint. I entered the San Diego Annual. I think it was called "Contemporary Arts" or something like that. Well, got in two years there. But during that time, that time of teaching, two or three things happened. One, because I was lecturing around and about and I seemed inevitably to be getting more and more known, not really even knowing why. Then in my classes, while I enjoyed the thing of teaching, what was happening in that particular school and I think other schools in the country as well, if the child was not adept enough to run a bandsaw, take woodshop, or adept enough to work in a printshop, they would be put into art class. At the same time those youngsters in art classes were some of the brightest kids in the school, if they had an affinity or real interest. It was right at that moment that they changed the California law to allow children of lower I.Q. to be a part of public school education. I can't remember the figures, and I never believed that much in I.Q., but it used to be something like eighty, and they reduced it to seventy or something like that. It made such a diverse classroom situation, where the most time I spent and the biggest problems I had were all behavioral problems. The kids would work for hours. I had one student from that group who was not very adept. I got him interested in car models, and he got turned on and got excited and built three incredibly beautiful little car models, kind of out of match-sticks and tissue paper and what have you. I put them on this ledge in front of him and another kid came along and pounded them with his hands, smashing them flat to the ground. It wasn't a pleasant experience for that kid, and it made me very angry to realize that I was not going to be able to be even-tempered with every trauma that came along. Also, I had sophomores to seniors, a great age diversification and great physical diversification, sexual diversification, kids all the way from mini-adolescence to real adults. I remember one boy I had in my class who was a real problem, and one young woman who was a real solid girl and very bright. I put him on a stool next to her, thinking that would solve that problem. After about three weeks she came to me and said, "I know what you're doing, I know why you're putting Jim next to me. I know I'm supposed to keep an eye on him and watch him but, please, I can't stand it anymore. He's obviously very fond of me, and the only way he can show it is by hitting me on the arm, and I get bruised to pieces." The combination of those circumstances and the fact that I would have to admit I was a pretty dedicated teacher and wasn't getting much time to develop my own painting, so I decided that high school teaching was not for me a career. I thought then, "Well, how do I proceed in that context? What will I do? I have a young family and obligations, and teaching is secure although, God knows, not much salary." I think my first salary was $2,900 a year, which sounds an incredible amount for a full-time salary, but we made it.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Well, it wasn't too bad then.

MR. HOPKINS: It could have been worse. Well, it may not have been, but it was pretty bad, but it was certainly a livable salary.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: It could have been about $10,000 now.

MR. HOPKINS: It could have been. So I went up to U.C.L.A. [University of California, Los Angeles], and I don't have any idea why. I've thought about that in retrospect, except that I did have obviously my G.I. bill, I'd used one year of it and I had four years of G.I. bill. So I wandered up to U.C.L.A. and looked around the Art Department and made an appointment to talk to the man who was the Dean, Chairman of the U.C.L.A. Department, who later went off to be the Yale head of the Architectural Department, a very good composite administrator as well. I sat down and talked to him about where I was in life, what I was doing, what I was thinking about and so forth and so on. He took an interest, which amazed me, so I went back to San Diego and he wrote me a letter and asked if I might be interested in coming up again and talking because he thought he might have a teaching assistantship in the Educational Department, art education. So I hurried back up there. I met the people in art education, and I met the people in art history, and had many confusions at the beginning, because I really wanted to go into art history seriously, but I was trained in art education, my T.A. in art education - how much was it worth in art history. So I was in a funny way in conflict with the department all along, but Gibson Danes was that kind of a mixed-discipline person. The first year that I was there I did a T.A. in art education and began a solid program in art history.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: So that would have been 1957 to 1958.

MR. HOPKINS: That would have been the summer of 1957, June of 1957. I went to summer school at U.C.L.A. and that fall moved on up. So, 1957, 1958, 1959. Then after the first year of getting my basic groundings in art history I really enjoyed it. There were some very good people there at the time in the school itself. Jim Demetrion was there taking art history.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Berkmeier was there.

MR. HOPKINS: Somehow, I don't know quite how, Berkmeier became my mentor, although it was certainly not my field of interest, he was a Northern Renaissance scholar. The man in the area of my greatest interest was Fred Wight, obviously the twentieth century. Even though that was my interest, it was obviously something I needed along the line, and by coming from a different environment, a more sophisticated environment, I probably would have tangled earlier than I did. It's all a question of seeking and finding and yet, at the same time, I will say that in that respect, any number of people in the museum field, most of them now directors, like Joshua Taylor and others, had equally scattered backgrounds. But they'd been industrious and ambitious and worked in a variety of things and had finally come into the museum world. When you get into the museum world there is nothing more valuable than that diversity of background. It runs all the way from selling shoes when you were in junior high school and teaching classes or taking psychology to doing this to doing that. Every bit of it at one time or another comes into play. I think if you came from too rigid a back-ground, straight out of art history, and you became programmed, you simply couldn't adapt or adjust to the funny variables of the job which we'll talk about as we go on. But being there that first year, having Berkmeier as a mentor, taking classes from Maurice Bloch in American Art, Fred Wight in twentieth century, and from -

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Jerry Ziff was there?

MR. HOPKINS: Not yet. Jerry wasn't there at that time. In what was called primitive art, Robb Altman who had that wonderful shop on La Cienega Boulevard, and as I say Jim Demetrion was a student there.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Was he a student too?

MR. HOPKINS: He was a student. I was a student. We were graduate students, whatever that meant. He had come out of high school teaching, mathematics, as a matter of fact, and come back to school. Shirley Hopps, as I remember, Shirley Nielsen Hopps, but she was then married to Walter Hopps, was there in the department, and had been there for a couple of years as a graduate student. A woman named Laura Lee Sterns, who has never gone on in her art history but a very bright person. It was a wonderful group. We were all kind of T.A.s [Teachers' Assistants]. We shared a little cubbyhole office. Working around the edges of that, because of his marriage to Shirley, was Walter, for his gallery interests were a whole conversation in itself. But I felt really, in a funny way for the first time in that U.C.L.A. experience, closer to home. But even then I had no ambition as such to go into museum work. I still never had a real clear definition of what exactly the next step would be.

MR. HOPKINS: Yes, that's right.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I've never thought of you as particularly an ambitious person, and as you recount your history so much of it's fortuitous. Maybe a combination of fortuity and capabilities.

MR. HOPKINS: Well, I think certain things kick into that. When you say ambition, I would typify myself as having reasonable ambition. I feel when I'm in a job I have ambitions for that job.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I'm thinking in terms of personal programs.

MR. HOPKINS: I don't have a driving "What Makes Sammy Run," compelling thing to keep me running in one direction to make a million bucks or whatever. I thought a lot about that and I don't poke at it, because it obviously is a part of my nature or my makeup, and does have more frequently than not some kind of good fortune. I never get too far down or depressed or irritated because something will come along to bounce it back up. I guess it really could be called fortuitous, or open to opportunities, or right place, right time, or some intuition guides you in that position.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Flexibility, too.

MR. HOPKINS: Flexibility. I think it's a very important part of it, and being multifaceted. I've often wondered if I happen to be somebody who is so directed, so completely directed, that I could be a really dedicated doctor or something of that kind. Whereas if you got off your track you'd really be thrown by that. Jan [Butterfield] and I sit around and on occasion say, well, if something goes wrong, we can always sell shoes. It's a false statement now. I don't think we could really do that, but the implication is at least that there are variables.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Well, at this point, I think you wouldn't sell them. You'd probably start a new company.

MR. HOPKINS: At this point I'm not sure what I would do. There has been a lot of fortune in it. I've also thought from time to time that people from my section of the country are, for some reason, and it's not that I can define it, but we are essentially accent-less. Though there are Idaho colloquialisms, but they don't pin you to the sounds of the Northeast or Northwest.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: We saw that in the army. You could always tell somebody from Texas, Brooklyn, Boston, and the South. The rest of it was anywhere.

MR. HOPKINS: For some reason, if we were not disciplined children, we were reasonably disciplined and we were made by our heritages there. I think the kids still are directed toward maintenance of themselves toward whatever. I felt that all of the Idahoans I have known, not limited to that state, but say the Rocky Mountain region generally, seem to get along pretty well with their own people as well as people at different levels. They're not put onto, if they are confronted with somebody with great power or great wealth or whatever. It seems to be just another person. I think so often that young men and women who come out of the Eastern establishment are cowed by different things. They're trained differently. It's a different psychological attitude and approach to life. They're made timid in certain situations, and for some reason that doesn't happen to Westerners in my generation. A lot of things go to make that up when you think about it. What I think of as the more interesting museum people are essentially Western in their heritage, like Joshua Taylor, Jim Elliott, Martin Friedman. I've often wished in a way that some author might take on a book sometime-

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -a sociological study.

MR. HOPKINS: That kind of thing. So here we are at U.C.L.A. Where do you want to go?

MR. CHAMBERLIN: The first time I got to know you was when we taught together at Don Rosenberg's course.

MR. HOPKINS: That was third year.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -for you. I think it was the second year for me.

MR. HOPKINS: Yes, your second year. So the way that worked essentially was that after the first year I got out of art education altogether. However, I continued to teach some classes for children in art education during summer sessions, extension, things of that kind. So I was compositing my G.I. bill, my T.A.-ship and some bit-and-piece teaching.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Were you doing some of the extension art history courses?

MR. HOPKINS:Yes, in 1957. The second year that I was a graduate student I was still feeling unknowledgeable compared to, say, Shirley Hopps or whatever. I shifted out of art education into art history and was given a teaching assistantship in art history.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: That was the second year.

MR. HOPKINS: Second year, and I was asked to teach a second year, evening class in art history, basic one, fundamental, 1A and 1B, which required a T.A. I did do that and I really enjoyed it. I very much enjoyed that experience which went on for years and years.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I can remember. I showed slides for many of them.

MR. HOPKINS: But every fall I would appear and I wondered, God, is anybody going to come and take this class? It seemed like teaching was a lot, and as you know about a hundred people would show up, all people that had interest - it's amazing how often I'd run into people just on the street who said they'd been in my class years and years ago, and we'd reminisce about it. That had some sort of effect. I think I can digress for one minute and go back to it. Probably my direction toward museum set itself, at least that idea began to set itself, the first year that I was there, and through Shirley Hopps. They were just starting, and I've now forgotten the man's name who was the head of the section at U.C.L.A., I think it was Friedman, they were just publishing a book out of U.C.L.A., called Looking at Modern Art. Several scholars around there as well as other places had written chapters dealing with the evolution of twentieth-century art. One dealt with Mondrian, one dealt with Kandinsky, and one dealt with Picasso. One dealt with Hopper and one dealt with this and that, and then up to the Abstract Expressionists, through the Abstract Expressionist. The principle that Friedman established, using that book and slide sets as a guide, was for certain people, myself among them, Shirley Hopps, Walter Hopps, and one or two others, we would simply take the courses, and by taking the courses it meant that if ten people in the community signed up to be a study group, we would go to their houses with a slide projector tucked under our arms and set up a screen and set up our projector and give a lecture. The lecture would be made for that particular study for that particular period of time. I think there were ten sessions. I think they were all together. That course, that involvement, took me to many homes that since then have become some of the major collectors in Southern California, and took me into another kind of environment, because it was teaching at home. The people taking the courses were usually well-to-do, very well-to-do. They were interested in art and maybe thinking of collecting. So that was really outside of the school, an incredible experience. In a variety of ways it was very salutary that eventually some of the people who are still my best friends, like Fred and Marcia Weisman, and Shirwins and others-it touched those classes of different homes, Joanne and Julian Gantz. Some wonderful American collections came out of that class we had worked in together. As a composite group, I guess, you'd have to say, not in any way solid or formed or anything else, but Shirley and Walter and myself, Laura and a couple of others, Jim Demetrion was not necessarily part of that group, we began to have ambitions, which may or may not be the right word, for having some input into what had happened to modern art in Los Angeles, trying to get the door open to more responses. But that type of teaching experience -it became a class where we had modern art which was in a way affiliated with U.C.L.A., but at the same time it was allowing freedom to discuss our ideas about twentieth-century art as well. We could go beyond the pamphlet and begin to open up, maybe bring in some of the art of the area and discuss things a little more widely. We'd talk about prices. We'd talk about the art market. We'd talk about any number of things beyond what the course was devised for. We reported that to Mr. Friedman and he was delighted that we were taking that stance on it. So teaching those courses went on simultaneously with teaching art history at U.C.L.A. and being a T.A. I suppose I should stop and try to find my view of what was happening at that moment. I did not know the museum people well at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Jim Elliott was there as Chief Curator, Bill Osmund was there as Curator in areas of design. Rick Brown was there at that time as what was called Chief Curator, because he was the art head of the tripartite Museum of History, Science and Art.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: That was when it was still down in Exposition Park?

MR. HOPKINS: Yes. I could go down there occasionally, not very frequently. They had exhibitions that I went to see like everybody else. It was always a little depressing to go into that particular environment when you'd been used to something like the Art Institute and the European museums and a variety of other things. The collection was not terribly strong, particularly in the modern area. One thing that was effective to me, for example, the first time I went to the museum I saw four or five of what I considered to be quite wonderful paintings, a tiny little Jackson Pollock, a beautiful Joseph Albers painting.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: They bought an Albers about 1954.

MR. HOPKINS: Yes, it was about that period of time. That's exactly what the influence was. There was a Baziotes and some other things. I was reading the label information. They'd all been bought at the same time, and by a group of people, so I asked to look at the registrational files. It was an exhibition that I guess Jimmy Burnes, who was there at a time-I'm not sure what period of time, he then went off to New Orleans and other places. He had put together an exhibition of American artists and had brought out these generally very small examples, but rather nice ones, and they'd all been bought from that show. The price labels were still there. The Albers was $400, the Pollock was $300, the Baziotes was $150, or something like that. That was kind of the heart of the artists that I was interested in at that moment. By this time I'd obviously made that jump to being very respectful of the Abstract Expressionists and the other true modernists in my mind. At the same time I was still painting a bit.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: You still thought of yourself as a painter at this time?

MR. HOPKINS: No, that was a bit back.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: At this point it had dwindled.

MR. HOPKINS: By this time it was quite clear that I was going to do one or two or three different things. I could go on and be a university person in art history or related in one way or another. I was going to someway find out more about museums. In my own mind I was going to be a facilitator, or catalyst, or whatever you want to call it, recognizing that my contribution was not going to be in doing but would be more effective in helping other people do it. It was a very complex time in my life. By that time I had two children, my second child, John, who is now twenty-three or something like that, my wife and I had trial-separated at that point. She had gone back to the San Diego area, close to where her family was, and went back to live in the little house that we had on La Mesa, which we had rented when we came up to U.C.L.A. So I was a little bit at loose ends. I had a girlfriend. I had an awful lot of time on my hands.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I remember all about that.

MR. HOPKINS: When you go back to being single after being dual, you find suddenly that there are many hours of the day and night that you use differently than you might have in another situation. So I did paint, usually right there in my little office at U.C.L.A., and put a work in the Los Angeles exhibition to kind of test my hand and I got in. I believe Clement Greenberg juried the exhibition. I didn't really know much about Clement Greenberg at that time. Well, that's interesting, whether I can paint, or do paint or whatever, at least it was acceptable in the eyes of somebody in that context. But I had given up thinking of myself as a painter. Although I would say at that moment one of the reasons for separation essentially was that I felt my creative juices were getting squashed one way or another. I was becoming too much a middle-class American and not enough of somebody who does think work is important and [inaudible] keeps bubbling up and bubbling up along the line. So, in fact, that was about the time that we met. I noticed that going down, I even took a couple of classes. One in ceramics and some other things. I would hang out in the print department where you were working, watching the process of print-making. It was very invigorating, kind of late in life, to be spending time that way. Nonetheless, it was invigorating. The association with Shirley and Walter was a very good one. I won't go into there because some day I hope we can get both of them on tape, because they were much more a specific catalyst as a form and unit than I. I was on the edge of that team. They had been dedicated much more directly along the line, starting early, forming a little gallery. I guess Sindell Studio was the first one over in the West Los Angeles-Brentwood area.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: The Hopps did.

MR. HOPKINS: And Walter would be the eye. The untrained but special eye. Shirley as a T.A. and graduate student and hard worker. Whatever funding was behind it was poor Shirley taking care of it.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: How was Sindell spelled, how do you spell that?

MR. HOPKINS: Sindell. The story essentially, of why that name. There was a funny little building that was over in Brentwood for a long time, now torn down and gone. But the story is that Walter was very much involved with the young, then avant-garde artists, amongst them Craig Kauffmann and Ed Kienholz. The story is that in the Midwest Craig Kauffmann, in the process of driving, hit a farmer crossing the road, whose name was Sindell, and they named the studio after him. It was actually an accident, but it was a tribute to the poor man that had been hit by the car. It typifies, in a very funny way, much of what Walter and some of those people had been about ever since that time, that they would give a name to something that would have some credibility in time. By the time I had come into the picture Walter had been running a gallery of La Cienega called Ferus Gallery.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Sure, Ferus, I remember very well.

MR. HOPKINS: There was a debatable term about what that meant.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: He was in it with somebody else, wasn't he?

MR. HOPKINS: Yes. True. It's history that should go on special tapes, but he was by that time in partnership with Ed Kienholz.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: But there was a third person in.

MR. HOPKINS: Yes, coming, chronologically. But Kienholz, who had run a gallery, Hopps, who had run a gallery, came together in a partnership to form the Ferus Gallery. They were never specific or clear about the name. It is a dictionary word. I liked the bold terminology, again indicating an attitude of aggressive, young behavior. And then, very shortly, in fact, I think it was later that year or the next year, because they were not doing that well financially the artists they were showing were all the young artists who had no real reputation at that time, but were interesting. Irving Blum appeared from New York. Irving had been working for Knoll International. He had come originally from Phoenix, Arizona, sophisticated and suave in manner, but very interested to work in a gallery. They struck a bargain, something like $150 a month. Irving became the day-by-day consistency of the gallery, and Walter remained just kind of special, there sometimes and not there sometimes. Irving found new ways to get financing. Then history shows that Walter dropped out to go work at the Pasadena Museum. The gallery became Irving's. He has gone on in a very direct line ever since.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I'd like to go back a second here before we get any further. In your résumé you talk about U.C.L.A. You did graduate work in art history. Course work completed for a Ph.D. You never got the Doctorate?

MR. HOPKINS: No, I never did. I had two, well, they were barriers as such. What had happened in my education-I was then in my third year at U.C.L.A. in graduate art history. I had had the opportunity through teaching in extension and doing other things, essentially proceeding as a professional and beginning to establish a profession, among many reputations in those areas. I'll admit that I was getting a little bored by straight art historical, scholarly aspects. I have always had and still have a language hang-up. It's painful for me to learn a language. It takes years and years and years. I just got my French out of the way and I thought, oh God, I've still got that German requirement, which probably was the specific reason that I didn't go on. But also Fred Wight, who was my mentor, and the fact that I had now switched into twentieth-century art history, if it could be called that, and had been developing as my specialty Southern California art.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: You were working with Fred rather than Maurice?

MR. HOPKINS: Yes, exactly right. In twentieth century rather than American. But I was still teaching courses, or doing some art and language courses. But my interest was in Southern California art, which was not at that time defined, and still is not defined, which will give you a clue to my affection for people like Helen Lundeberg and Stanley Donald Wright. Even whether I loved them as people or not, some of whom I did, at least I spent a lot of time talking to them, interviewing them, getting to know more about them and the history of the Southern California scene. I probably, intellectually, knew more about the history than almost anybody at that moment, because I went about it in a dedicated fashion. That spurred me in certain ways. I did have one seminar with Maurice Bloch in nineteenth-century American art. One of the projects asked for in the seminar was to put together an exhibition. So we put together an exhibition of Civil War illustration, Civil War artist illustration, and spent the whole seminar looking into that material and doing a little catalog which I wrote, and installing it in the cases in the old U.C.L.A. Art Department. It was far from a brilliant show, but it actually had a purpose and it was well put together. That was my first museology experience as such. I began to think a little more in that direction because I was really enjoying it. I guess you can throw that clear back to my interest in theatre design among other things. There were a lot of different things coming together all in one moment. I approached Fred Wight and asked him if he would allow me to do an exhibition in the main gallery of U.C.L.A. He talked to me about it. I said I wanted to do an exhibition of Los Angeles art, kind of a prototype of some of the earlier figures and these young people working at that time. He agreed and I think, to the best of my knowledge, it was the first time in an American university of an art history program for a graduate student to use an exhibition as a dissertation approach.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: You were thinking of this actually as your dissertation?

MR. HOPKINS: No, the dissertation would have to come out of it. That said something too about Fred's flexibility and willingness to let me do that. As you remember, at that time Fred was not only teaching twentieth-century art, but he was the head of the U.C.L.A. Art Gallery. He was a museologist, and he had had a lot of experience and this and that. Jade Carter, who is still there, was then head of installations. So it gave me an opportunity to work with installation, to do an essay for a catalog, select the artists, to get them in a pickup truck, to do all of those things that one has to do to put together an exhibition. While it was not a resounding exhibition, it has proven over time, I can't be avidly accurate on account of its being a first exposure in a museum context of these, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Kenny Price. It looked a little bit like prophecy at that given moment.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: So you had early figures, but you really had the contemporary-

MR. HOPKINS: I had Bill Brice, Stanton McDonald Wright, Ben Berlin. I can't even remember all of them.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Was Ruscha in that show?

MR. HOPKINS: Ruscha had not yet come along. He would probably have been at that moment in Southern California. But I didn't know him yet, he hadn't appeared on the horizon.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Kienholz was.

MR. HOPKINS: Kienholz very much was. He had been an important figure, not only in the gallery scene, but as an artist he was beginning to form his key pieces, like John and Jane Doe, and some of the earliest assemblage pieces. Through those contacts, through that whole variety of things, I got to know some important people in the art world. A man named Bill Sykes. I got to know Peter Selz, who at that time was teaching at Pomona and went off to the Museum of Modern Art to be Curator. At that particular moment in time there just were no more gods and heroes than in the Museum of Modern Art. In my mind, that was the epitome of the world. So, in getting to know some of those people more, putting on the exhibition, being a little bit tired of graduate work, finding myself already with an M.A. degree and a lot of extra graduate work, I was leaning more and more toward something to do with art as an object. I think the next step was when you and I were probably in closest contact. I made a decision that I would not enroll in school that year. That in fact, if I could find the backing for it, I would open a gallery. The reasoning behind that, again, was the composite idea, the Ferus Gallery was there, the artists that were being shown at the Ferus Gallery, I won't remember them all, but Kenny Price, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffmann, Robert Irwin, John Altoon, Hassel Smith from up here, Jay DeFeo from up here, occasionally a Diebenkorn drawing, a composite of avant-garde activity normally from Southern California, which Walter was very well informed about. It happened that a number of galleries that had been on La Cienega were leaving to go other places. There was a fear in our minds that if this was allowed to happen, the art scene would dissipate.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: "Our?" You're saying Hopps?

MR. HOPKINS: Walter, Shirley, myself and Irving. Obviously we were all going through many personal crises at one time or another. So the situation became, all right, if I can find a backing I'm going to start a gallery. Three young attorneys came along. I've either forgotten or suppressed their names. Except that, interestingly, in fact sitting on my desk right now, there's a phone slip from Ambassador Lloyd, asking me to have lunch next week. Ambassador Lloyd is Frank Lloyd, who was one of the three young attorneys. Now Ambassador in Washington on his way to his assignment. I will see him the first time for twenty years. Anyway, three young attorneys wanted to start a gallery, mainly as a tax write-off. They were obviously young, aggressive businessmen. They didn't need to make money, although they were interested in it. They happened to be Jewish and they had interest in great art.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I remember one friend of mine who's been involved in galleries many times. When anybody comes to him and wants to start one, he says, are you willing to drop $10,000 the first year?" And if they go for it and say, "Yes," then he's willing to talk to them and plan.

MR. HOPKINS:Well, this is more or less the way. We didn't talk about money. But I think everybody recognized that it wouldn't happen. We found a place across the street from the Ferus Gallery. We thought a lot about how and what to name it. Since there were so many of us, three backers and myself, we didn't want to name it after anybody. We struggled here and there. I forget who, but not me, came up with the idea of using the name Huysman, a nineteenth-century decadent writer and poet. That sounded okay. I became known as the Huysman Gallery, Dutch. Everybody called it the Huysman Gallery. It was supposed to be Weisman.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: That'll teach you to be smart.

MR. HOPKINS:It didn't last long enough to make a difference. So any-way, the first exhibition that I did was a composite show of mainly Northern Californians because they had a lot of association with Northern California. I remember Gerald Davis was in that first show, a painter named Enrico Yamamoto who, I thought, was pretty good. I don't know what's happened to him. Lundy Siegriest was in it, John Saccaro was in it, and a few Southern Californians, but not really avant-garde Southern Californians. We were trying to look to a kind of art that wasn't being shown in the galleries. It was a very successful opening. We had a lot of friends and a lot of people poured in and, of course, nobody bought anything. So I did one or two other exhibitions. We began to have some difficulty about the time of the third show, because David very much wanted, under the aegis of one of their girlfriends, to do an Israeli exhibition of contemporary Israeli art. I felt strongly it simply wasn't in the direction of the gallery, of what we wanted to do, so we began to argue about what that was. We had the exhibition. It did not have that many terrific things. It did not bring the Jewish community in to buy hundreds of dollars worth of paintings, which we had hoped would happen, and so I went on for a couple of shows. At that moment in time I met Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and Larry Bell. They were all essentially students coming out of Chouinard Art Institute, who had been trained by Altoon and Irwin and others teaching there. They were in roughly their third or fourth year. They'd all been told that if you got out of school, you go out and be artists. While that had not been my temperament, yet it goes back to temperament. Obviously, as I told you, I took art education courses and resisted being thrown out on the street and being an artist. I've always admired people who take that risk. The first one to come in and actually talk to me was Joe Goode. He's become a very dear friend. He brought in some little drawings on paper, kind of little star patterns, heavily impastoed, so I just asked if he had some friends and so forth and so on. He brought around Larry Bell and brought around Ed and Nate and we got to know each other well. I did one little show where I showed Joe's drawings which taught me two things. One, that when I grew up and got into the art business, or whatever you want to call it, I never had any illusion that I would make much of a living. At that moment it was even a kind of surprise but, in the interim, with the high prices even than for Abstract Expressionism, the earliest beginnings of the Johns, Rauschenbergs and so on, young artists had a whole different attitude. I remember when I hung Joe's little show of drawings along with another artist, one of them sold, I think for $100, and he was ecstatic. Joe was depressed for about two weeks, and I couldn't figure out why, and his hope had been that the show would sell out that first night. I suddenly recognized that the world had changed somewhere in there, where art had been something else. I don't [inaudible] that Joe has sold out since that time, but he'd gotten used to that idea, that they were young, aggressive artists, and their whole ambition in life was to knock off, philosophically and esthetically, the artists across the street, to knock off Kenny Price and Ed Kienholz and Irwin. I liked that competitiveness, so I did an exhibition.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: This was the "War Babies" exhibition.

MR. HOPKINS: It had some vague historical significance. I called it "War Babies," the poster for which Joe Goode designed, as a matter of fact, and Jerry McMillan, who was an artist and photographer in Southern California, did the image for the poster. He made it with four artists. It was Joe Goode, Larry Bell; Joe Goode did construction out of cardboard boxes. I was really angry with him because we had one big white wall which was pristine, and he came in with six penny nails and about thirty cardboard boxes and nailed them all to the wall with these giant spikes, making this big composition of open-ended and close-ended cardboard boxes. Very prophetic, when you think of Rauschenberg's cardboard doors and the things that came along a whole decade later. There was no question that this was a prototypical piece for that kind of environmental statement made on the spot. Larry Bell was still a painter. He was doing what he called "saddle paintings." They took a kind of configuration at the top and they had a little saddle indentation. But they were Abstract Expressionist paintings, though they actually now would be more related to color-field things. A young artist named Ron Miyashiro, who has just recently reappeared again on the scene, did rather elegant drawings. Mainly very black and very dark drawings of vaginal shapes, very rich oily, charcoal things. There would be a kind of slit in the middle. And the fourth artist was Ed Bereal, who was a black artist. Big, tough, mean, really black in every sense of the word, pre-civil rights in a way. But he was a wonderful guy and we're good friends. He was doing really bizarre constructions, assemblages, of leather pouches filled with stuff and then filled with oil, and projections attached to them and swastikas painted on the outside edges of it. Oil would leak through the leather sack and it would begin to get odiferous. These were quite unique and special objects. Ed Ruscha would have been part of the "War Babies" show, but he was off on his first trip to Europe. I had not ever really shown Ed's things, but I did have a few of his works there. I bought a painting of his called Sweetwater for $200. He got paid off in ten dollars per month over a two-year period. Another guy named Jerry Rosenzweig got a little painting called Sue which will be in his retrospective coming up, pre-Ruscha Ruscha series in words. He was using paint like he does now. But he was off and away. The reason that the "War Babies" show created so much interest or trauma, whatever you want to call it, was that it was really tying into the McCarthy era and the John Birch period. The poster that Joe had designed and Jerry had photographed showed these four young guys, bravos, all in their own ways but pretty rough on the exterior. And that Joe, who happened to be a Catholic, they were sitting at a table draped with the American flag. On that were various crumbs of this and that, Joe, being a Catholic, was sitting at one end, eating a mackerel, and Larry Bell, who was Jewish, was eating a bagel, and Bereal, who was black, was eating a watermelon, Ron Miyashiro, who was oriental, was eating with chopsticks. It was a great photograph, dark and intense. Here was an American flag, and all these diaper types eating. Somehow it got the attention of the John Birch Society. They drove me crazy with their phone calling, chastising me for using the flag like that. It brought all my social instincts to the fore, and I very patiently explained that if they were all beautiful young women in spangled costumes and football games, then they wouldn't have any qualms about it. It was only because these were some people who were multi-racial and that bothers you, and you have no business being upset by that. That's not what America's about. That was my political phase at the moment. The political phase was the key backing on this, it touched a number of-

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -a catalyst.

MR. HOPKINS: My backers got bothered to the point where they refused to let me put up the poster. I put up the poster anyway, which meant obviously that I was going to have to leave the gallery. The gallery was quite frankly not making much money anyway. I had a salary arrangement. My salary arrangement was $300 a month. And I'll tell you that's about the time that we really got broke. And so I knew I had to go somewhere. Also, it was at exactly the same moment that some had personal stuff was going on at U.C.L.A. They had brought a man in named Lester Longman who was head of the department.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Yes. Well, Longman had been in there a couple of years, because he was the one who put in the course that we taught.

MR. HOPKINS: That's correct. The first year he came - you know how everybody asks about who's coming, who's going to be our leader. He had a reputation for being a man who had been supportive of contemporary ideas. In fact, he brought Guston to the University of Iowa after Grant Wood. That was a pretty advanced set. He taught about Picasso. He wanted to bring these courses in esthetics back into the university structure. And John Rosenfeld, whom you know and who is a wonderful scholar and very interesting person, was our head in that thing. I enjoyed teaching because it was different again. I had one T.A. in art education and two in art history, one in theory and one in esthetics. It turned out in my mind that Longman was a bad guy. He would come to meetings where artists like Motherwell would be invited to speak, or Dore Ashton who would speak, and he would come and prophesize against modern work. It had gone too far. He was bugged so I wrote a broadside. He wrote something in the New York Times. I wrote an answer to that, about a six-page document and answer, a fiery political letter. I published it in an edition of about 200, and passed it out in the gallery about the time of the "War Babies" show. It made me some friends and some enemies. The friends that it made me were new people, very interesting people and people who had something for my career, but it put me in trouble at U.C.L.A. The "War Babies" show was going on, the battle with Lester Longman was going on, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came Jim Elliott. He was with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and asked if I would like to think about working there.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Had you gotten to know him before in some way?

MR. HOPKINS: Not at all well, just fleetingly. I had met him. He had come into the gallery; we talked. I knew who he was, but we certainly weren't friends in any real way. He said he had been watching, that was a magnificent show at the University, and would I like to think about coming to work at the museum.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Well, I've got two digressions on the gallery I want to get in before we get on to the museum. One, do you sometimes fantasize or think that you could have been a real major gallery dealer, a Castelli or Carper, in this town, Berggruen?

MR. HOPKINS: No, I had no real fantasy about that. Philosophically, I could be. I think, probably, that I would feel competent if people with real sales capacity and backing would come to me and let me work behind the scenes and suggest this artist and that artist.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: In other words, if you could be the eye rather than the front man.

MR. HOPKINS: Well, I would like to be more the eye than the philosophy, because I'm a great absorber of information. Again, that's one of those things when we were talking about diversity. I spent, not a lot of time, but I listen to the news endlessly, I read newspapers endlessly, I watch T.V. endlessly, and somehow in my own mind I've juried shows endlessly. God knows how many hundreds of shows in how many different states. It's coming up to thirty now. I lecture very well, sucking up stuff, and so I consider my information, rather than being a true eye, it's a composite opinion, is really what it comes down to, it boasts at the same time. It's not a capacity I poke at, it's a temperamental thing. I think that I do know kind of where pulses are at times. I think in a gallery situation I could be very helpful. I learned many, many years ago when I would sell shoes in the summer and sell furniture in the summer, that I simply am not a merchandiser. Whenever I'm called upon to sell something that didn't fit quite right or was out of date, I was in a moral dilemma within. I've never really, it's a terrible thing to say, but I never really look at art in monetary terms. You have to use money to get it, buy it, and so on. That Joe Goode painting on the wall over there that I've had since the 1960s, I bought for ten dollars a month over a long period of time, has a value now of over $10,000. It doesn't to me. But that's not the issue. But then that's not what that is, it's still ten dollars a month or whatever. I couldn't succeed in that and I knew it. My dipping into the gallery business at the time was essentially to-

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -proselytize.

MR. HOPKINS: Well, it was to save a scene and to proselytize and get a little stimulus going. It had that effect. It only lasted about nine months. But to digress, that's at the time, for example, specifically when you'll remember that I was living separated from my wife, not yet divorced but still separated, in a little place over near Brentwood, just off the freeway to the west of U.C.L.A. Down in a eucalyptus grove there was a residence that had belonged to an off-beat artist. He had built a little house about as big as this office, with a tiny little bedroom and a tiny little bathroom and a tiny little kitchen. But an incredible setting, beautiful. They said that it was for rent. I said how much, and it was seventy dollars a month. Well, that was possible because at that time I was making $300. Well, I thought I was making $600 a month, $300 to my ex-wife and living on the other. So I had this neat little place. The reason they were going to rent it to me for seventy dollars a month was that sooner or later it was going to be torn down. One day I came back and there was a notice in my mail saying that on whatever date it was they were going to tear it down. I didn't pay any attention to it, assuming those things would go through a third, fourth or fifth warning. One day there was an exhibition in Pasadena. I'd gone over with Walter [Hopps] and Shirley, and drove back about two o'clock in the morning. I walked up to my little house and the house was gone, flattened to the ground. My file cabinet, my Ruscha painting, my Joe Goode painting, my guppy tank, my clothes, sitting there in the moonlight. My house was gone forever. I actually stayed with Walter and Shirley for a while. Then I shared rent with you down on Thirteenth Street and Euclid. It was both an ebb in a way in my life, and an incredibly invigorating time. Just so diverse, so full of confusion, just unbelievable. I was asked then to go work at the L.A. County, if it could be done. I should say about that same time, Walter Hopps had decided to go work at the Pasadena Museum. He had been asked by Tom Levitt to come and function in a curatorial capacity. While Walter was a very diverse person, brilliant, but not responsible, we were surprised at that appointment, but delighted, because the implication was that he would, through his knowledge which was compatible with what we were generally thinking, have more influence, that he could actually bring people we knew into those exhibitions. And then they asked me to work at the L.A. County Museum. I felt very good about it. I felt flattered, as a matter of fact. I thought it was a wonderful risk on Jim's part. I've admired him for giving me that opportunity every since. There was no money at the County to do it.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: This was Assistant Curator of Modern Art. And that was under Jim Elliott.

MR. HOPKINS: When I first went. And he said if I could work it out, I will let you know. So time went by and I was getting a little shaky because I knew I was going to leave the gallery into another couple of weeks. I was wondering exactly what I would be doing, selling shoes or something. So he came and said, "All right, we've worked it out. We'll give you $3,000 a year." (This was a long time after my initial salary of $2,900. Three thousand was really peanuts, but fine.) And so that was it. You would begin on X day in June or whenever that was. I found out many years later that there was no County money at all. The person that paid my salary the first year that I was there was Marsha Weisman. She was not paying it because it was me, she was paying it because of Jim. Jim really needed the help.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: She was being kind of an angel.

MR. HOPKINS: So she put up the money to employ someone.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: When it came to unmarked bills in brown envelopes, weren't you suspicious?

MR. HOPKINS: No, no other artist, I was paid to assist, but my title was Assistant Curator of Modern Art. I thought, well, a pretty ambitious title. The first day that I went to work at the museum was the day when they were jurying the next to the last of the Los Angeles Artists show. The juror that year was William Sykes. As I've mentioned before, I had great admiration for him. How wonderful to be beginning a whole new career on the day when this great hero was working! I spent my whole first day at the museum helping him jury. Schlucking around with this and that, listening to his comments and watching the process and having, really, a wonderful time. It got to be about six o'clock and we stopped jurying and went over to the Weisman's house in Beverly Hills, and went swimming, and had a massive dinner and ate thirty-dollars-a-pound chocolates. About midnight Jim came out and put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Just remember, every day is not going to be like this." It was a very valid observation, but it was a euphoric first day, a pretty wonderful beginning.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: The $3,000 seemed quite palatial.

MR. HOPKINS: Anyway, that's how I finally, after many, many years, got into the museum profession. I really have enjoyed life. You know, there are incredible frustrations, and more as it's harder to get money together and this and that, and more as you're asked to be an administrator. But for that first day I felt that, like a duck in water, I'd found my pond.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Well, the other three positions that are listed there: Head of Museum Education, 1963-1965, Head of Museum Programs, 1965-1966, Head Curator of Exhibitions and Publications, 1966-1968, all sound to an outside, they're somewhat cross-reference. It's the same job with new titles.

MR. HOPKINS: They were different jobs.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: So why did we go from one to another?

MR. HOPKINS: Well, okay, that has to do with diversity of background, timing, the museum, the same thing that we've been talking about from time to time. I went to work as Jim's assistant. For the first day that I started to work at the museum, Jim gave me certain responsibilities, and let me do them and make my own mistakes, and he was always available for advice. As I say, I couldn't have asked for a better person to get my feet wet, because he really made me, from the first day, function in some real way. I had a lot of diversity, so I was able to. I can't remember specifically how my duties went, but I know one of the very early things that I did was to install the Reuben Nakian exhibition. It was Nakian's first museum exhibition in the United States, and there has been a lot of criticism of the installation of shows at the L.A. County Museum. It gave me a chance to do what I thought was better than what had been done. It was very well received, and Henry Seldis who wrote in the Los Angeles Times gave a nice installation award. It gave me a little credibility at the beginning in a nice way. I was perfectly happy working with Jim. Then obviously, after six months, I think, it went on to a County salary. I made somewhat slightly more of a living wage, but not much more. That was really not very much money at the time.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Were you still trying to send half of it to Joanne?

MR. HOPKINS: Yes, and the old Head of Education was retiring. They did not have an Education Department, and they were thinking about that. I had a strong background in education in a lot of different ways, and they wanted to start a new docent council. We were still down at Exposition Park. Rick Brown called me into his office one day and said, "All right, I'll just lay it on the line to you. We need the head of the Education Department, and we need a person to come in. We need this done and we need that done. We need a sense of direction set for us. You'll have a great deal of responsibility. I realize it's not curatorial and I realize this and I realize that." I guess I was, you'll have to say in fairness to that point, simply a company man. I tried to weigh what I thought would be more valuable for me. I must admit that I really felt probably the curatorial work continuing in one sense. But it was a point of transition, it was already determined that we were going to move to the new building. They were even starting to dig the ground and so forth. I listened to everything back and forth. Then I went back to Rick Brown and asked, "What do you want me to do?" He said, "I'd really appreciate it if you would do the Education job, because we really need that very badly right now, and because were beginning to close down the exhibition program until we make the move, and we won't have as much activity in that area." I said, okay. I became the Head of Education, started the docent program with Glynn Janss, a woman volunteer, a very good, energetic organizer.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: They had not had any docents before that?

MR. HOPKINS: They had not had docents in an organized way. As a group it has achieved a certain special renown of its own. Some people think it's wonderful and some don't like it as it's structured. But it still goes on very effectively. I was just down speaking to them a few weeks ago. Many of the same old-timers that were there when we started were still there. I trained them in art history, which begot teaching, worked with them in the galleries, started a lot of education programs there, organized the first Animated Film Festival which is now in its fifteenth year, or something like that, the Tournee of Animation, started a lecture series, brought in a number of very interesting speakers. All of this time was in transition. The person who was the head of my division, I forget even what he was called, who was between myself and Rick, who handled programs and education, simply had not worked out as a person. About the time we were ready to move over to the new building, he was let go. I was asked if I wanted to take that position, which was Head of Education, as well as being Head of Programs, Head of Public Relations, Head of the Museum Travel Program. A whole diversity, really, a catch-all position. Since I had been doing a lot of that work anyway, plus publishing the handbook for the collection that was given out when the new museum was opened, this was an advancement within the area.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: It also gave a little more money, too.

MR. HOPKINS: Yes, in fact, by that time it was a living wage. So that was the second step, actually third step, Head of Education, then Head of Programming. If you remember, when we got into the new building, and had been there for about a year, the trustees and Rick Brown got into conflict. Rick Brown left and went off to the Kimbell Museum in Texas. Shortly afterwards Jim Elliott left to be the Director of Wadsworth Atheneum. The question was how would things function. Kenneth Donahue became the Director. I was anxious to move on because I was very supportive of Rick, and not so much of the new director, or have some different kind of job than I had at that time. I talked to several of the trustees and the agreement was made that I would take the position, not a chief curatorial position, but a position that would handle all the publications of the museum, and would set up the exhibition program.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: They hadn't had somebody in charge of this before?

MR. HOPKINS: No, and it would occasionally give me the flexibility to do an exhibition. So it brought me full round again into the curatorial section, but in a more administrative way. I'd been semi-administering, but this gave me even more administrative responsibility. We had a very active publishing program at that time, giving museum members a catalog. The membership, when the new museum opened, jumped from something like 5,000 to 20,000 at a time. Just because of the new location, it was that big a membership. You can publish catalogs, the cost to print a catalog and reproduce it, the New York School catalog, "American Sculpture of the 1960s," a number of major catalogs we could reproduce for very small amounts of money because there were so many of them, because we gave them to the membership. I started that program, made alliances with New York Graphics so we could distribute the books nationally, as well as to the museum. This was a whole new facet of work. I was fascinated by it. I really enjoyed working with the designers from the ground up. I also patterned the whole exhibition program which was at that time more modern than it has been since. We did the Giacometti show, the de Kooning exhibition, the Pollock exhibition.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Man Ray, Oldenburg.

MR. HOPKINS: I worked with Jules Langton on the Man Ray show, with Maurice Seldis on the Rico Lebrun show. I did most of the installations.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: When you talk about how the exhibitions originated, the first one is "Thirty-seven Works by Thirty-five Artists of Los Angeles."

MR. HOPKINS: Okay, that's the one that I did at U.C.L.A. I did not get into exhibition origination that much. I co-originated with Jim on the Reuben Nakian exhibition in the first year. Then I got into the Education position and was originating things like the Animated Film Festival, but not exhibitions. Then when I came around the loop again-

MR. CHAMBERLIN: -let's see, "John Paul Jones" in 1966, and Albers's "White Lines Squared" in 1966.

MR. HOPKINS: I was getting some curatorial experience, a lot of installation experience, a lot of publishing experience, a lot of administration experience. That was a good period of time. I was beginning, about 1966, to feel I could be a director. I was not, in my own mind, I'm sure, and in his mind, getting along that well with the director at that moment.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I gather you didn't get along with many people.

MR. HOPKINS: Well, whatever. I began casting around for possibilities. I heard about the position at the University of Iowa. I went back to talk about it. It was interesting. The one time that I was interviewed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rene d'Harnoncourt asked me to come back. I didn't really know or had not spent time with Rene d'Harnoncourt. So he was talking to me, and various patrons were talking about this and that. He helped me by talking about my interest in education. I got talking about that, and I thought because they weren't talking about a specific position that this was what they were offering. I thought maybe they were talking about an education position. So we got all embroiled. I heard later that they wanted me for a curatorial position. I was so interested in education that they thought it wouldn't work out. It was one of the problems with being too broad. At the College Art Association, in 1967-68 in St. Louis, Rick Brown approached me again, who was in the process then of getting ready to build the Kimbell Museum. He asked me if I would come to the Kimbell Museum and take essentially the position that I had at the L.A. County Museum.

LK: LOUISE KATZMAN

KL: KAREN LEE

MR: MIMI ROBERTS

MR. CHAMBERLIN: We're going to begin with a working session with Louise Katzman, Karen Lee and Mimi Roberts talking about the Edward Ruscha show. The main reason I wanted to talk to you first of all was to get the story on what happened about that painting from you, since I've already heard it from about three other sources. And then, depending on how detailed your memory of that early period is, I have a bunch of questions I'd like to ask.

MR. HOPKINS: Well, let's talk about Sweetwater, which is a painting done by Ed Ruscha in about 1960, which is a time in my life when I was running a gallery called the Huysman Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. Ed was at that time a recent graduate, or maybe not a graduate but recently out of Chouinard Art Institute, along with Joe Goode, Larry Hell and a number of other young artists who turned out to be very interesting artists. The first person I contacted at that time was Joe Goode who wandered in one day with a series of star paintings, as I always called them. They were somewhat Abstract Expressionist, small paintings with a star image in the center, and painterly around the edges in greens and reds and so on, that kind of centralized image he used pretty much since that time. One of his closest friends was Ed Ruscha, whom I had not yet met. The next time that Joe came to the gallery he brought Ed with him, who at that time was a shy young man, and still is a shy man. My recollection is that he brought with him a number of little wooden objects that at that moment in time were, they still are, I think, very interesting. Where they are, I don't know. I don't know whether Ed even has them. My recollection was that they were little cruciform shapes, maybe sixteen inches high and fourteen inches across. Or just little slabs of old wood, found wood, that had words worked, drawn, painted, or cut into the surface one way or another. They were interesting, too. Ed and Joe had both come from Oklahoma to the West Coast, and they were both travelers back and forth, taking the old Route 66 back and forth like Jack Kerouac between the Midwest and the West Coast. But also right at that moment in time, 1960-61, Ed Kienholz was starting to work on his constructions in Los Angeles, which eventually became the tableaus. He had been doing a lot of work with painting on wood and things of that kind, and Wally Berman was doing his kind of constructions here in San Francisco. Well, he floated back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Bruce Conner was doing his, in my mind, most important work at that time, the early feather and rubber objects, and collections of esoteric material in box-like configurations which were vaguely reminiscent of Joseph Cornell, apparently that was the source, but they were harder objects. Then, also, George Herms was doing his wooden slab objects, out of found pieces of things. In the very beginning of his career, Ed was cognizant of other things going on around him, but bringing a very independent hand to it. Well, we got to know one another and enjoyed each other's company along with Joe, Larry, and some of the others. Larry, at that time, was painting like an Abstract Expressionist. And the next time that Ed came in, or shortly after that, he came in with two paintings. One, which was called Sue, was in my recollection about two feet by two feet square, essentially a white canvas with the word Sue painted on it in a typo-graphical style, the style he was using at that time. The major feature was a triangular piece of blue and red striped cloth that cut a diagonal in the middle of the painting. It still belongs to Jerry Rosenzweig, and it's a piece we're going to try to see if he'd like to have in the exhibition. The other painting was Sweetwater, which is a big painting. I notice that it says here on the back, "About forty-six by sixty inches." I think it was at least that scale, if not even bigger, which was the first big painting of Ed's I had ever seen. It was an interesting configuration because, again, it was essentially a white canvas of rather large scale. At the bottom the word "Sweetwater" was spelled across the base in typographical form with two very fine lines, one above the word and one below the word. Then, the full bottom half of the canvas, other than that, was completely blank. In the top section it had a series of splotches of color where he had obviously put a pile of paint on and dragged across the surface, maybe with a wooden stick or a piece of cardboard or who knows. Although I can't place the colors exactly, the recollection clearly is that they were rather pastel-like shades. I vaguely remember cerulean blue, ochre and a green, just simply dragged across the canvas in a very thick, impasto way. It's a very funny painting. The top is very rich in pigment, and like an Abstract Expressionist painting, the bottom half is pure and clean, with the one word, "Sweetwater." We talked a little bit about that. I wanted to know what "Sweetwater" meant. Sweetwater is a town in Texas along Route 66. Other "Sweetwater" things occur in his imagery as he goes along. But it was still for that moment a very unique painting. I liked the painting and I liked Ed a lot, so we talked about this and that and I agreed to buy it from him for $200. Jerry Rosenzweig bought Sue for $100-150. I can't remember exactly. Since I couldn't pay for it totally, we set it up on a basis where we were paying $10 a month. They gave me a photograph of the painting and chopped off [inaudible] at the bottom quarter. He would chop one off each month that I paid him the $10. So, anyway, the painting was mine, and I carried it around with me wherever I went for quite a period of time. I was a T.A. at U.C.L.A. in art history, and had therefore a little office that I worked out of, over at the U.C.L.A. campus. Since I was moving with some frequency at that time, I put it in my office back-to-back with the back side of the canvas out. I came there one day, and the painting wasn't there. I asked any of the other T.A.s if they knew where it might be, and they didn't know and hadn't heard, so I asked around the whole Art Department if anybody had seen this painting and where it was. It was still at that moment in time no more valuable than $200 as far as that's concerned, but it was a painting I had become incredibly fond of because of the circumstances. Finally, nobody said anything. But I came back about a week later and in my office there was a little note on my desk from a young woman whose name I've fortunately forgotten, that indicated the fact that she wanted to talk to me. So I went to find her and she said that she was an art student at U.C.L.A., a painter, and that she had seen that canvas sitting there, and it didn't look like it was finished to her and, therefore, she took it and used it as her own to paint on. So I asked to see her work, thinking conceivably something could be done, it could be cleaned off or something. But she was a person who was painting kind of like Joan Brown at that moment, with two-foot thick pigment and a few other things. So it was totally gone, and that was the end of Sweetwater, which is now only in photographs. I think it took me something like fifteen years to tell Ed finally what had happened to it. Now he knows, so my conscience is clear.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: How did he respond?

MR. HOPKINS: Sympathetically. We've been good friends over the years. I'm sure that it's at the point now where getting a retrospective show is even a much greater disappointment, at least in my mind, kind of the classic first picture, classic first painting of the group.

?: What year was that in?

MR. HOPKINS: Roughly 1960.

?: Was it destroyed the same year?

MR. HOPKINS: No, it was not destroyed until probably 1962. That's the story of sweetwater and Sue.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Even though he wasn't in the "War Babies" show, he feels himself sort of an honorary member of that group, so maybe you could talk a little bit about how he fits into that whole group.

MR. HOPKINS:Well, the reason he was not in the "War Babies" show was because he had gone off on his first trip to Europe. He has always been more adventuresome than some of the artists of that particular group. The four artists in the "War Babies" show were Joe Goode, Larry Bell, Ed Bereal, and a young Hawaiian-Japanese American, Ron Miyashiro, who had been doing very interesting things that were small scale. They had more or less vaginal shapes in the center, pre-dating Judy Chicago's butterflies, but out of a male imagery. Almost all of them were black, very dark in color. Black with a little blue, black with a little yellow, very handsome small objects, and again consistent with what was going on. There was a painter in Southern California named Richards Ruben, who was very much devoted to Clyfford Still and Clyfford Still's ideas. Ruben was teaching at Chouinard, and a lot of Miyashiro's imagery came out of this, but it was richer in a funny way, even than Ruben's work. Larry Bell, who had been painting really Abstract Expressionist paintings. You would mix them up with Michael Goldberg or somebody of that time. Then he went to a series of what he called saddle paintings which were somewhat cleaner. My recollection is that they were squarish paintings, about four by four feet. They had an indentation at the top, not the actual canvas, but the painted form. It kind of dipped down at the top like the seat of a saddle. He was in the exhibition, and the fourth artist was named Ed Bereal, the big black artist, who was involved at that time in making really weird fetish objects. He would take a leather purse, or leather sack of one kind or another, small, like a marble bag or something, then he would put objects in that, God knows what they were, like an African fetish piece of one kind or another. Then he would permeate the whole thing with oil, so the bag was filled and kind of seeping out, and then attached to it, on the top, various metal attachments, like small pipes. They were like conduit piping but very tiny, copper piping. That kind of thing stuck out of the top of this thing like a periscope. He would paint on the surface a giant black swastika on a light brown field, very aggressive, very mean, obviously black-white relation-ships in society and things like that. He made about a half dozen of them. Ed has not done as much since that time, although he continues to function as an artist. But he was in the exhibition. So it was quite an extraordinary show and Ed would have been in it with the exception of the fact that he had gone off to Europe. If he'd been in the show, it might have been a little harder, because of my recollection of the poster, which was designed by Joe Goode, called "War Babies." I think that was 1961. I know it was the last exhibition I did in the gallery because it closed right after that, having a lot to do with that exhibition. The idea of the four artists was to present themselves as individuals, while Joe Goode was a painter primarily, and a very nice draftsman. His piece was to be nailed to the wall of the gallery, which in those days we'd spent a great deal of money making pristine white and pure. He nailed it to the gallery with about ten penny nails. A configuration of cardboard boxes, some with the flaps open, some with them closed, and from the backside around and so forth. It made a shape on the wall about ten by twelve feet. There isn't, I think, a photograph of Ed's painting. It would be very interesting if there were, because then it could figure later in relation to Rauschenberg's cardboard figures and cardboard doors. A lot of people have worked with cardboard since that time. In retrospect, in 1961, it probably was one of the first environmental sculptures, if you think of it in that funny context. It took a full wall of the gallery. As I said, Larry painted with the saddle paintings. Ed had Bereal's and wanted me to show those little drawings. The poster created the greatest furor because it represented the four of them, Ed Bereal, black, eating a watermelon, Ron Miyashiro, being Oriental, eating with chopsticks, Joe Goode, being Catholic, eating a mackerel, and Larry Bell, being Jewish, eating a bagel, sitting around a table with the American flag draped over the top of it, crumbs on the table. A very strong photograph taken by Jerry McMillan, as a matter of fact, who was a friend of Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode. He may still have a copy of that photograph, as a matter of fact, which might be worth looking into.

?: Oh, in fact I know I have.

MR. HOPKINS: I have the poster.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I have a copy too, I think.

MR. HOPKINS: I have the poster, but there are not very many of them left. That happened to be right at the time of the John Birch Society. When we put it up in the window all hell broke loose over a period of time. My backers at the gallery were not very enthusiastic. I had lunch with one of them the other day. He's now an ambassador, working out of Washington, and ambassador without a portfolio with the Carter administration, working with starving people in the world. We reminisced about those days. He was much more sympathetic now than he was then, since they have all become interesting artists. Anyway, to go back to Ed quickly, he was part of that group, he never did show at the Huysman Gallery although we were close friends. His first exhibition was, I think, at the Ferus Gallery which picked him up the next year or the year after that.

?: Do you recall what was in that show?

MR. HOPKINS: Which one?

?: The first one at the Ferus.

MR. HOPKINS: I don't remember. Isn't that bizarre to say? I really don't remember. I think the only person that could answer that would be Walter Hopps, or maybe Irving Blum, because Irving was with the gallery at that time. I remember at about that time two things were going on in Ed's life. One was the publication of his first book, the Gasoline Station book [Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, 1962], that was self-published. I don't know how many he made, but I know that it was not a very popular item at that time. He came by and brought me a copy. Years later I was visiting him at the studio. There were stacks and stacks and stacks of the first two or three books. Maybe thousands of them, I don't know. I teased him about being-what were the two brothers, the Collier brothers, who let the roof fall in on them with newspapers. It looked a little like that at that moment. But then they caught on, I guess we knew that they would. Now they've sold something like seven or eight editions, incredibly popular all over the world. He was working on that project which was very interesting to me at that time. Other people would think that it was such an off-beat thing to be doing, and it's a prototypical approach to art, a major manifestation, but really rare for that time. I remember he moved from one studio to another studio where he was working on the bird paintings, the ones you were looking at yesterday. So those things were all coming along from 1960-61, although the bird paintings didn't really show. My feeling is that first Ferus exhibition, the painting Annie and probably Boss, and it would be that group of work, because I think they probably were in that first show.

?: I think Boss was in 1964. Are you sure?

MR. HOPKINS: I can't be that specific, but I'll tell you Betty Asher can answer that.

?: I asked her. She didn't remember.

MR. HOPKINS: Where she got the painting Annie?

?: She got it from Ed.

?: Annie was 1962, wasn't it? And Boss 1961?

MR. HOPKINS: There was a very nice painting, it seems to me it was one of the Noise paintings, that belonged to Betty Friedman; does that still belong to Betty Friedman?

?: No.

MR. HOPKINS: There was a very nice lady in Los Angeles, whose name has been Betty Friedman. I think she's recently remarried, but she's well known in the collectors group there. She supported Ed for a while. I know she gave him some money. She gave Larry Bell some money. She was a good supporter of young artists without any hope of return at that point. So she still has one.

?: Yes, she does still have one.

MR. HOPKINS: But she might recollect exactly what was in that show too. He did show Boss in a 1964 show according to-

MR. HOPKINS: -in a 1964 show. Well, all right, his first Ferus Gallery show was not, when was it?

?: No, the ones by Betty Friedman-

MR. HOPKINS: It was in 1961, I mean it came later. In 1965 he showed the Birds.

MR. HOPKINS: Okay, all right.

?: But nobody remembers what he showed in 1962.

MR. HOPKINS: When Huysman folded, there was a question of the Ferus Gallery. They had a very tight relationship amongst the artists that were there, and the artists had a great deal to say about who came into the gallery. Both Larry and Ed were brought in. They were really like a blackball situation amongst the artists, but in a positive sense. They didn't really want to show anybody other than somebody they thought was really super in their mind. So it was kind of a day of heroics both for Larry and Ed, who were one generation removed from Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffmann, Billy Al Bengston.

?: Do you remember the things that were shown at Ferus? In 1961 or 1962 there was a show of Jasper Johns sculpture and paintings of [inaudible] and Schwitters collages simultaneously.

MR. HOPKINS: Not, in my mind, not simultaneously. Well, there's talk about that. I'm not going to be accurate about dates, but it was an interesting period and it was in 1961 and 1962. Ferus Gallery did first of all an exhibition of Joseph Albers, of small and larger paintings, from eighteen inches square to forty-eight inches square. It seems to me that the small paintings were $400 and the big paintings were $1,200 or some bizarre amount like that. And through those paintings of Albers's which was a taste of-actually it was a taste of Walter's-

?: -a closer taste to Walter's wife at that time.

MR. HOPKINS: Shirley Hopps; and Irving Blum had come to work with the gallery, and that exhibition had a very salutary effect. Albers hadn't even been seen that much in the museum, although the L.A. County Museum owned a very beautiful Albers, a blue painting, about the only one in the whole area. Only one or two paintings, I think, were borrowed for the show but had a great effect on the arts, especially Billy Al Bengston, in the early Boss, stars and stripes painting, square on square on square, with the symbol in the center. Then, it seems to me, after that they did a little [Giorgio] Morandi exhibition. I don't think there was a single painting in that exhibition bigger than eight by twelve inches, all of them very tiny but very special paintings. I remember Henry Seldis, who was a critic at that time, put down the art of Morandi as dumb, funny stuff. But they were beautiful, beautiful paintings. I don't think anything sold out of the exhibition. They were something like $600. That had a real impact on almost all of the artists there, because of the scale, the intimacy of the subject matter and scale. Walter owned one of the best of the Joseph Cornell boxes, it was a parrot box which had parrots on the inside and a glass front. Cornell had broken the glass front and put another glass over it. It had you looking through it like you were looking through a broken window. It is in the Cornell show right now in New York, and it was one of the very best boxes. All of those things were feeding into this group of very tightly knit artists. There was a moment in time when they were each trying, in the nicest sense of fellowship, to knock each other off. Could one be better than the next when they had their exhibitions? It was right in that phase that Kenny Price did his second exhibition, the exhibition where the cups were boxed. It was the first cup show and they were all in beautiful little boxes, almost like Cornell boxes. Robert Irwin did a series of tiny paintings, six by eight inches, but in very rich, heavy impasto, kind of a sweep, like an eye shape almost in the middle of it, and with very soft pastel color. There probably are two or three of those around. Billy Al Bengston, to top that, painted his whole show in a week. They gave him a month, but I think it was a very short time, which was the motorcycle show. They were feeding and fighting off of each other, using these esoteric resources that had never been available in Los Angeles before, which is the difference, I guess you'd say, between the West Coast and New York. It had real impact on that whole gang, especially some other people as well. It may have been a combination of Johns and Schwitters, I think you're right. There were not too many Schwitters. I remember when I went to Fort Worth I bought the last one from that group at the Fort Worth Museum, which was a very beautiful one. The Johns show was there, and there was also a Johns show at Everett Ellen.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: I heard about that one.

MR. HOPKINS: Which was a little bit later on.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: It would have been 1962, or not later than 1962.

MR. HOPKINS: That's right because the Ferus show had the flashlights. I don't think it had the coffee cans, but I remember seeing the flashlights and the light bulbs. And Irving Blum still has one of the lights from that period of time, the flash-light, but somebody bought them. That show had some impact on Ed, for sure. It drove him off to New York and Europe, if I'm not wrong.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: What about the Braun Gallery? It was showing New Yorkers too at that point. Henry and I were working together at the time. They were showing Rauschenberg. I remember the show with Reinhardt's black paintings.

MR. HOPKINS: Yves Klein came and did a body performance, having this model roll on the canvas.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: That was almost more avant-garde than Ferus. Ferus was seen like a local-

MR. HOPKINS: The Ferus Gallery was driven by one person's taste, it was pretty much Walter Hopps's taste. When Irving Blum came along, he brought his hard, clean taste. The gallery was a composite of the two for a while. When Walter left and went to Pasadena, Irving's taste came forward. The key is that it was totally shoestring. They didn't have a dime. I think when Irving came to work his salary was $200 a month, and Walter didn't make a dime anyway. The only money behind the gallery was Shirley Hopps, who was a teaching assistant at U.C.L.A. She had a little bit of family money. She's the one that essentially kept the doors open. It's amazing when you think what they did do, how they ever convinced anybody-. The history that Walter has worked out was based on another romantic moment in Los Angeles art which was back in the 1950s, when a man named William Copley became a major collector of Surrealist art. William Copley is the brother of the man who runs Copley newspapers in San Diego, which are exceptionally right-wing newspapers. Bill Copley was the black sheep in the family, totally left wing and totally art-oriented; he is a painter himself. He did ten shows in ten months. They've now been documented. They were all Surrealist. One was Ernst, one was Tanguy, one was Man Ray. Not a single painting sold from any of those shows, so that's where Bill Copley's collection of paintings came from. It was also a moment in time when Walter, who was a very young person, saw those things. That's what turned him in that whole direction. His attitude about show-making came out of that sensibility-with no money. Virginia Lawrence, heiress to the 3-M Company, opened a space in Westwood over by the U.C.L.A. campus, and they moved to another location. When they opened they did an Yves Klein show, which was very rare to do.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: The Tinguely show.

MR. HOPKINS: Right. They did a Franz Kline exhibition. They did a Philip Guston exhibition, a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition, and Everett Ellen did Johns. He was Everett's-I don't know if Everett was the lawyer. It was a moment when some gallery had more money behind them than Ferus. So it was more avant-garde. I remember the San Francisco criticism, that they were too rich, too wealthy and, therefore, it wasn't a serious exhibition. Ed and Joe were the funny beneficiaries. Now Ed went off to Europe. On that trip he gave Rauschenberg a little painting called Ace, which would be in the exhibition. And the question as to whether that little painting is a tribute to Rauschenberg's painting called Ace, or whether Ed's giving the little painting to Rauschenberg is because of the little painting of Ace that was painted by Rauschenberg. That would be very interesting to get straightened out accurately. I can't pinpoint which it was. The reason it was interesting is that here were these young artists in Southern California, Ruscha and Goode, although there were others, who were linked to the Pop artists in New York, linked to Warhol and Lichtenstein, and obviously the generation preceding that, the Johns and the Rauschenbergs were the key feed-ins for both the East Coast and West Coast people. But Ed and Joe knew nothing about Lichtenstein and nothing about Warhol when they started doing their Pop art or common objects painting, and certainly Lichtenstein and Warhol knew nothing about Goode and Ruscha, and [inaudible] didn't know anything about Ramos and Thiebaud up here in Northern California. So six kind of different, there were many more, manifestations in Pop Art all occurred in 1960 and 1961, totally without any relationship between the artist, and all spinning off of Abstract Expressionism, and then Rauschenberg and Johns translating, especially in Johns early targets and the early drawings. Ed's earliest print, Gas, and Joe Goode's earliest print, Screwdriver, are both in the nicest sense rip-offs of Jasper Johns's Coathanger print, which was at Everett Ellen's gallery along with some other things. They're drawn the same way, the tusche is worked the same way. The image is different than Johns's image, but the whole feathery line of the litho print. Ed did a couple of other prints at that time, one called Division Street, and one with a sign that then broke away and became more word oriented. With the gasoline print, all a grey field, there is a little gas can at the bottom, with the word "gas" across it, so the word part was set very early.

?: Just one last question on that Johns show at the Ferus. Was the painting Tennyson in it?

MR. HOPKINS: The painting Tennyson was probably in the exhibition because it went into the Don Factor collection. I think it went to Don Factor, in fact, I'm sure it did. Don was buying really only from Ferus. It could have been that Don bought that painting and lent it to the exhibition. There was that kind of relationship, it's very possible. He might have bought it from Leo and showed it there. And then there was another-Des Moines Art Center-

MR. HOPKINS: That's now. They now own it. Des Moines Art Center bought it in about 1969 or 1970. When Don and Lynn Factor divorced, and sold the collection, it was Don Factor's. And then there was the four-fold canvas of Johns. He took the can-vas and the four corners that fold over to the Center. I've forgotten the name of it now. That was probably in the exhibition. But I've never really talked to Ed about how strong an influence Johns was, but obviously there's a lot of imagistic overlap.

?: He's very open about it, and he said he's discussed it with Johns, and Johns doesn't believe him.

MR. HOPKINS: It's funny because they were-it set those patterns, for the grey paintings especially. The Joe Goode milk bottle painting behind you is right out of Jasper's. There's no question but the color sense and everything else comes out of that, even the ringing around the little bottle at the bottom. But Ed and Joe, I can't make it a defined art historical situation, but Thiebaud and Ramos were doing one thing with comic book material and lollipops and so forth and so on up here, and Lichtenstein and Warhol took off in their flat-painted direction and Goode and Ruscha both came more directly out of Johns. But their subject matter was more human. That's why Walter Hopps, who was working at that time, did a lecture called "The Common Object," which he preferred to the title "Pop Art," which is more drastic.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Why did Franz Kline seem to be the most popular of the Abstract Expressionist painters, of that group of artists? And the other thing is the infatuation with Hollywood, is it from living there?

MR. HOPKINS: I can answer the question about Franz Kline because I know it isn't the truth. De Kooning was thought to be coming too much out of the European base. There were strong Still aficionados, also I mentioned Richard Ruben who was painting in Southern California out of Still. Still was in Northern California. The word floated down, mainly through people like John Altoon, Craig Kauffmann, and some others. Diebenkorn was a young hero to all of them at that moment. But Franz Kline was the most purely basical American, and that was the issue. It had nothing to do with patriotism or anything else. It was just that it didn't have a European link or base, and it was aggressive, straight-forward, black and white.

MR. CHAMBERLIN: Even the titles.

MR. HOPKINS: Actually the artist of that group most affected by Hollywood imagery is really Ed. All of them are Southern Californians, though whenever you talk to them, and ask how much influence has that had on you, they all deny it had any. Many of them in that period of time, Bengston, I know, Irwin, I know, Bell, I know, went off to New York to live for a while. They all put their tail between their legs and came right back home almost as fast as they got back there, to an environment where they could function well. They weren't terribly well received, either. Even more than Hollywood, the influence of the beach area around Venice, and the fact that most of them were involved in one way or another, if not actually in bike racing like Bengston was, going to events like that. Many of them were involved in surfing, the high shine of the surfboard, that kind of fiberglass surfacing. I'm sure it's had a real impact on artists like Kenny Price, Billy Al, Irwin to a certain extent. The Hollywood sensibility, or Southern California sensibility, certainly affected lifestyles not only of that group, but a lot of other artists that lived and worked there as well. They all had very elegant studios even though they might not have had fifteen cents. They lived the Southern California life in terms of the outdoors and indoors, and so forth. In Ed's case, I don't want to go too far out on a limb, but I would say, from a purely personal observation, that a young man coming from Oklahoma and undoubtedly steeped in movie lore and everything else under the sun, the fact that he had close liaisons with one or more movie starlets along the line, and that he had off and on had a big car, like a Rolls, I'm sure it's just a young country kid adapting to that very exotic world. To his benefit and detriment, he was more drawn into it than almost all the rest of them. I think now he's reached a level of different maturity, he seems to be shifting. But I'm sure he will be Hollywood star-struck.

?: Are there any things which come to mind, having to do with those early years, especially the late 1950s and early 1960s, that were important? There was a lot going on. When I asked Ed about it, he goes, "Nuhhhhh."

MR. HOPKINS:Let me jump ahead, if I may. There's one other thing that I think may have information of, and only Ed may be the other one. That has to do with the chocolate room, the Venice Biennale. That was in 1970, which was the worst conceivable year for the Biennale. I was asked to do it, and the desire was to present a major representation of American printmakers, and to take over a lithographic studio, and take over a silkscreen studio and take over a lot of other things, and really emphasize America's printmaking. Well, it was a nice idea, but it was during the Paris revolts, student revolts, the American Vietnamese revolts, and anti-government period of time, and the tradition of American exhibitions in relation to the Venice Biennale in the past was to show one, two, three artists, and it was an honor. If we had selected one artist, then perhaps it wouldn't have been a problem because it would have been very hard for him or her to say I'm not going to do it, but because the exhibition was made up of fifty different artists, then many of them said no, we're not going to participate in this government sponsored thing. It was never really government sponsored, but that wasn't the issue in any case during the end of the Johnson years and the beginning of the Nixon years. So many of the artists simply said, no, they didn't want to come. One of the processes that we had hoped we could work out would be that once each month, during the time of the Biennale, an artist would come and produce interesting and major work. It would be a demonstration as well as an exhibition. Since Ed was a good friend and I hadn't seen Ed in a long time, I asked him if he would be interested. He went through the same moral dilemmas that all the other artists were going through, because it really was a national scandal. I was getting called on the phone at two or three in the morning, don't go, don't go, do this, do that. I felt an obligation to go ahead and do wh