Don’t Count Him Out Yet

‘Every day is not going to be like this,” James Elliott, then-chief curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art, warned his new assistant, Henry T. Hopkins, on a balmy evening in 1961. Hopkins had spent his first day on the job with William Seitz, a prominent curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who had come to Los Angeles to judge the annual open exhibition at the county museum in Exposition Park. When Seitz finished, the curators went to the luxurious home of collectors Frederick and Marcia Weisman for a swim and a leisurely dinner.

“Quite right,” said Hopkins, in an interview at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, which he has directed since 1994. “Those were wonderful times. There was a different museum world then.”

Hopkins, who celebrated his 70th birthday in August and is retiring from the UCLA/Hammer museum at the end of the year, has had many good days during his long career as a curator, educator and museum director. But he has also weathered some bad times during Los Angeles’ fitful evolution as an international cultural center, and he has witnessed troubling changes in America’s art museums.

Born and raised in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Hopkins began painting as a child and earned a master’s degree at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955. He then taught art at Grossmont High School in San Diego for two years, but returned to school to pursue his career as an artist. Funded by the GI Bill from a tour of duty in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and inspired by art he had seen in European museums while stationed near Munich, Germany, he enrolled at UCLA in 1957.

He became thoroughly immersed in the local art scene and decided that his talents lay in the area of curatorial and educational work rather than painting. While still in graduate school he organized an exhibition of Los Angeles contemporary painting at UCLA and ran the Huysman Gallery, a commercial contemporary art gallery across the street from the seminal Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard.

Sensing that Hopkins was a rising star, Elliott asked him to join the staff of the multifaceted county museum in 1961, when plans to build a separate art museum on Wilshire Boulevard were in the works. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened in 1965; Hopkins rose through the ranks to become head curator of exhibitions and publications. He stayed until 1968, when he became director of the Fort Worth Art Museum, in Texas, a 20th century art museum.

Returning to California in 1974, he directed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until 1986, then came back to Los Angeles and led the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation of Art for five years. In 1991, Hopkins moved to UCLA as chairman of the art department and director of the Wight Art Gallery, but he was soon embroiled in the university’s negotiations to take over management and programming of the Hammer Museum. In 1994, when the merger occurred, Hopkins became director of the UCLA/Hammer Museum.

Debonair and well-spoken, Hopkins is an educator at heart and a natural diplomat. He looks every bit the respectable museum director--stocky, fit and distinguished, with neatly combed white hair, a thick mustache and a ready smile. But having spent his entire career in the West, he is also a bit of a renegade--widely recognized as a stalwart and effective champion of West Coast art.

Hopkins will remain on the faculty, teaching art history and theory full time at the university, but he is leaving the museum. Preparing for the next phase of his professional life, he talked about the ever-changing art scene and how he might realize some of his dreams.

Question: What is it about Los Angeles that has kept you here?

Answer: People are always surprised, particularly my San Francisco friends, that I have an affinity for Southern California, but it’s very much a part of my heritage. When I was little, my father had business in Southern California and we had relatives in Pasadena, so every year in February--the worst time of the year in Idaho--we would pile in the car and head out across the barren Nevada desert, where Las Vegas was just a pimple on the horizon at the time, and come into San Bernardino. With the orange groves, the smell of the blossoms and orange juice stands on the corner, it was like coming to heaven. Then, even though it was winter, we would go the beach. That wonderful smell of oil and sand around Long Beach permeated my soul.

This is also a place where a lot can happen, and I think it’s destined now in the next 20 years to be the lead city for the 21st century, mainly because we have gone through a lot of trauma and sorted it out. It’s a challenge to try to get the best here, to get more and more interesting people to come here, to get over our self-consciousness about differences between the East and the West and get on with it. But it’s not only a challenge, it’s fun.

Q: You speak of the period from 1958-65 in Los Angeles as the most exciting time in your career. What made it special?

A: That’s when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was actually built, the museum’s Contemporary Art Council was formed and people in Los Angeles really started to collect art. Norton Simon was one of them. His sister and brother-in-law, Marcia and Fred Weisman, began collecting in areas where he wasn’t collecting, and many others began at that moment--Betty Freeman, Betty Asher, [Philip and Beatrice] Gersh.

Also, it was a great time for learning. In 1958, UCLA Extension instituted a class called Looking at Modern Painting and developed a textbook for which various university professors wrote. The idea was, if 15 people agreed to take the class, UCLA would send an instructor to their homes with a slide projector and textbook to teach them about Modern art. Those of us who were committed to art in Southern California were also committed to education. We knew if we were ever going to build an audience, we would have to do something about it ourselves.

Another significant thing that happened was the arrival of Maurice Tuchman at LACMA as curator of Modern art. He immediately started originating shows. The county museum opened with Jim Elliott’s Bonnard show, which traveled. Then Maurice did a New York School show and “American Sculpture of the ‘60s,” a very important exhibition. I did a Morris Louis exhibition, and Maurice did his “Art and Technology” show. We hadn’t originated many shows before that; we borrowed them. But suddenly we had a museum and we were organizing exhibitions that traveled to other institutions. And suddenly we were getting coverage in Time and Newsweek. It was very vitalizing.

The other important thing was the introduction of June Wayne’s Tamarind Lithography Workshop and especially the spinoff of Ken Tyler’s Gemini. The major artists in America, therefore, the major artists in the world at that moment--Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly--all came to Los Angeles to make prints. They would stay two or three weeks. That put them in contact with museum people and artists in the community and broke down that bicoastal sensibility.

What was going on at the old Pasadena Museum was crucial to our evolution as well. When Tom Leavitt was director, he catered to local artists but also invited major New York artists to speak. Walter Hopps, who was a curator and later director of the museum, organized Marcel Duchamp’s first major retrospective exhibition. It seems impossible, but it occurred here.

Then [Los Angeles art critic] Jules Langsner did the Man Ray show at the county museum. From then on, it was just a question of how long it would take until some kind of parity between the East and West Coast began to evolve.

Q: And has that parity evolved?

A: We have always been such a topsy-turvy community. We are high one moment and low the next, depending on a lot of things, but physical manifestations as much as anything--fires, floods, earthquakes and riots. Yet even with that, we just keep going.

It seems that the Getty may be the ultimate stabilizing factor. L.A. has become a three- or four-day visit for art groups instead of a one-day visit, as it used to be.

Q: What prevents Los Angeles from reaching its potential as an art center?

A: One of our two greatest weaknesses is in the commercial end of things. Artists produced here are as good as anywhere in the country--better, in fact, than most--but we are just not turning out a support system.

One of the reasons for me to go back to teaching at UCLA is to institute a program that gives students some insight into things to do in the art world other than being an artist. That’s based to a certain extent on my own evolution. I happily found a solution in a support role, but we hope to develop a program in the realm of arts management, museum management and critical theory, leading some people to become dealers, some to become writers, some to become museum people.

The other weakness has always been publishing. I have never understood why--since those earliest days of Artforum [which was established in San Francisco in 1962 and based in Los Angeles from 1965-67, but then moved to New York]--we have not been able to generate and maintain a magazine that is well-written, well-edited and well-received both by the readership here and away from here.

Q: What about Art issues.?

A: Art issues. has certainly been the longest surviving art magazine published here, but it does not have a wide national distribution.

Q: Have you thought of starting a magazine?

A: I’ve talked to a few people about the possibility of the various institutions coming together--MOCA, LACMA, the Getty and UCLA/Hammer--and pooling the money that we put into monthly calendars. We could establish a publication that would list everything going on, and use the extra money to do feature articles on special exhibitions and other things of interest. I think we could even find the right kind of advertising to help. But coordinating museum people is about as bad as coordinating artists.

Q: How has being an art museum director changed since you entered the field?

A: When I began as a director in the ‘60s, art was the dominant ambition. We had to get that show or buy that picture. Now so much is based on the numbers, the audience, which helps you get national support.

A corporation that supports an exhibition wants the show primarily in cities where the corporation does the biggest business. And then, increasingly, you have to meet their standard, like putting a Chrysler in the courtyard. But that’s the biggest money.

In the last six or seven years, foundations have been giving much more to education than to exhibitions. And the National Endowment for the Arts is essentially down the tubes. Being a museum director has just become a chore of either being personable or convincing enough to raise money or, on the other hand, flexible enough to work with a board of as many as 35 or 40 people, all of whom have their own interests.

On the one hand, if board members get too involved in the art itself, they like to see what they collect on the walls of the museum. That’s dangerous, but almost impossible to beat off. On the other hand, because they are people who come out of business, bottom line is part of their consciousness.

Q: Given all these problems, where will the next generation of museum directors come from?

A: I really don’t know. When I went to a meeting of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors in Pasadena four years ago, I arrived late, walked in the back door and here were all of these rather heavyset, partially balding, gray-headed men in rumpled business suits. I thought: This is our profession? This is where we are?

So many museums are without directors, I feel blessed that Ann Philbin [director of the Drawing Center in New York] has agreed to come here [as my successor]. She is a very bright, energetic, well-organized person; many people here already know her. I think she will be wonderful, not only for the museum and its programs but also for the broader L.A. community.

Q: What are some of the projects on your agenda after you retire from the museum?

A: One thing I have felt should be written is a new 20th century American art history that, without bias, seriously looks back at everything all across the country from the beginning of the century. Whether it’s [American Synchromist painter] Stanton Macdonald-Wright coming to UCLA or comparing [Los Angeles-based artists] Peter Krasnow and Oskar Fischinger to Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe and others, nobody has ever looked at that in a serious way. It would take a lot of research, but I think it would be a much more interesting, broader history than now exists and put some things in context.

I’d like to see some earlier California artists taken seriously. Pick up an auction catalog and you still see a beautiful John McLaughlin for $15,000, which doesn’t make sense; a Josef Albers of that period is $150,000. A Billy Al Bengston “Dento” is $2,000, as opposed to a much bigger price for a work from the ‘60s by somebody who is not any more interesting but has been in the New York magazine-auction-gallery scene. It’s something to think about.

Another project floating around in my mind is a textbook of art history as it can be taught in Los Angeles, bringing together all the best things here. A tremendous amount of art has come into our museums in the last 40 years, and I just don’t think people are conscious of it because it’s not all in one institution.

Suzanne Muchnic is The Times’ art writer.