Walter Hopps hopps hopps

ArtForum, Feb, 1996 by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

HUO: To come back to the issue of curating: in an earlier interview you mentioned a small list of American curators and conductors you consider to be important predecessors.

WH: Willem Mengelberg was a conductor of the New York Philharmonic who imported the grand Germanic tradition of running an orchestra and conducting. So I mention Mengelberg not so much for his style, but for his unrelenting rigor. No matter what, he'd make the orchestra perform. Fine curating of an artist's work - that is, presenting it in an exhibition - requires as broad and sensitive an understanding of an artist's work that a curator can possibly muster. This knowledge needs to go well beyond what is actually put in the exhibition. Likewise, as far as conducting goes, a thorough knowledge of the full body of Mozart's music underlies a fine conductor's approach to, say, the Jupiter Symphony. Mengelberg was the sort of conductor who had a broad knowledge of any composer he addressed.

Of the curators, I admired Katherine Dreier enormously, with her exhibitions and activities, because she, more than any other collector or impresario I knew, felt she should facilitate what they actually wanted to do, to the greatest extent possible.

HUO: So you could say she was the artist's accomplice.

WH: Exactly. She didn't have other rich people on her board. She had Man Ray and Duchamp - having artists in this capacity is nothing but trouble, conventionally.

HUO: You also mentioned Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney.

WH: Yes. Barr, who came from a Protestant Yankee family, might have become a Lutheran minister. Instead he became a great director and curator with an institution that had all the resources the Rockefellers, and others, could provide at the time. There was a kind of moral imperative behind Barr. He preached that Modern art was good for people, that the populace could somehow become inculcated with the new Modernism and it would improve their lives. It's very close to a Bauhaus idea.

Sweeney was more complicated and romantic. I don't think he would have argued that art per se was necessarily morally good for you, but I don't think he made a big case that it was not. But Sweeney was a genuine romantic who felt that the esthetic experience was a whole other territory to explore. He was like an explorer. For him, Picasso was one of the great adventurers, you know. Sweeney was one of the first in his generation to admire Picasso. He worked briefly at the Museum of Modern Art, and then later the Guggenheim.

HUO: And then in Houston?

WH: Yes, he was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for a while, at the very end of his career. He responded instinctively to the Abstract Expressionists. And because of his work in France during his youth - in literary journals and so on - he was responsive to the Tachistes as well, and was just beginning to have a certain empathy, a certain response, to the Nouveaux Realistes, right before he died. I think if he had been younger - and alive, for example - he would have been the greatest champion of Yves Klein. Sweeney was also one of the most rigorous people in working out an installation. When I was young, I had the chance to actually see him in the old Guggenheim townhouse before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was constructed. He was never happy with the Wright building. It was a clash of two giant egos. Sweeney wanted something more neutral for his own stagecraft where the art could happen. However, one gorgeous show he did do in the Wright building was the Calder show.