Henry Hopkins at Off Main - Santa Monica - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Tom Collins

An eminent museum director, curator, teacher and author, Henry Hopkins has sizable listings in both Who's Who in America and Who's Who in American Art. A few highlights of his career must include his directorship of the Fort Worth Art Center Museum (1968-73) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1974-1986). In 1991 he was appointed chair of the art department at UCLA and became director of the Armand Hammer Museum when UCLA assumed its management in 1994. He retired from the museum in 1998 and returned to UCLA, where he still teaches.

Hopkins studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and exhibited a bit in his youth. In 1999 he began painting seriously again, and this is his second solo show in the last two years at Off Main Gallery. And what does a man of such vast experience do when he steps from the museum or classroom into the studio?

Oddly, Hopkins makes perfectly realistic graphite drawings of anemones, tulips and ranunculuses that have the delicacy of drypoint etching; he also paints straightforward Japanese watercolor "portraits" of flowers. The core of this show, however, was the series of a dozen precisely rendered, Surrealist-influenced watercolors titled, rather prosaically, "Forests of the Mind." The vignettes are sometimes fanciful evocations of nature, sometimes little allegories about environmental issues; the images often carry a dash of art-historical quotation. Secrets (Homage to Gustav Klimt) depicts a pair of lovers in an embrace, one of them draped in an unmistakably Klimtian patterned cloak, partly hidden in a forest of white-barked aspen; Support Group (Homage to Rene Magritte) is a lineup of three trees, each with a slice taken out of its trunk, all miraculously still upright.

The little girl who rolls her hoop through de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of the Street shows up in Hopkins's Introduction rolling her hoop out from under a budding grove of asparagus, inscrutable as ever. Raphael Peale's famous, satiric Venus Rising from the Sea--A Deception (After the Bath) is quoted in Bush/Cheney. While Peale poked fun at Quaker censorship and Federalist mores with his trompe l'oeil rendition of a handkerchief pinned over a painted portrait of a nude Venus, Hopkins lampoons Bush-Cheney environmental policy with a bed sheet emblazoned with a pattern of blue sky and clouds hung in front of a blood-red sky over the dead stumps of a clear-cut forest. Hopkins's watercolors may sometimes come a little too close to kitsch for comfort. Along with their winning directness, humor and sincerity, that's what gives them their charm.