Hopps’s The Dream Colony: A Life in Art documents a defining moment in art in America in the second half of the twentieth century, through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it. Hopps died in 2005, after decades at the Menil Collection in Houston, of which he was the founding director. A few years before that, he began work on this book. Hopps felt uncomfortable with the idea of writing his life story, but agreed to tape more than a hundred hours of interview with artist and Editor Anne Doran. Deborah Treisman, now the Fiction editor at The New Yorker, worked with Hopps in the 1990s on the art and literary magazine Grand Street; she edited and adapted his words into The Dream Colony. Included are intimate portraits of some of the greatest twentieth-century artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Walker Evans, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and many others.
Biographies
Walter Hopps (1932–2005) was a curator and museum director who worked at the Pasadena Art Museum, the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, the Menil Collection, which he helped create, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Deborah Treisman has been the fiction editor of the New Yorker since 2003, and was deputy fiction editor for six years before that. She hosts the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and was the editor of the anthology 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker. From 1994 to 1997 she was the managing editor of the art and literary quarterly Grand Street, for which Hopps was the art editor.
Paul Keegan was formerly the poetry editor at Faber and has edited The Penguin Book of English Verse. He writes about art for the Times Literary Supplement.