The Dream Colony: A Life in Art - Tapa dura

Hopps's atmospheric account captures three decades in the art world with such passion and perception that we don't need to know more about what he did, though we may very well wish we could have hung out with this dynamo and heard him talk more about art. (Washington Post)

In The Dream Colony: A Life in Art, [Walter Hopps's] lively posthumous memoir, we learn all manner of detail from Hopps's life . . . A very good read. (Wall Street Journal)

Based on interviews conducted by artist Anne Doran and shaped by beloved New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman, the colorful tale of this natural-born curator gets told in his own gift-for-the-yarn cadences. (Best of the Year ArtForum)

Stories flow from every page: about his talented and eccentric family in Los Angeles of the 1920s-30s; reminiscences of artists famous and obscure; of art collectors and institutions. Learned but far from stuffy, Hopps merged life and career into one passionate, improvisatory, gonzo experience, his voice and personality present here. (Library Journal)

A scintillating and revelatory volume . . . Hopps was a genuine original whose influence will continue to radiate. (Booklist)

A wealth of recollections . . . [Hopps's] idiosyncratic voice rings true in The Dream Colony. (Art in America)

For those unfamiliar with Hopps, this semi-auto-biographical story will be even more delightful--if only for the anecdotes and images . . . [The Dream Colony] should be treasured by art enthusiasts of all stripes. (ArtNet)

Walter Hopps was everyone's model of what a curator should be. His landmark exhibitions stay in the mind's eye decades later. Now we have his memoir, a record of Walter's unique personality, his astonishing range of interests and curiosities, and the depth of his feeling for and commitment to the art of his time. Essential reading. (David Salle)

Walter Hopps was a celebrated museum curator and director, but he had many of the qualities of an artist--he was original, he was inspired, and he was famously late for appointments. He knew the best stories about artists, or at least about Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg and other members of the avant-garde with whom he worked closely. His memoir offers an unusually intimate glimpse at the post-war American art scene. For once, you didn't have to be there, because Hopps was there and tells all. (Deborah Solomon, author of AMERICAN MIRRO: THE LIFE AND ART OF NORMAN ROCKWELL)

The Dream Colony immediately provides its reader with the exhilarating conviction that you are in the presence of both the craziest and most sane person you will ever be lucky enough to know. Walter Hopps's prodigious gifts as a storyteller are every bit the equal to the adventures that defined a singularly brilliant and deeply principled life in art. (Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York)