Two Eugenes I Once Knew Eugene Walter And Eugene J Martin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Walter

Above is the entry on Eugene Walter. I met him in Rome in the summer of 1964. My mother was a friend of Annie Lou White who was Eugene's English and French teacher at Murphly High School in Mobile, Alabama.
   When I was going to Europe in the summer of 1964 she gave me Eugene's address in Rome. She must have written him a letter telling him I might stop by to see him because he welcomed me and gave me a good tip on a cheap nearby hotel.
   I was lucky that he was in Rome and at home and not too busy.
The apartment building he lived in at number 18 Corso Emmanuel in Rome was also home to Leontyne Price. He had gotten her the apartment under his to use when she came to Rome to record for RCA Victor.

When I knocked on his door on the top floor I had passed her apartment on the way up. She was originally from Laurel, Mississippi. Eugene and I were from nearby Mobile, Alabama. Still at the tender young age of
24 I was amazed how Southerners get around.

I knocked on Eugene's door. He answered and led me through a room filled with fake trees from some opera set.

He was very friendly and we had a chat and he showed me his terrace where he grew his garden.
  I went off to my hotel and later in the week he took me to dinner in the apartment of Linda Christian.
Some man was staying there. She was not a home. But there were stacks and stacks of her autobiography or biography in the apartment.

I drank so much wine I had to sleep there that night. Eugene took off.
I dropped by to see Eugene before I headed off to Greece at the end of the week.
He gave my a copy of the Transatlantic Review of which he was an editor.
He also told me to read Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi which he said was the best travel book in English about Greece.

I mentioned to him that Hamilton Basso described the relationships in the South of the USA where everyone seems to be related as a bundle of fish hooks. Eugene was not impressed with Hamilton Basso.

I was very lucky to meet Eugene Walter when he was still young.

Annie Lou White was keeping Eugene's book collection for him while he was in Europe. She showed some of them to me. I remember he had some William Faulkner first editions.  The first I had ever seen.

Mobile is justly proud of Eugene Walter. In years to come he will be remembered right up there with Madam Octavia Walton Levert.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_J._Martin

Eugene Martin I knew in Washington D.C. I think Bill Mckenzie introduced me to him. Eugene Martin a
very quiet nice man. I published one of his drawings in the magazine we were doing back in 1967,1968,1969.
It is nice to find on Youtube that he went on to bigger and better things.

In the videos below you will find out more on Eugene Martin and Eugene Walter.
The picture of Eugene Martin sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. is what he
looked like in 1969 and when I knew him. Dupont Circle was two blocks from where we lived.
It is also about 4 blocks from  The Phillips Art Museum. And the same distance to the location of The Washington Gallery of Modern Art where Walter Hopps was director in 1967 before moving on in 1970 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art as Director.
Click on the labels below for more info on these people.

The Veiled Nun At The Corcoran Gallery Of Art Washington D.C.

http://collection.corcoran.org/collection/work/veiled-nun

This is my favorite piece of art at the Corcoran in D.C. Click on the picture to enlarge it. And then read about it in the link above. But to get the full effect it needs to be seen in person. You can see through the marble veil to see her marble face.  I always pay her a visit when I go to the Corcoran.

The Corcoran is hurting for money and they may have to sell the building and/or the Collection.
The biggest problem is they are charging 10 dollars admission in a city that is full of free museums.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was no admission fee.

The adjacent Corcoran Art School is doing fine. One suggestion that sounded good to me is save the old historic beautiful building by turning the whole building into the Art School. Mark Power made that suggestion. He wrote an article for the Washington Post about that.

The Corcoran Gallery Of Art In Washington D.C. May Have To Move And A Good History Of The Corcoran Gallery Of Art By Roy Slade

The Washington Post today says the Corcoran Gallery Of Art may be forced to move out of D.C.  It is too expensive to stay and renovate. And they are losing money at a fast rate. Not surprising in a city full of free museums such as The Smithsonian and The National Gallery Of Art.
On the other hand this may be just a fund raising effort.

http://www.royslade.com/web/corcoran.html

The article above mentions a fist fight at an opening in November of 1972 between the Director of the Corcoran and another official. They are not named in the Washington Post article below article so I had to search the web. After some looking I found Roy Slade's blog and he tells the story. See his blog in the link above.
 He is very long winded and you have to scroll down through half his story to get to the details of the fight at the Corcoran at an art opening in Novemeber of 1972. The Director Gene Baro got a nasty cut on his head by the ring on the finger of the other guy.
The link below is to the story in today's Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/corcoran-gallery-to-test-market-for-sale-of-building/2012/06/04/gJQAjHfBEV_story.html

Click on the label Walter Hopps in the Labels box below for many posts on Walter and his tenure as Director of The Corcoran Gallery of Art in the late 60s and early 70s. Those were the glory days. Nothing since has come close to the excitement Walter Hopps created in the art scene in Washington D.C. when he moved to D.C. from L.A. in 1967.    As they say you have to have been there. It was the 1960s and 1970s when "the suits" temporarily lost control and and the artists and the radicals took over.  

Above is a photo of Walter Hopps. He is on the phone which is where he always would be. That is the way he looked when he was Director of The Corcoran Gallery of Art from 1970 to 1972.
I knew it was not going to be Walter who was in a fight. No one would hit Walter in the head because he would never do or say anything that would lead to such an incident. He was way too cool  for that kind nonsense.
   He was always polite and thought and acted with a great sense of humor. Others were not so civilized.

Washington Post Article by Art Critic Paul Richard About The Life And Death Of Walter Hopps

Click on the above picture to enlarge it. Explanation is in the article below.

Walter Hopps, Museum Man With a Talent For Talent

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 22, 2005; Page C01

Most museum men are smooth. Walter Hopps wasn't. He was sort of a gonzo museum director -- elusive, unpredictable, outlandish in his range, jagged in his vision, heedless of rules. That's if you could find him, which wasn't always easy. But Hopps, who died Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 72, had a peculiar gift. He found artists, wonderful artists, and he found them first.

That's because he had a knack. He wasn't just for abstraction, or photography, or funk art or assemblage or political art or street art. He was for all of these at once. No one idea controlled him. When he became director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967, all the art that he displayed there -- colored stripes by Gene Davis or street art from Los Angeles or paintings on linoleum by the group the Hairy Who -- looked utterly unlike anything that had been shown at that gallery before.


When he became director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, he showed visionary architecture -- Paolo Soleri's. Also New York abstract expressionist sculpture -- David Smith's. Hopps's Smith installation began on the second floor, marched down the broad stairs, continued through the door, between the guardian lions, across 17th street and flowed out into the park beside the White House grounds.

A lot of his colleagues were cautious followers. Not Hopps. He was the first to show Andy Warhol's pop art. He also was the first to show Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz and Frank Stella. Ruscha makes flawless drawings with words in them (these are now on exhibition at the National Gallery), and Kienholz made funky, gut-punching assemblages, and Stella makes big abstractions. Their work has nothing in common, except that it's terrific. This sufficed for Hopps.

There is no 20th-century conceptualist as influential as Marcel Duchamp. This now is obvious, but it wasn't when Hopps installed the first Duchamp retrospective in Pasadena, Calif., in 1963. He did as much for Barnett Newman, who made empty fields of color, and for Joseph Cornell, who made evocative little boxes. He even introduced R. Crumb, who drew comics, to the museum world.

When he moved to Washington in the early 1960s he did his scouting here. Sam Gilliam, Ed McGowin, William Christenberry, Rockne Krebs, John Gossage -- Hopps reached out to all of them. Go back through his record, and it's like a pounding drumbeat, first, first, first, first.

Walter Hopps began his art career as a college kid in California. Toward the end of his life he worked for both the Menil Collection in Houston, where he was its founding director, and for the Guggenheim in Manhattan. Right until the end Hopps was searching out unfamiliar artists of exceptional accomplishment. He may have been the finest art scout of his age.

He often astonished. That was part of who he was. He also often vanished. James T. Demetrion, former director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, was studying at UCLA when Hopps hired him as the curator of the Pasadena Art Museum. Hopps, Demetrion recalls, once began to hang a Jasper Johns exhibit the night before it opened. "He said he'd show up at 9 p.m., though of course he didn't. He strolled in after midnight, and we were there all night. Still, the show looked great."

Hopps would often work three days without a break, and then disappear for the same amount of time. When he was working at the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts his boss, Joshua C. Taylor, was sometimes heard to say, "If I could find him, I'd fire him." But of course he didn't. Hopps always kept roaring back. That was part of him, too.

Artists surrounded him. When he was serving as the NCFA's curator of 20th-century American art, he borrowed a downtown storefront here to mount a group show he called "Thirty-Six Hours." The idea was simple. He'd be there for that period, and while there he'd hang anything anyone brought in.

And what he saw he remembered. Hopps kept a kind of mental store of everything he'd seen, and every image in it was retrievable at will. All you had to do was ask.

I still have the button somewhere. The size of a half-dollar, with white words on a black background, it was commissioned (by his staff) with only half a smile. It says: "Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes." Which meant, of course, he wouldn't.

Hours, sometimes days, would pass before one heard his low, rich voice, often on the telephone in the middle of the night. It was always worth the wait. He was the best art talker I have ever heard. His speech was like a Jackson Pollock drip painting, swooping, swelling, doubling back. He mesmerized. He taught.

One night, I remember, at the headachy end of a noisy artists' party, I asked him to conceive a show on the spot. "Okay," he said. "We'll call it 'Seven Enormously Popular American Painters.' Five supporting actors, and two stars. For the five, Walt Disney, N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, Rockwell Kent and Saul Steinberg. And for the two competing stars, Audubon and Warhol."

The death of Walter Hopps makes the modern-art museum world feel somehow pale and tame.