The Boy With A Bumble Bee On A String---Young Art Collector Had a Bumblebee Tied On A String Attached To His Shirt

Have you ever seen a person with a bumblebee tied on a string attached to their shirt?  I did back in 1969. The young art collector mentioned in Paul Richard's Review in the Washington Post of the very first ever exhibit of underground original comic art in a major museum was the person with a bumblebee for a pet.
See my blog post below this one for information on that show and to read Paul Richard's two reviews of that show. The show of underground comic art was at The Washington Gallery of Modern Art in May of 1969.

I will not name the young collector since I want to protect his privacy.
   He bought some art by Gilbert Shelton. I know he bought the Billy Graham and the Dope Mystics(see it it in the post just below this one) because I saw it in his home. He showed it to me. Paul Richard writes that he bought a Wonder Wart Hog original by Gilbert Shelton also.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Wart-Hog
After the show this young man called me up and wanted to come into D.C. to see me.He lived nearby in Arlington, Va.  I remember he also invited me to his home and showed me slides of pictures he had taken in  Antarctica. He projected the images on a large movie type screen.
 They were professional quality photographs of ice he had taken on some assignment.

When he came into D.C. he had a bumblebee on a string attached to a button on his shirt. It flew around and around. He explained to me that he had taken the stinger out of his pet bumblebee.
I see by looking at Youtube there are several people who have put bumblebees on strings and filmed the bees flying around. They seem to think it is funny.

For lunch he told me he could only eat hamburgers from a place like Burger King where the meat was flame broiled.

Then we went to a small museum or gallery of African Art.  Standing in the front room of an old D.C. townhouse  we began to look at the art on the walls. He bent over to pick up something and a pistol fell out of his coat. I heard something hit the highly polished blond hardwood floor. I looked down to see a pistol spinning around and around.

   D.C. has some very strict gun laws. I think they were just as strict in 1969 as they are now. Guns are not allowed in D.C. Only criminals and the D.C. police can have them. Well, that is not exactly true anymore. Someone sued over this law recently and through a very complicated and difficult process people can obtain a license for a gun. But back then I don't think they could.
   I suggested we leave the gallery after he picked up his gun.

Wahington Post Art Critic Paul Richard Reviews The First Underground Comic Art Exhibit In A Museum---Washington D.C. May 1969 At The Washington Gallery Of Modern Art--Walter Hopps Director

I have written more on this blog about Paul Richard and Walter Hopps and The Washington Gallery of Modern Art circa 1967-68-69. You can search for those posts by clicking on the names in the Label Box below.
I recently found my copies of Paul Richard's Reviews of this show from 1969. Since they not on the web anywhere as far as I know here it is now.

The above picture is of Walter Hopps taken around the time he was Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Click on the photos to enlarge them and double click if necessary to read the above.
The drawing is by Robert Crumb.
   Paul Richard Reviewed the Show again about a week later on June 1, 1969. Here is that Review below.
It was too large for my scanner so I had to do it in pieces to get it all in.

The above drawing is by Robert Crumb. Click on it to enlarge it. This is from 1969. Do the freeways in the cities look like this now. I would say Yes.
   
For all the information and photos I have on this comix art show search my blog for the labels shown below.

And below is the Gilbert Shelton drawing the young collector bought in the show that is referred to in the review above. Click on the picture to enlarge it. And double click if necessary.

Billy Graham / Dope Mystics

Gilbert Shelton

Radical America Komiks

1969

Pen & Ink

19 x 12.5


And click on the link below to see the whole Comic book this drawing comes from which includes stories of Wonder Wart Hog.

The original artwork was large in size. 19 inches by 12.5 inches.

http://www.undergroundcomixart.com/drawings/main.php?g2_view=slideshow.Slideshow&g2_itemId=260

What EYE Saw Thanks To Walter Hopps And The Corcoran Gallery Of Art - A Response To Art Critic Paul Richard And His Lecture "What I Saw" At The National Gallery Of Art October 3, 2010

Click on the above picture to enlarge it. This building was The Washington Gallery Of Modern Art in 1967 when Walter Hopps took over as its Director. The name changed to The Corcoran Gallery Of Art Dupont Center in 1968 or 1969. Later it was used for studio space by students of the Corcoran School Of Art. Sometime in the 1970s or 1980s it became a building of law offices. Now it is the economic section of the embassy of Poland.

The address of the building is 1503 21st Street N.W. Washington D.C.

We went to hear former Washington Post art critic Paul Richard deliver a lecture at the National Gallery of Art East Building auditorium last Sunday. It was titled "What I Saw".  Paul was the art critic at the Post for 40 years. I knew him from 1967(when he became the Post art critic)until 1972.
   Here is someone else's review of Paul's lecture. It is very good.
http://greg.org/archive/2010/10/03/what_i_heard_paul_richard.html

We enjoyed his lecture very much but it was not what I expected. I had thought he was going to talk about all the art shows he reviewed over 40 years as an art critic for The Washington Post.
He did talk about Walter Hopps and how important a figure he was and how helpful Walter was to artists in this area and to Paul himself since Paul began his career as an art critic the very same year Walter arrived in Washington D.C. That was 1967.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Hopps

And here is something about Walter Hopps that Paul Richard wrote in the Washington Post in 2005 after Walter died.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55574-2005Mar21.html

I met Walter Hopps in 1967. We lived at 2010 P St. N.W. in 1967. That was just around the corner from The Washington Gallery Of Art when Walter took over as Director of that Gallery in 1967. I also spent many hours in the Phillips Collection which was just 2 blocks away from where we lived.

Dupont Circle suddenly became an exciting place to live when Walter Hopps arrived on the scene. Sleepy provincial Washington D.C. got its first taste of modern west coast art. And eventually to many other kinds of modern art that Walter brought to the city.

  I am going to try and list as many of the shows that he brought to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art which changed its name to Corcoran Gallery Dupont Center while he was there. And then in 1970 Walter became Director of The Corcoran Gallery itself and the modern art explosion moved to the big museum with Walter at the helm. It was an exciting time to live in Washington D.C. if you were interested in modern art. Here was this famous wildcat western art curator opening shows and opening people's eyes to what modern could really mean. It seemed anything was possible.

Remember this was all taking place from 1967 to 1972. Starting in 1969 Nixon was in The White House. The Vietnam War was raging. The 1960's changes were blowing full force.
Here is a link to the Corcoran Gallery Of Art Archives page for the year 1969.
http://www.corcoran.org/exhibitions/archive_results.asp?Year=1969
And here is a link  to 1970.
http://www.corcoran.org/exhibitions/archive_results.asp?Year=1970

 And here is a link to the year 1971.
http://www.corcoran.org/archives/archive_results.asp?Year=1971

You can go to the Corcoran Gallery Of Art website and click on exhbitions and then click on archives to see a list of past exhibitions from many other years.

Remember it was Walter Hopps that brought all these shows to D.C. from the years 1968 to 1972. Some were at the Washington Gallery Of Modern Art in 1967. They changed the name to the Corcoran Gallery Dupont Center around 1968 or 1969. And then Walter became Director of the Corcoran Gallery Museum in 1970. He held that job until 1972 or so. Then he moved to a job as curator of modern art at the Smithsonain Museum of American Art.
Here are some of the shows Walter Hopps did in D.C. that I remember best.
Chuck Close
The Hairy Who
Ed Keinholtz
Billy Al Bengston
Cybernetic Serendipity
Eleanor Dickinson
Rockne Krebs, Ed McGowin, Sam Gilliam
Alexander Lieberman
Comics Art Show called The Phonus Balonus Show. The very first underground comic art exhibit in any museum. It was organized by my brother Bhob Stewart and Walter Hopps with the help of Nina Osnos.
The Comic Art Show at The Washington Gallery Of Modern Art.
May 20, 1969 - Jun 15, 1969

Click and double click on these pictures to enlarge them. The pictures were taken by Rachel Stewart in June 1969.
That is me sitting there reading an underground comic book. On a nearby table you can see part of a little file box. We sold underground comics during the show. One day I was downstairs and someone else was supposed to be upstairs watching the money and the comics. And they thought I was upstairs. In any event when I went back upstairs all the money from the little box was gone.

This was the official title of the Comic Art Show:
The Phonus Balonus Show of Some Really Heavy Stuff [Dupont Center]

Paolo Soleri
Click on the name Walter Hopps in the Labels below to see all my other posts on Walter Hopps and The Corcoran Gallery Of Art.

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.