Budd Hopkins
Untitled Abstract
1964

About the Item

BUDD HOPKINS (1931-2011) Untitled Abstract, 1964 Oil on paper on canvas 14 x 11 inches Signed and dated at lower right: Hopkins ‘64 Budd Hopkins was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1931, and at the age of two survived polio. He earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Oberlin College in 1953 and afterward settled in New York City, where he soon made his artistic reputation. He also maintained a summer studio on Cape Cod, Massachusetts and was an active member of the Provincetown Art Association. Hopkins came of age as an artist in the 1950's becoming friendly with Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and other artists of the New York School. He began to exhibit energetic, athletic abstraction at Poindexter Gallery in 1956 and continued to paint and exhibit for the rest of his life. As his painterly, gestural approach eventually gave way to more hard-edged style, Hopkins maintained that the emotional drive that initially attracted him to Abstract Expressionism remained at the core of his work. Hopkins has exhibited widely since 1955. In 1976 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for painting. His work, which by the late 1960’s included Mondrian-like paintings of huge geometric forms anointed with flat planes of color, is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the British Museum, among others. His work won him a number of fellowships and awards. In 1972, the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Council awarded him its Commission Prize. In 1976, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting and in '79 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He also won a special project grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1982. Hopkins work has been exhibited widely including the Smithsonian Institution and the Library Congress in Washington, D. C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the San Francisco Museum, among others. Universities and Colleges which have shown Hopkins paintings and sculpture include his alma mater, Oberlin; Princeton, Yale, Denison, Drew, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, DePauw, Williams, Brandeis, Middlebury, North Carolina, Michigan State, Reed, Bradford, Connecticut, Alabama, Bennington, and the City College of New York.

Creator:

Budd Hopkins (1931 - 2011, American)

Creation Year:

1964

Dimensions:

Height: 14 in (35.56 cm)Width: 11 in (27.94 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil,Paper

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

1960-1969

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Concord, MA

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU354689542

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Budd Hopkins' paintings in the 1960s combined the precise, hard-edge geometric shapes he was enthralled with and drawn to as a child with gestural, atmospheric painting characteristic of second- and later-generation Abstract Expressionists. "I had come to understand that an abstract painting at its most powerful was a kind of aesthetic scrim behind which lurks a concealed, obsessive 'thing' or image of some kind, transformed, made palatable by the artist's mediating skills." Hopkins viewed collage as an artistic technique and a philosophical, aesthetic means of unifying a disjointed and fragmented world. He saw collage, the assemblage of fragments and varying points of view, in the poetry, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and, especially, motion pictures of his day: "Consciously or unconsciously, contemporary artists work to create harmony from distinctly jarring material, forcing warring ideas, materials and spatial systems into a tense and perhaps arbitrary detente. Seen most broadly, the presence of the collage aesthetic is the sole defining quality of modernism in all the arts." Hopkins worked to achieve harmony, clarity and precision while maintaining a sense of mystery: "I like neither extreme in art wholeheartedly, neither the purified world of geometrical art nor the free, indulgent world of Expressionism." In 1963, Hopkins' work was included in American Painters, a film documentary of American artists and styles with commentary from Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, Thomas Hess of Art News Magazine, Sidney Janis, gallery director, and Harold Rosenberg, art critic. Later, Hopkins included abstracted figures in his sculptural pieces. While moving away from Abstract Expressionism, Hopkins retained in his work the use of intense colors and hard-edged forms. His works of the 1980s, including Temples and Guardians, featured these "sentinals" who were, according to Hopkins, "participating in a frozen ritual, fixed – absolutely – within a privileged space…" Though Hopkins denied any connection, some critics viewed these ritualistic pieces as an extension of Hopkins' fascination with alien beings. Hopkins viewed his sculpted guardians not as human per se, but as magical, fierce, noble robots of the unconscious. Hopkins exhibited his paintings and sculptures in museums, galleries such as Andre Zarre, Levis Fine Art and Poindexter (New York) and Jan Cicero (Chicago), and universities throughout the United States. Hopkins had a major retrospective exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in the summer of 2017. The Whitney Museum, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the British Museum, include Hopkins' work in their permanent collections.