A panoramic look at art in America in the second half of the twentieth century, through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it. An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery in L.A. at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz, where he turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists. Ferus was also the first gallery ever to show Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and was shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman's edgy art. At the Pasadena Art Museum in the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art--before it was even known as Pop Art. In 1967, when Hopps became the director of Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art at age thirty-four, the New York Times hailed him as "the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation)." He was also arguably the most unpredictable, an eccentric genius who was chronically late. (His staff at the Corcoran had a button made that said WALTER HOPPS WILL BE HERE IN TWENTY MINUTES.) Erratic in his work habits, he was never erratic in his commitment to art. Hopps died in 2005, after decades at the Menil Collection of art in Houston for which he was the founding director. A few years before that, he began work on this book. With an introduction by legendary Pop artist Ed Ruscha, The Dream Colony is a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century.

More than any other figure throughout art's long history, Andy Warhol has attracted fans, aficionados, enthusiasts, experts, critics, art historians, philosophers and many thoughtful others who have not just reported on the details of his life's work but have struggled to make sense of it as an enigma. Citizen Warhol carries this inquiry forward by unpacking the lasting effects of Warhol's most deep-seated influences - his Byzantine-rite religiosity and its relationship to the retinue of Roman Catholics that starred in his films and staffed his studio, his art training in an institutional crucible dominated by Andrew Carnegie's Gilded Age theory of art, his powerful identification with Shirley Temple's frolic in the adult world under the cover of childhood, his formative dalliance with the guilt-ridden sensibility of arch-decadent and Catholic convert Aubrey Beardsley, and his triumphs as a commercial artist working in a professional world still beholden to the Red Decade ideals of the 1930s as a 'cheaper Ben Shahn', the leading Social Realist artist. Each of these underappreciated influences were fundamental to the life and legacy of the mature Warhol, an artist best understood as the Leonardo of our age who, more than any other, has given formative poetic expression to the epoch of the global consumer.