巴德·霍普金斯

Elliot Budd Hopkins (June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011) was an American artist, author, and ufologist. He was a prominent figure in alien abduction phenomena and related UFO research.

Early life

Elliot Budd Hopkins was born in 1931. He was raised in Wheeling, West Virginia. He lived with his parents, Elliot B. Hopkins and Eleanor A. Hopkins, brother, Stuart, and sister, Eleanor. At age two, Hopkins contracted polio. During the long recovery process, Hopkins developed an interest in drawing and watercolors, which eventually led him to Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in art history in 1953. It was here, Hopkins was exposed to art with "a capital A", and attended a lecture by Robert Motherwell that first introduced him to the "automatic, gestural approach that Motherwell espoused."

From Oberlin, Hopkins moved to New York City, where he met Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and other abstract expressionists. For a time, Hopkins studied art history at Columbia University and worked a low-level job selling tickets at the Museum of Modern Art. His experimentation with collage techniques and style as an abstract expressionist won him national acclaim.

Art career

Hopkins' first solo show was held in New York City in 1956, the same year he met and married his first wife of thirteen years, Joan Rich. 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.

In 1969, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired Hopkins' Norbeck Yellow Vertical, describing him as "a leading American painter who has successfully brought together the vocabularies of painterly abstraction and hard edge painting." In 1972, Hopkins was among five artists whose work was commissioned as part of a statewide effort to support the creative arts in West Virginia. It was, Governor Arch Moore claimed, "the first project of this kind to be undertaken in the nation." The piece was to be displayed in the state's cultural center located near the Capitol.

In 1976, Hopkins was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting.

Exhibits

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 mid-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.

Art style

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 the 1970s, Hopkins' work included a series of assembled paintings, incorporating architectural elements. Sculptures such as Gallatin's Drive I, White City Hall, New York Wall II and others bore urban names and echoed elements of New York City's skyline. Many of his works during this time featured circular shapes with primary colors set against black and white backgrounds suggestive of Piet Mondrian.

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.

Interest in UFOs

As a child, Hopkins experienced, firsthand, Orson Welles' 1938 radio play The War of the Worlds. This both terrified Hopkins and his family and left psychic scars. He considered the radio play a dramatic, theatrical hoax and, because of his childhood scare, felt it added to his skepticism about alien invasions rather than enamor him to the idea of it.