Budd Hopkins
(b.1932)

Budd Hopkins
(b.1932)

BUDD HOPKINS (1931 - )

A candid reflection on the artistic career of Budd Hopkins reveals a style imbued with the emotional dynamism of the 1950s, the cool sensibility of the 1960s, and the linear geometry of the 1970s. Works from all points of his illustrious career are in the collection of thirty-two museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hopkins’ career began during the early stages of Abstract Expressionism, which he embraced with its violent brushstrokes, heavily applied paint and massive canvases. He would often have Franz Kline over to his studio. By the mid-60s, Hopkins’ unique style became clear; one in which abstraction finds its place in a color field where there is harmony between angles and circles, blacks with whites, and flatness with depth. This unique style primarily developed from Hopkins’ response to Fernand Léger’s later hard-edged works, and also a general increased interest in collages. The collages provided Hopkins with “a method of concretizing the implicit geometries of Abstract Expressionism without sacrificing any of its energy” (Kingsley, 1972).

While the works from the 1960s reveal a static moment in time, the works from the 1970s and 1980s reach far beyond a multi-dimensional atmosphere. These works exemplify Hopkins’ ability to transcend movement on a two-dimensional plane, revealing a struggle for “time and attention” within the space.

Hopkins’ oeuvre conveys a sense of uninhibited “harmony and life-like complexity,” an intensity that continues to dominate his work today. The duplicitous nature which exists in his canvases pay tremendous homage to Piet Mondrian’s geometric canon, Mark Rothko’s color and depth experiments, and the Abstract Expressionist’s unbridled emotional expressiveness.














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