Budd Hopkins - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

MARGALIT FOX “Budd Hopkins, Abstract Expressionist and U.F.O. Author, Dies at 80” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/arts/design/budd-hopkins-abstract-artist-and-ufo-author-dies-at-80.html

既に先月のことではあるが、抽象表現主義 *1の画家Budd Hopkins氏が亡くなっていたことを知る。
アーティストとしてのBudd Hopkins；

A painter and sculptor, Mr. Hopkins was part of the circle of New York artists that in the 1950s and ’60s included Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.
His work ― which by the late ’60s 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.
In later years Mr. Hopkins turned to large, quasi-architectural sculptures that seemed to spring from primordial myths. In 1985, reviewing one such piece, “Temple of Apollo With Guardian XXXXV” ― it was part house of worship, part archaeological ruin, part sacrificial altar ― Michael Brenson wrote in The New York Times:
“If the work is about sacrifice and violence, it is also about ecstasy and illumination. In the course of trying to re-establish the broadest meaning of the abstract geometry that has fascinated so many 20th-century artists, Hopkins makes us consider that ritual, worship, cruelty and superstition have always been inseparable.”

しかし、1960年代以降のHopkinsはアーティストというよりもUFO、特にUFOによる地球人拉致問題の研究家として有名であり、1989年にはマンハッタンにUFO及び宇宙人を研究するThe Intruders Foundation*2を設立している。

Alejandro Rojas “Alien Abduction researcher, Budd Hopkins, passes away” http://www.openminds.tv/budd-hopkins-passes-away-764/

は〈UFO信者〉の立場からの記事。
因みに、UFO陰謀理論の宗教社会学的研究であるMichael Barkun A Culture of Conspiracy*3には Budd Hopkinsへの言及はなかった。UFO問題に関しては何よりも、Curtis Peebleの『人類はなぜUFOと遭遇するのか』*4をマークしておかなければならないだろう。