I met Walter Hopps in September 1975 during my year as a museum fellow at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington D.C. (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum).

In the spring of 1982, in the thick of the return to non-Conceptual painting and three-and-a-half years after Giorgio de Chirico had died, William Rubin organized a major exhibition of his paintings and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.