When he was director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Henry T. Hopkins gave the green light to the first major retrospective of Ed Ruscha's paintings. The show was instrumental in securing Ruscha's reputation as a critically important artist -- both for Los Angeles, where he began to attract attention as a promising newcomer around 1959, and for a 1980s art world that was just on the cusp of going global. Hopkins, who died over the weekend at 81, was instrumental in developing L.A.'s art scene. He had some insteresting tales...