LOS ANGELES – If one were expecting, perhaps even hoping, that the art exhibition surveying the work of actor Dennis Hopper would be glorious, self-indulgent dirt, well, one would be disappointed.
Hopper isn’t bad for a celebrity. Not at all.
He is talented and thoughtful, and his stuff appears to be unique, solid. Arty-looking visitors strolling the just-opened show here occasionally stop before one of his big billboard photo-paintings and say holy cow.
“He’s been a bit of secret,” said Douglas Chrismas, director of the Ace Gallery, a private museum and exhibit space hosting Hopper’s first big retrospective in his adopted home town. “People of course know him as an actor and director, but you ask him, he would say he thinks of himself as an artist first.”
Ten years before he co-wrote, directed and appeared in the seminal ’60s film “Easy Rider,” Hopper was a painter of abstract expressionist work who ran with a crowd that included Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney.
A disastrous 1961 fire in Bel Air and Brentwood, Calif., consumed his production, perhaps 300 paintings, Chrismas estimates. It was a near-fatal blow, but from the ashes Hopper took up black-and-white photography, which makes up about a third of the exhibit.
As Craig Krull, owner of the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, recalls the tale, Hopper’s wife gave him a camera after the fire. “He really developed a very keen sensibility” characterized by “bold compositions and dynamic moments,” Krull said. “He knows how to put together formal elements on a plane.”
As Hopper moved through the art world, Hollywood and political circles, he brought the camera with him. “He was able to capture many moments that might not be historically significant but that take on a historical significance because of the way he photographed them,” Krull said.
“He took to it like a duck to water,” said Chrismas, a longtime figure in the New York and Los Angeles art scene who represented Andy Warhol. “You’d never see him without his freaking camera.”
The photographs in the exhibit, which Chrismas guesses represent about three percent of Hopper’s output, include portraits, but not as many of fellow actors as one might expect.
There is an image of Paul Newman (a shirtless Adonis) and another of Dean Stockwell (with fried egg on his cheek) and a 1964 shot of Bill Cosby, which Hopper took for Vogue magazine and which showed the young comedian, wearing a pair of black Converse high-tops, hiding himself in the ivy shrubs of the louche-luxe hotel Chateau Marmont. But most of the early photographs are portraits of fellow pop artists, such as Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha.
Tony Shafrazi, owner of the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, represents Hopper in New York and has been friends with him since 1963. Shafrazi says Hopper was part of a movement of actor-artists in the 1950s who “had a broader approach to acting than a previous generation.” Hopper was in two of James Dean’s three movies, and both Hopper and Dean saw acting as just part of a range of creative expression that also included sculpture, dance, painting and photography, Shafrazi says.
“James Dean spearheaded the idea that acting was only one aspect of art, and to do painting and photography is also important,” he noted. “This left a tremendous impact on Dennis.”
Hopper avidly collected art by California artists working in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “He was one of the first people worldwide who responded to this new art that was developing” – pop art, Shafrazi says. At the first major exhibition of Andy Warhol’s paintings, a series of Campbell’s soup cans shown in Los Angeles in 1962, Hopper was one of only two buyers who took home artworks. Shafrazi says Hopper got them for $75 (and later surrendered the paintings during a divorce).
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