When the Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper died last year, he took a piece of modern art history with him. In the early 1960s, the very hip Hopper began to buy the wild new modern art in Los Angeles, art works that nobody else seemed to care about.
That has made Hopper more than an actor. According a fascinating new book by art writer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, he was part of a Hollywood network, galvanized by the 1960s ethos, that ended up making an entirely new “art scene” in America possible.Artistically, the scene had southern California characteristics. As Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s explains in a superbly written narrative, this included shiny colorful objects, plastics and lacquers, Pop art simplicity, paintings of swimming pools and palms, and tableaus made of detritus.
The real story, however, is sociological, and that is where Hollywood and L.A.’s entertainment industry played a crucial role. None of the innovative artists coming out of the 1960s were actors or producers, where the money seemed to be. None of the artists had rich parents or a natural business sense. But all of the players did attend the same parties. It was sun, money, and excess that created the bond. Art was as good an excuse to party as any. In this chemistry, Hopper—who went to the bars and galleries of the beatnik artists—was the exemplar.
Some Hollywood actors, such as Vincent Price, collected art. But it was Hopper who brought friends and neighbors in on the enthusiasm. He was a link between the new gallery art of “LA cool” and the already burgeoning movie, fashion, and music industry. For the art, one of the emblematic events came in 1962, when the Pasadena Museum of Art held a “New Painting of Common Objects” exhibit. It was probably the first Pop art show in the U.S. Andy Warhol was just one of the painters on the roster.
Enter Hopper, who essentially hosted the party atmosphere of those early Warhol-meets-the-L.A.-artists days. As incarnated in Hopper, it was an art scene fueled by “drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll.” He’d done plenty of movies, but his new vision culminated in Hopper’s surprise blockbuster movie, Easy Rider (1969). Art scenes do not live on drugs alone, however. To get it going, L.A. still needed a New York boost. That came in the form of professional art dealer Irving Blum. He tutored the laid-back L.A. artists—attached to such humble operations as the Ferus Gallery—in reaching out to collectors, educating them about “contemporary art,” and then closing the deal.
Drohojowska-Philp is a fine wordsmith. Backed by extensive research, and by way of her many interviews with the old hands (including Hopper, just before he died), she says a lot with a little, capturing the characters and mood of the L.A. sixties. At one point, a group of three artist who specialized in lacquers, room moods, and lighting, competed for who among them was the real founder of “Light and Space” art. Or, as Drohojowska-Philp says, “who did what first.”
Besides good art, there was also a good deal of human wreckage produced by an art scene that was characterized by Hopper at his wildest. On this, Drohojowska-Philp sweeps nothing under the rug. We’ve heard of “Hollywood Babylon” before. But this is the 1960s art version: fleeting hook-ups, drug addictions, bitter divorces, and a network of copulating people that mingled artists, rock stars, wealthy collector-housewives, and high school-aged femme fatales.
According to Rebels in Paradise, not quite all of them descended into debauchery. Overall, though, it is amazing that a core group of the innovators could succeed financially, given the haze that surrounded their artistic lives. What saved them, of course, were the hard-nosed art dealers and the wealthy collectors—collectors who in the spirit of the 1960s began to come out of L.A.’s otherwise conservative woodwork.
Through her extensive interviews of the artists, their families and friends, Drohojowska-Philp found that the most alluring thing about southern California to them was its freedom from all conventions of history, ordered cities, or institutions. In sum, it was freedom from the Midwest and from New York City. Plus the weather was so good. It was easy to get along. That was the “paradise” part. It was unique to Los Angeles in those days before crammed freeways and super-smog.
What gave birth to the L.A. art scene—now a major player with four contemporary art museums and an international reputation—was the same coupling that gave birth to every great art scene. It was a handful of determined artists, usually intoxicated, and a handful of very wealthy patrons. Such was the story of Montmartre (Paris) or Greenwich Village (New York). In the L.A. story, a few rebels survived in their ambitions. Fewer still boasted financial success. Very few, if any, had success and an admirable record of human relationships. Along with Hopper, who ended up in rehab, the L.A. crew constantly battled indulgence and excess.
Some interesting art remains. Still, there must be a better way.
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