Dennis Hopper - lover of art

I found this wonderful video of Dennis Hopper talking about the art that inspires him.  He gives a tour around his home explaining why he loves art, how he got into collecting art, and how surrounded by great contemporary art energizes him.

“I think that probably I collect things I wish I had made.”

“I started collecting in the ’50s, so for a lot of people who were going to the beach, going to tennis, and going to the mountain skiing, I was a gallery buff.”

“My idea of collecting is not going and buying bankable names, but buying people I believe really are contributing something to my artistic life.”

Dennis Hopper died at his Venice, California home early Saturday, May 29, 2010.  He was 74.

Hopper’s death comes right on the heels of one of his biggest accomplishments as an artist. On July 11, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will open the first comprehensive survey of Hopper’s artistic career to be mounted by a North American museum with an exhibit called “Dennis Hopper Double Standard” (named after his iconic 1961 photograph).

Hopper not only collected great contemporary art–he had one of the finest private collections around–he was a gifted artist and photographer himself who as a child had studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. All of his early works, as well as his first art collection, including an original Andy Warhol “Campbell Soup Can” which Hopper bought for $75, were destroyed in by the Bel Air fire in 1961. Broken-hearted, he put down his brushes for some time. His wife at the time, Brooke Hayward, gave him a camera and he started taking pictures of their movie star friends and quirky urban scenes around Los Angeles, many of which he published in 2001 in a charming and intimate photography book titled, “1712 North Crescent Heights,” the address where he and Hayward lived.

In “Los Angeles 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capital,” an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in 2006, there was series of photographs Hopper took in the 1960s of an ice house that he and several artists constructed in the late 1960s. He described it as sort of a guerilla art event: they found an empty lot, brought in huge blocks of ice and built the place. Then Hopper photographed it over several days as it melted in the southern California sun. He laughed remembering the experience, the trouble they caused, the fun of it all. Knowing Hopper’s profoundly dark period that would follow in the 1970s, that scene and that laugh seemed all the more poignant.

In October, 2008, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris mounted “Dennis Hopper & le Nouvel Hollywood,” an exhibition of everything Hopper: his personal art collection, which included several portraits of him by well-known contemporary artists (I loved the Julian Schnabel one made of broken plates); pictures he had painted; photographs of him on sets and in life; photographs he had taken, such as those of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and his most well-known, “Double Exposure,” of two Standard gas station signs on a corner in West Hollywood, which he snapped through his car windshield in 1961; of movies he had appeared in; and clips of films he had directed. When you saw it, Hopper made sense: he was a Renaissance man from Kansas.

In addition to being a prolific artist, the late Dennis Hopper also supported environmental, scientific and humanitarian causes.

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