I went to see two of Hopper’s oldest friends in the Los Angeles art world: Irving Blum, one of its founding fathers, and Ed Ruscha, its first star. In 1958, Blum joined the Ferus Gallery, the city’s first important contemporary-art gallery (now long gone), in West Hollywood. One of Blum’s many claims to fame is that he gave Andy Warhol his first show, in July 1962. “I went to see Andy at this house in New York,” Blum told me. “He showed me several Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. I said, ‘You should show these in California.’ I knew he was thinking his friends were in New York and he didn’t know that many people on the West Coast. I took his arm and said, ‘Andy, movie stars come into the gallery.’ He said, ‘Let’s do it.’ The truth was that no movie stars ever came into the gallery. Dennis Hopper did.
“He photographed all of the artists we showed - Bob Irwin, Bally Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha - and I used his photographs as announcements. And I’ll never forget: I got these transparencies of the Lichtenstein show I was going to have in 1963. And Dennis looked really hard at them. There was no such thing as ‘Pop’ style then. People called it different things. Ivan Karp, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, called it ‘Commonism.’ Two days later Dennis came back into the gallery and said, ‘I want to take you somewhere.’ We drove to a billboard place called Foster & Kleiser. And we looked at several of the sheets they would plaster on billboards. They were enormous, but they would fold them flat. Dennis bought three or four. We went up to Crescent Heights, where he and Brooke lived. He begun putting them up as wallpaper - a giant hamburger in his bedroom. Drove Brooke mad. But he caught the Pop sensibility before it was a sensibility.”
Ed Ruscha met Dennis Hopper in 1961 or 1962. The Los Angeles art world, Ruscha recalled, was “miniscule but vital. Dennis was a fixture. He had an exhibit at the David Stuart Gallery, which was a few doors north of Ferus. He was just always around, always taking pictures and making things. I remember visiting him, and he said, ‘Let me show you my garage.’ It was jammed with these sculptures he did. The thing I appreciated was he was so kind of restless, And then you say, God, he’s had more than one life. I mean, here he checks in with all these great performances in movies, but he always comes back to art. He bought my first big painting of the Standard gas station, and now it’s in Sid Bass’s collection. I guess Dennis lost it in his divorce with Brooke.” Did he remember what Hopper had paid for the painting, considered one of his most significant works? “Yeah, $1,500.”
At Dennis Hopper’s place, the clutter starts in the garage, which is packed with paintings, children’s toys, and a pair of motorcycles with flat tires. When I returned to continue our interview, two assistants were going through boxes of his photographs in preparation for the MOCA retrospective. It was inspiring to see some of his most memorable images flip by; a shirtless Paul Newman sitting in the shadow of a chain-link fence; Robert Rauschenberg having his tongue stamped by Claes Oldenburg; a whole series on the 11965 civil-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
We talked for two hours and covered a wide range of topics, from art to politics, from William Burroughs to Lynda Resnick (“She’s cool, wow. What she’s doing, man, with pomegranates - it’s amazing”). I asked him what he thought was the greatest achievement of his career. “Easy Rider,” he answered without hesitation. “Easy Rider and The Last Movie were the only films that I made totally on my own.” And as an actor? “I think Blue Velvet, probably. But I’ve been in such incredible movies. I think at one point I’d been in the five most expensive movies ever made - not that I had large parts in them. Apocalypse Now was one.” If he had to make Easy Rider again, would be make it differently? “Would I make it now? It was about then. And I think a filmmaker’s responsibility is to show his time. Brueghel, I think, was the first artist to show his time.”
Hopper, who grew up in Kansas and San Diego, didn’t go to college. “People sit around the Riviera Country Club and say, ‘What school did you go to?’ And I say, ‘Warner Bros.’ It’s true. I signed a contract when I was 18.” When did he begin collecting art? “The first thing I got, Vincent Price gave me. He was the only one in Hollywood who had a contemporary collection. There were a lot of people, like Billy Wilder, who had good collections of the Impressionists, but nobody had any of the other areas, except Donald Factor, Max Factor’s son, and me.” He “really got serious” about photography, he said, after he married Brooke Hayward. He told me their divorce came about as he was leaving for New Orleans to shoot Easy Rider. “On the way to the airport she said, ‘You’re on a fool’s journey. Peter [Fonda] can’t act. You’re just going to make a fool of yourself.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s the way it’s going to go.’ So we got divorced in the car. We just said, ‘That’s it.’” (“It’s completely idiotic,” Hayward told me of Hopper’s account, adding that she didn’t file for divorce until several months later.)
That led him to his last marriage. For 14 years the Hoppers had seemed to be happily married. They met in 1992, when Victoria Duffy, an aspiring actress, introduced herself to Hopper in a restaurant. Their split quickly turned ugly, as charges and counter charges were leaked by both sides throughout the winter. “Who would have ever thought I’d be getting a divorce in this state? It was a big shock,” Hopper told me.
So we moved on to politics. How did it happen that a counterculture icon came to vote for George W. Bush twice? “I’d been a liberal Democrat my entire life, until the choice between Bush and Gore,” he explained. “I looked at the two of them and said, ‘Who would I rather have on my side in a fight?’ Bush. That’s a true story. Then Victoria got very involved with the Obama campaign, and I stepped back out of it. I thought it was good for her to get some glory. It’s hard being married to a celebrity.” His support of Bush seems to have been an aberration. “I didn’t think much of Ronald Reagan as an actor, and I didn’t think much of him as governor and president,” he told me. “I like Clinton, I like Obama. I hate what’s happening to the country. I think we’re in the worst shape I’ve ever soon. Just think how conservative this country has become, It’s like the 60sw never happened.”
Did he ever consider himself primarily a director, an actor, or an artist? “I made my living as an actor, and I love acting, so I’m an actor,” he said. “But that gets you in a lot of trouble in the art world. I tell you who’s got it: Viggo Mortensen. He’s a terrific writer. He paints. And he makes music.” As he talked, it became obvious that even in his wild, drug-filled days - he had given up drinking 27 years ago, he told me - he had always taken his art seriously. “I just wanted to make sure that I was doing something that nobody had ever done before.”
Talking about the LA art scene, he noted, “I was around when MOCA first started. I watched Eli Broad’s growth. He’s done more cultural things for this city than anyone. There’s some funny business going on now, but at least it’s progressing culturally. For me, this thing at MOCA supersedes everything. But I never thought I’d end up there. I mean, to at last have a show in LA. I’ve shown at the Cinematique, in Paris, a retrospective. The Stedelijk, in Amsterdam, retrospective. The MAK, in Vienna, retrospective. The Hermitage, in Russian, retrospective. Putin wanted to meet me! I guess he’s seen a lot of bad guys. He shook my hand and said, ‘I love your work.’”
she looks stunning, definitely going to get it
I know I'll be in the minority but I think the cover is terrible, they've made her up to look a bit frightening 
