By Daily Press staff
Actor Dennis Hopper and other Venice artists last week got together for their first reunion in more than 40 years. Members of the contemporary “LA art movement” of the early 1960s, led by Hopper, gathered in the lobby of Azzurra, an 18-story waterfront residential tower and art gallery in Marina del Rey, which housed a permanent collection of more than 150 of their works.
They smiled and hugged for their historic class picture taken by Jerry McMillan, himself an original member of the city’s fledgling art scene.
The group posed in front of Hopper’s iconic “Double Standard,” a 10 by 15-foot photograph taken in 1961 of a corner gas station taken through a windshield. The blow-up of two Standard Oil signs at the intersection of Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards documents LA’s obsession with the automobile and its dreary urban landscape festooned with billboards.
The artists, originators of the “light and space” genre, wouldn’t knuckle under to the art establishment’s view of Los Angeles as a backwater of taste and talent.
“In the 1960s, the center of the art world was New York and we were just surfers, 15 to 20 artists bouncing off each other, trying to make it mutually supportive for each other,” recalled Peter Alexander who has the entire 12th floor of the Azzurra dedicated to his art, including the now famed self-portrait he photographed through a smoke-filled lens.
Joe Goode, wearing a blue-gray fedora popular in LA in the 1950s, said, “People tried to talk us into moving to New York to be more successful, but to the man, all of us stayed (in Venice and Santa Monica) because of the weather and the freedom, and because all of us could afford our own studios here.”
Acclaimed for his painting and photography, the fifth floor of the condominium tower is reserved exclusively for Goode’s work. His celebrated 1969 calendar of “LA artists in their cars,” permanently installed on the mezzanine level of the Azzurra, includes a color photo of Billy Al Bengston in aviator shades hanging half naked out of the driver’s side window of his 1955 Ford Fairlane.
William Claxton said he met Hopper when the struggling actor, painter and photographer was hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard.
“I gave him a ride in my new Ford convertible, and we ended up talking art and photography for five hours,” said Claxton, who came to the reunion with his wife, Peggy Moffitt, whose own art form caused a furor in the 1960s.
Moffitt, the only woman in the reunion portrait, may have been America’s first supermodel. She generated international press coverage when she unveiled fashion designer Rudi Gernriech’s infamous topless bikini and posed discreetly for publicity photographs taken by Claxton in 1964.
“It was evolutionary, in stages, not overnight,” Hopper said. “But slowly our work became noticed because a lot of us were focusing on the culture of LA in different ways at a time when the East thought LA was a fine arts wasteland.”
Hopper’s photography of East Coast artists who later became part of the LA school is exhibited on different floors. His photograph of Andy Warhol, installed on the penthouse level with other Warhol works, captures a reflective artist who changed the world’s perception of art by exploring the fine line between art and commerce.
The actor-writer-director, who had small parts in “Rebel Without A Cause” and “Giant” before his big breakthrough in 1968 in “Easy Rider,” bought one of Warhol’s famed Campbell’s Soup Can paintings for $75 after they met in 1961. But Hopper said he lost it soon after in a divorce settlement.
Hopper’s photos of Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg are part of the collection which also includes works by Frank Stella, Tony Berlant, Jim Dine, Edward and Nancy Kienholtz, John Altoon, Ed Moses and Alexis Smith, David Hockney and Richard Diebenkorn among others.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 20, 2006. Read the original PDF.