REMEMBERING DENNIS HOPPER The Patron Saint of Venice May 17, 1936 - May 29, 2010

I can still hear Dennis Hopper’s voice — his words drawn and stretched in that distinctive way — with a rising pitch that could charm and captivate or turn dangerous and snap.

“Do you know the great literature of your daaaaaaaaaay? Do you know the great paintings of your daaaaaaaaay? Do you know the great poetry of your daaaaaaaaay?”

He was talking about his views on art and quoting, from a book that had greatly influenced his thinking, called The First Six Lessons” by Richard Boleslavsky, (co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater with Stanislavsky).

He continued to quote Boleslavsky from memory: “Do you know the contemporary world around you? Because unless you know that, how dare you come to me and ask me to teach you acting. Because unless you know the contemporary writing and creative things of your day, then how can you express yourself, because you are your instrument.”

The words rang from him as a clarion call to live the creative life, fully engaged in the arts.

“So I took that to heart, said yeah, that seems right. And I thought while you’re learning it, why not do it? So I created with everything I possibly could. I wrote poetry, I made paintings, I made photographs, I acted. I finally got to direct movies. All hard battles each one of them.” And the hardest?

“The hardest was trying to paint and trying to exhibit with painters.”

Sadly, Dennis Hopper did not live to taste the full fruits of victory, but he did get to know that the battle had been won.

When the artist Dennis Hopper is honored this summer with a retrospective exhibition at his hometown

museum, MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, he will join the ranks of so many of the peers he befriended, studied, photographed, collected, and championed — Johns, Rauschenberg, Kienholz, Ruscha, Moses, Arnoldi, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Basquiat, and Schnabel (who has curated the exhibition), amongst others.

The exhibition will not be the first to acknowledge the rich diversity of Hopper’s artistic output — a number of excellent museum and gallery exhibitions in recent years had begun to look beyond his work in film and to place Hopper in this broader, deeper context. Nonetheless, this will be a significant milestone, about which Dennis Hopper was very proud.

I first met Dennis in the early ’90s, when he was having an exhibition of his graffiti paintings at 72 Market Street restaurant in Venice. He was talking with Robert Rauschenberg. Hopper was eager to discuss his work and invited me to join the conversation. The paintings had been inspired, he said, by looking through the camera lens at graffiti covered walls, while directing his film “Colors.” I was impressed by his openness and enthusiasm. Over the years, I saw that he shared himself easily, if he saw that you were passionate about art.

In fact, if you were a part of the art world, particularly in Los Angeles or New York, you most likely felt, as I did, that you were privileged to know Dennis, and would think how cool it was that he had showed up for your opening, reading, or performance. The fact is, Dennis was as much a part of the art world as he was a part of Hollywood. He moved freely between them because he saw so little that separated them.

Years after our first meeting, we discussed during an interview how strange it was that there weren’t more cross-connections between these artistic spheres, and how few Hollywood faces were seen in galleries and museums.

“Yeah, I never thought of compartmentalizing. I just thought acting was part of living in culture. If you were an actor, a painter, a poet, if you could play music, great — whatever you could do. I knew I was never going to do opera, but I enjoyed opera and I felt that it was part of my life as a creative person. Not that I could sing opera or even that I would ever direct it, but I felt it was really important.”

Perhaps because of this broader commitment, Dennis Hopper appears, “Zelig-like” at so many of the pivotal moments in art and film through the last 55 years. The list of artists who Hopper collected, photographed, and knew reads like a “Who’s Who” of contemporary art. The iconic films he was in are well known. But the two he did with James Dean seem to have impressed on him a standard of artistic excellence and commitment that challenged and inspired him for the rest of his life.

It was a standard that led Dennis Hopper to the forefront of artistic endeavor — from the Pop Art movement to the present. In the end, he was that rare artist and champion of the arts whose voice will echo long after we’re done mourning his passing and our loss of his unique talent and vision.