The Cool School (2008)

This documentary is narrated by Jeff Bridges and includes commentary by Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell who were on the periphery of the beat artist scene of the late 1950s when Venice was the backwater of bohemia that drew the artists to the edge of the world. They were a small group and medical school dropout, Walter Hopps, got to know them all when he opened a tiny Los Angeles art gallery called Ferus and gave California artists a serious venue for exhibitions...artists such as Jay DeFeo, Ed Ruscha, Craig Kaufman, Wallace Berman, John Baldessari, Peter Voulkos, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz.

L.A. never embraced the "New American Art." They viewed the abstract expressionism that had a grip on the New York artworld as communist. Hopps opened another small avante gard gallery with Irving Blum called Syndell Studio, but the partnership failed and Blum stole his wife. Hopps went on to curate shows at The Pasadena Museum where he hosted Andy Warhol's first show and charged just $100 for the Warhol soup can prints. He later gave Marcel Duchamp his first retrospective in 1963.

Hopps helped cultivate an interest in art by offering an adult ed class to wanna-be collectors and began to take some of artworld attention away from New York as he brought the California aesthetic to the art magazines and collectors. The subject of the modernist world was not external...it came from the artist. Wallace Berman did for assemblage what Ed Ruscha did for language (as visual experience). Robert Irwin did for the Light & Space Movement what Peter Voulkos did for the ceramic art sculpture.

This may not appeal to many, but I appreciate seeing evidence of a simpler time in history, a time when so much fresh excitement about contemporary visual art was happening for the first time.