Sunday 28 September 2014

OUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION


Double Standard (1961), one of my favorite Hopper's photographs is part of the Lost Album.

Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and David Goodman, 1963. Via Artsy.
Irving Blum and Peggy Moffitt, 1964. Via Artsy.


The Lost Album, a collection of more than 400 photographs, taken between 1961-67, when Hopper was blacklisted by Hollywood, are being exhibited at the Royal Academy until the 19 of October. The photographs are all originals, and so you can not only see but somehow feel the 50-something years that have passed since those moments, stories, and lives were captured by Hopper. Hell angels, poets, artists, Hollywood stars, civil rights fighters, hippies, Mexican landscapes, giant billboards, many subjects of the verge of changing forever, captured without pretensions but with a really instinctive eye by Hopper, a really fascinating character himself and one of Holloywood's enfants terribles.

According to Mark Brown in The Guardian, "Marin Hopper, who discovered the boxes after her father's death in 2010, knew about the 1970 show but had no idea he had kept all the photographs. "It was extraordinary," she said. 'I was surprised he kept them at home because he had art storage and also that he never really mentioned it to anyone.' "

"Hopper took around 18,000 pictures with his Nikon F; the ones in the show are both a personal visual diary and a document of the wild and freewheeling cultural life of 1960s America.
Marin said when she first went through them they seemed like movie storyboards. 'If you look at them from beginning to end, you feel like you've travelled in a time capsule of America.'"

The exhibition was curated by Petra Giloy-Hirtz, organised in co-operation with The Dennis Hopper Art Trust, and you can see it at the Royal Academy until the 19th of October. Absolutely meaningful procrastination.

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