Recalling birth of LA's hip art scene

Nick Cheung plays an ex-mobster in "Exiled." (tang chak shun/Magnolia Pictures)

Los Angeles in the 1950s was a no-man's-land for visual artists. Then, in 1957, curator Walter Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz opened Ferus Gallery, and founded a fervid little art scene that birthed the pugnacious, jazzy, bright aesthetic associated with Los Angeles to this day.

Morgan Neville's quick-paced documentary "The Cool School" recounts the rise and fall of Ferus Gallery and the mark it made on American art. This intriguing story, like many tales of mid-20th-century American art, is fueled by testosterone. Neville interviews those surviving of the tight band of Ferus artists, including Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Kenneth Price, and Ed Moses.

They were originals. While de Kooning and Pollock were splashing paint over canvases in New York, the Ferus artists broke off in new directions. Kienholz made assemblages of found objects that many reviled as vulgar. Price and John Mason worked in ceramics, turning a lowbrow, crafty material high-concept. Irwin invoked car culture in his work; Billy Al Bengston used resin and plastic.

For all the splash of LA art, "The Cool School" is spare, filmed largely in black and white. The director splices in contemporary interviews with archival footage and photos. In black and white (with occasionally witty dashes of digital color, like the red paint in a bucket carried by Moses), the images have an urban grit, and they suggest looking through the filter of memory. Neville drives the conceit home toward the end of the film: When the artists stop reminiscing and begin to discuss the present, he goes to color. Everyone looks flushed and wonderfully alive.

Interviewing Ferus artists and those on the fringes, such as actors Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, Neville expertly spells out the personalities and conflicts of the artists and particularly their dealer. Hopps was enigmatic and mercurial, yet, as Hopper marvels, "Walter is the man who discovered it all."

Drama was not lacking. Early on, police shut down the gallery, and arrested artist Wallace Berman on an obscenity charge. Another Ferus stalwart, John Altoon, was a diagnosed schizophrenic.

In 1958, Kienholz dropped his partnership to work on art full time. Hopps brought in the debonair Irving Blum, whom several compare to Cary Grant. If Hopps drew artists, Blum found collectors, pulled in big New York names like Roy Lichtenstein, and gave Andy Warhol his first solo show in 1962 - the year Hopps left to become director of the Pasadena Art Museum. Blum made Ferus profitable. He also stole Hopps's wife away.

Thanks to Blum, the scrappy gallery grew chic, and its artists wealthy.

"We were the whores and Irving was the pimp," reflects Bengston.

It couldn't last; community had given way to commerce. Ferus Gallery closed in 1966. "The Cool School" neatly memorializes but does not glamorize the fractious, warm, and often chaotic scene that sparked a new style of American art.