An icon of the Beat generation and countercultural movement idolized by Keith Haring, Dennis Hopper rose to fame through his first significant film role in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), opposite Natalie Wood and James Dean. With his directorial debut – the drug-fueled motorcycle drama Easy Rider (1969), in which he starred alongside Peter Fonda – Hopper was established as a talent of note at the forefront of the burgeoning resistance to the status quo. He attained additional renown for his photography, which documented his relationships with artists from Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol, and a major retrospective of his work was staged at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2001.

Hopper and Haring met through mutual friend Andy Warhol and became friends themselves, visiting each other’s exhibition openings and meeting socially. As Gil Vazquez, board president of the Keith Haring Foundation, recalls, “Keith and I once visited Dennis Hopper in Los Angeles. He was newly married or engaged at the time, and he was great – he was a friend. Loved, loved, Keith and was a huge fan. They were dear friends.” Hopper, a supporter and admirer of Haring’s work, narrated a short documentary for WTTW-TV, titled Off the Wall: Keith and the Kids, about Haring’s mural project with the students of Chicago Public Schools in 1989. The present work, an example of Hopper’s esteemed photography praxis, depicts Paul Newman, his co-star in Cool Hand Luke (1967), and was a gift from the artist to Haring.