ART APPRECIATION : MORE AND MORE, HOLLYWOOD TURNS TO THE VISUAL ARTS FOR INSPIRATION, TALENT AND MOODY, FACT-BASED PLOTS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

When the French artist Man Ray fled to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, giving the slip to Hitler's goons, he cast a decidedly cool eye on his new Hollywood neighbors.

``I still have a feeling that an insignificant, static drawing, painting or photograph can outlive a million-dollar film,'' Man Ray declared around the time he was setting up his Vine Street studio.

During his decade-long California sojourn, the great surrealist's view of Hollywood mellowed somewhat. (For more on the subject, plan to visit the large retrospective of his work opening Sept. 21 at Santa Monica's Bergamot Station galleries.)

Yet Man Ray's attitude typified the deep mistrust that for years colored relations between the dream merchants and the so-called ``fine arts.''

Now, there are signs of a truce between visual artists and big-bucks moviemaking. As a new generation of artists migrates toward film, advertising and cyberspace, Hollywood has discovered a new source of talent in its eternal quest for would-be visionaries.

Likewise, ``serious'' artists no longer automatically look down their noses at the studios. In recent years, several of them have stepped behind a Panaflex to direct their first features, including Robert Longo (``Johnny Mnemonic''), Kathryn Bigelow (``Point Break,'' ``Strange Days''), Robert Salle (``Search and Destroy'') and, most recently, Julian Schnabel (``Basquiat''). Schnabel managed the neat trick not only of directing the biopic, about the rise and fall of '80s art-world star Jean-Michel Basquiat, but of serving as one of the movie's main characters. Schnabel had befriended Basquiat in the '80s and championed his career.

This film came on the heels of ``I Shot Andy Warhol,'' the story of the assassination attempt on the famed pop artist. Warhol, as portrayed by David Bowie, is also a main character in ``Basquiat.''

While reaction to these movies has been wildly mixed, both critically and commercially, there's general agreement that they've given Hollywood an infusion of visual chutzpah. Others to make the jump include Gus Van Sant, whose lyrical, multimedia style reflects his apprenticeship at the Rhode Island School of Design; David Lynch, who shot experimental films as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; and photographer Cindy Sherman, known for her creepy, pseudo-glamorous self-portraits. Sherman is preparing this fall to shoot a low-budget horror feature film, her first.

Meanwhile, Hollywood's fascination with great artists' lives continues unabated. A number of big-screen profiles are moving along the assembly line, starting with Merchant-Ivory's ``Surviving Picasso,'' starring Anthony Hopkins, which opens Sept. 20. Other projects reportedly under way include a portrait of Italian modernist painter Amedeo Modigliani, directed by and starring Al Pacino; a profile of Jackson Pollock (with the names of Barbra Streisand and Robert De Niro attached); and a biopic about the late Robert Mapplethorpe, avant-garde photographer and scourge of the Christian Right.

Enemies no longer, visual artists and corporate green-lighters are pooling their assets for fun and profit.

``I think artists are probably as willing to sell out as anybody in the film industry,'' laughs John Baldessari, the well-known Santa Monica-based pioneer of film and video art. ``They're not any purer, they just have a harder time doing it.''

In fact, Baldessari is surprised there hasn't been more collaboration.

``Probably, if the two camps got together, there'd be a lot of commonality.''

European movies have a long, self-conscious history of cross-pollination with the visual arts. From Eisenstein's montages and Godard's cut-up narratives to the tableaux vivants of Derek Jarman (``Caravaggio'') and Peter Greenaway (``The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover''), continental filmmakers have freely raided images and inspiration from gallery walls. Ditto for Japanese painter-turned-master-director Akira Kurosawa.

Hollywood is a different story. In the early years of movies, the industry saw the visual arts as too highfalutin by half, while artists had trouble getting a grip on the unwieldy new medium of motion pictures.

That began to change around the end of World War II.

``By that point, you had a whole history of the cinema available, a huge data bank of images available to artists, whereas before, I think artists were just sort of awed by the cinema,'' says Kerry Brougher, who curated the exhibition ``Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945'' at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art last spring.

Of course, movie moguls have long been drawn to epic displays of misunderstood genius: ``Moulin Rouge,'' ``Savage Messiah,'' ``The Agony and the Ecstasy'' and endless Technicolor portrayals of poor Vincent Van Gogh and his missing ear (``Lust for Life'' among others).

Nor has Hollywood entirely snubbed visual artists in the past. Hitchcock famously recruited Salvador Dali to paint a pair of giant eyeballs for the Freudian dream sequence in ``Spellbound'' (1945). Stylists like John Ford and the European-born Douglas Sirk demonstrated a working knowledge of Western art traditions. In turn, these directors influenced a new breed of artists and photographers weaned on Saturday matinees.

But Hollywood's new-found art appreciation suggests something besides mere hero-worship or a craving for novelty. Apparently, the studios have recognized the public's growing appetite for art - especially big, splashy art.

``I think what has happened to some extent is that museums and galleries in the '70s, '80s and '90s have turned art into mass entertainment,'' says MOCA's Brougher.

``We have these big blockbuster exhibitions that people buy tickets in advance and come to. The art world has expanded outward to be embraced to some extent by everyone, not just by an elite group of people. I think more people are just aware of what's going on in the art world.''

Hollywood also has turned to the arts in search of new design elements, fresh graphic concepts - the millions of visual details that can lend a movie, video or CD-ROM a distinct look and feel. That's a plus, given the copycat nature of so much commercial product.

``We are constantly using references from every possible source we can find, including print work or previous movies or theater work,'' says Eric Armstrong, an animation director with Sony Pictures Imageworks.

As communication grows more visually oriented, art jokes and allusions are cropping up in utterly mainstream movies. In Tim Burton's ``Batman'' (1989), for example, Jack Nicholson's ``Joker'' tells his vandalistic henchmen to lay off a Francis Bacon portrait because he kinda likes it.

In ``Wall Street'' (1987), slimy stock trader Gordon Gekko was a prominent modern art collector. Just as Hollywood has begun to use opera arias to underscore plot points and flesh out character traits in movies like ``Fatal Attraction'' and ``Philadelphia,'' background art objects can supply a kind of visual shorthand.

Whether all these cozy developments suggest sophistication or exploitation is open to debate. MOCA's Brougher questions whether the bold, subversive spirit of experimental film artists like Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger can be translated into multiplex fare.

``From my own perspective, the attempts by artists to be completely absorbed by the Hollywood machine generally results in not such interesting film, and the reason for that, I think, is that they have lost their distance from the cinema,'' he says.

``I think that someone like Andy Warhol knew the dangers of that. Even though he was fascinated by filmmaking, by Hollywood and by celebrity, he always kept his distance so that he could make a film that would comment on the impact of movies on society.''

Artist Baldessari has a different take. Over the years, he has had plenty of students who found themselves making commercials or MTV videos, after dreaming of becoming the next Picasso, Antonioni or Dorothea Lange.

That's fine by him.

``I can recognize the need for it, and I'm all for it,'' he says. ``I don't know why there should be any distinction between commercial film and TV and art. It's just that there are more constraints.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) ART GOES TO THE MOVIES

AFTER DE CADES OF MUTUAL DISTRUST, HOLLYWOOD AND THE VISUAL ARTS ARE BEGINNING TO SEE EYE TO EYE

(2) Though he became a fixture in 1940s Los Angeles, French surrealist Man Ray, seen here in his prized Graham ``Hollywood Supercharger,'' cast a wary eye on his filmmaking neighbors - if not their car culture.

(3) In one of many examples of films drawing inspiration from the visual arts, ``Surviving Picasso,'' opening Sept. 20, focuses on the lusty Spanish painter.