Word: hopperful
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Terrible Task. Hopper himself is habitually as disappointed in his own work as others are enthusiastic. His latest is.a painting of a gas station on a four-lane highway. "I had the idea for it quite a while," he says. "But not so very long, I guess." (The reverse declarative is a Hopper hallmark.) "I didn't think much of it at the start. Still, if you're a painter you have to do something...
...Historian James Thomas Flexner points out that Hopper is the one painter of his generation who is "in the air" today. Flexner dares hope aloud that "the old gentleman will be a bridge between today's abstractionism and realism, for sooner or later the pendulum's got to swing back. Hopper's compositions are awfully good in the abstract, you know. Abstractionists respect...
...young realists certainly do. In a forthcoming book (Conversations with Artists, by Selden Rodman) Painters Jack Levine and Andrew Wyeth give professional appraisals. Hopper "does what he sets out to do," Levine says admiringly. "No dreams of the old masters set him off his course . . . Hopper looks inland. He's an American painter all the way." Wyeth goes farther still: "What makes Rembrandt so very great is that his concern for other people and for nature always shows through, giving his paintings a dimension of identification and self-effacement that is almost unique in art. Titian doesn...
Everything in Hopper's existence is geared to painting, but he finds the task terribly hard. He can seldom face canvas. He always hopes that his frequent trips will result in new works, but has learned, to his pain, that they need not. Once he spent a whole summer in New Mexico, roaming that most scenic of states, and found material for just one watercolor: a locomotive. He once tried to paint the fine view over Washington Square from his Manhattan studio-home. "It must have been 15 or 20 years ago," he says. "I didn't finish...
Although his work has made him moderately prosperous in recent years (his oils bring about $6,000 each), Hopper and his wife live an astonishingly frugal life. Their Washington Square apartment is a fourth-floor walkup, 74 tiring steps above the street. It is heated by a potbellied stove, with coal hauled up in a dumbwaiter...