Word: hopperful
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...stations, hotel lobbies, rooming houses, side streets, Pullman compartments, lighted windows, underpasses-such are the meager materials Hopper chooses to make immutable and unforgettable on canvas. Their fascination for him lies in the fact they are manmade, and common-man-made. He finds them appropriate for the expression of human striving in all its loneliness and disarray, as well as its hints and spasms of nobility...
...Hopper's quiet canvases, blemishes and blessings balance. He will paint an ugly front stoop and the warmth of sunlight on it, or a sooty curtain stirring with the fragrance of an unexpected breeze. He presents common denominators, taken from everyday experiences, in a formal, somehow final, way. The results can have astonishing poignancy, as if they were familiar scenes solemnly witnessed for the very last time. "To me," says Hopper, "the important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling...
...Champion. As Hopper gazed silently and intently at California, a 29-picture exhibition of his work opened with a Hopper-like absence of fanfare at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Being staged in one of the nation's richest repositories of native art, the Boston show underlined Hopper's place in a great and continuing tradition...
...drama from the history it helps illustrate, it has reflected not European painting but American life-rough and smooth, tumultuous and diverse. And though it is a great river of many sources and many passing moods, its strongest single current throughout is a searching realism. One measure of Edward Hopper's importance: he is today the revered champion of that tradition...
Less recognized, but equally true, is the fact that Hopper, at 74, expresses the present moment of American life with all the vigor and attachment of youth. The tradition he practices has nothing to do with convention. It involves no set approach, and never stoops to slavish copying. Hopper seldom sketches on the spot; he has not painted an oil direct from nature in 15 years. What he shares with the other great realists in American painting history is a heartfelt regard for the here and now, together with an overmastering desire to understand it intimately and express it clearly...