Word: hopperish
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Edward Hopper was one of Diebenkorn's inner jury of admired masters--no other American painter except de Kooning influenced him as much. What he liked in Hopper, Diebenkorn once laconically said, was "the diagonals." Not the mood: you can't extract a Hopperish melancholy from Woman in a Window, 1957, though her face is averted. What she might be thinking doesn't count; she's a model, not a narrative. What does count is the confluence of vectors--the square window with its two planes of blue sea and sky, the tabletop rushing away to the right...
...hell, in fact, full of endless chatter, where all the clients' heads are clocks whose hands have stopped for eternity at 10 p.m.--has its affinities to Hopper's Nighthawks. Even the silver G.I.s in Kienholz's great antimilitarist piece, The Portable War Memorial, 1968, have a spectral Hopperish sadness as they raise the Iwo Jima flag on a patio table...
...that Katz is a poor draftsman. He seems not to look at anything but the painting, and so repeats the same stereotypes for the human face and body, for houses and dogs, steering wheels and tables, and everything else that he puts in his big, clean, post-Hopperish spaces. The idea of drawing as scrutiny of a subject, as a struggle with its strangeness and resistances, is quite alien to the pharaonic prettiness of his art. Of the structure, weight, pathos and energy of the human body he has no sense at all, and one result is his inability (shown...
Even the group's most lingering look back at life on the land, King Harvest, is touched with a double vision. It is marked by an ironic interplay between the rich, yet somehow threatening sound of nature and the querulous, grass-hopperish whine of the farmer...
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