Word: hoppers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...largest collection of Hoppers, some 2,500 paintings, drawings and prints, was left to the Whitney Museum of American Art by his widow, Josephine Nivinson Hopper, when she died a year later. Hopper's name is more closely bound to the Whitney than any other American artist's to any American museum, and the Whitney's main show this summer is a reunion of some 60 of his finest paintings from various collections, including its own. "Edward Hopper and the American Imagination" isn't a formal retrospective. It's more an evocation of Hopper's world, and its scale feels...
...These suggest a parallel harmony to the paintings, not art history or criticism but analogies in writing. (Since, unlike most curators, the writers can write, one can read this vade mecum with pleasure after the show.) The idea is to show how pervasive the areas of American experience that Hopper raised have become. The show falls between two more formal Hopper events: the recent publication, at long last, of Hopper's catalogue raisonne, and a definitive biography, due in the fall. Both are by the leading Hopper scholar, Gail Levin, and represent 20 years of work...
...Hopper's realism had nothing to do with the prevalent realisms of the 1930s and '40s in American painting. That is to say, it had no persuasive content; it was entirely free from ideology, left or right. He had studied painting with Robert Henri, whose politics were romantically anarchist. But none of the political ferment of pre-World War I New York rubbed off on him, and none shows in his work. The only painting in this show that could be guessed to show an industrial worker is Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947; and the bald man is posed like Millet...
...Hopper excelled in painting, discreetly and from without, people who are outsiders to one another. You imagine him staring from the Second Avenue El as it rattled past the lit brownstone windows, storing the enigmatic snapshots of home and business for later use. These are reconstructed scenes, emotion recollected in tranquility. In Room in New York, 1932, it is night; a man reads a paper at a round table, a woman turns away in her own absorption and boredom, touching the piano keyboard with one finger. They are out of synch, and their distance from each other is figured...
...doubt Hopper saw something like this, yet not very like it. The space would not have been measured by his three exact and conscious patches of red: the armchair, the woman's dress, the lampshade. The figures would have been remote. In the picture they are large, and we are close to them, outside their window. You don't for a moment imagine Hopper on a scaffold outside the window or spying on the couple through a long lens. And yet the painting does evoke the pleasure, common to bird and people watchers, of seeing while being unnoticed; it does...