Word: impressionist
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...chronicler of society whose work was "a summing up of the nineteenth century" and, on the contrary, a "visionary artist" whose genius was to transcend time. He is described as a moralist who "judges" and "condemns" and a "visual writer" who sees. He is compared with French Impressionist paintings and Wagnerian opera...
...Impressionist Ambience. The Whitney show will not add much to Hopper's established reputation. But it does reveal a good deal about Hopper's interests and development, his slow trial-and-error manner of working, his exacting standards for himself and his relationship with the world. The son of a frustrated scholar turned dry-goods merchant, Hopper was born in Nyack, N.Y., in 1882. He read prodigiously in his father's library: English, French and Russian novelists, philosophers from Montaigne to Emerson. He was a loner almost from the start, perhaps because by the age of twelve...
...took no part in the Parisian whirl, where Picasso and Braque were busy trying to revolutionize painting. He remained a light-struck realist to the end of his days. His early work shows, however, that the shapes and, above all, the light of Paris, as well as the Impressionist ambience, did much for his eye and his palette. Back in the U.S., the attractive blur of Impressionism vanishes from his oils. The light flattens, shadows are sharper and more sculptural, forms grow increasingly solid and defined, as in The Dories, Ogunquit, which suggests that Hopper might even have picked...
...former Premier of France. "My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that's left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear." Painters have often guessed wrong about their achievement; none guessed worse than Monet. He is, in fact, the only Impressionist other than Manet and Seurat whose work has consistently seemed relevant and useful to modern painters. One cannot imagine an artist "learning" from Renoir today. The difference is one of radical intent, of questions which Monet's work asked but did not always close, as most Renoirs are closed...
Tourist Object. This might seem harmless enough. But inflated prices feed a numbness back onto art itself. The Impressionist and old master market has been big news for so long now that nobody can look at a Monet without seeing in front of that exquisite paint a wall of dollar signs. The hedge against inflation inevitably becomes a hedge against perception. Its price has made the painting different, of an order other than art. Museums, which should resist this syndrome, tend to exploit it. Thus the Metropolitan got untold mileage out of the fact that it paid...