Edward Hopper

B.B. was passing through town yesterday, so I took a day off and took him to see the Edward Hopper show at the National Gallery. It was excellent. Arranged in more or less chronological order, it started with a dozen or so etchings he made as a young man in the first decade of the XX century. Aside from the one of a man walking along a street under a streetlight, which I vaguely recall having seen somewhere a long time ago, probably at the Whitney, I had never seen any of the etchings before, and they were all beautiful. I think they are shown fairly rarely in general, at least compared to his paintings, but the current show was an excellent opportunity to see them. There were tons of watercolors, also lovely, and, of course, most of the famous oils, including the endlessly parodied Nighthawks, Automat, Room in New York, etc. Very comprehensive.

Hopper has always been one of my favorite artists, even back when I thought Dali was god. Something about the minimalist, yet decisively concrete way in which he depicts things, especially buildings, had always appealed to me on a purely emotional level. The occasional need to be grounded in reality in art as in life, I suppose. And, of course, most of his works, even ones with no people in them, positively ooze loneliness, and any artist who can do that, especially as effectively as Hopper, is alright in my book. But I actually haven't thought about him, and have not come across images of his work, either accidentally or deliberately, in a long time. This made the exhibit that much more enjoyable – I was reminded just how much I love his stuff. There was a quote from a critic – Clement Greenberg, I think – in an on-wall introductory paragraph in one of the rooms. It was something to the effect that Hopper wouldn't have been as good of an artist had he been a better painter (meaning technically). Bunk, I say. The thing that hit me the most yesterday – something I was vaguely aware of before but never really stopped to think about – was the quality of his light. He could pinpoint precisely the time of day or evening (especially evening) by the color of the sunlight on the side of a building, or the angle at which the shadows fell. That's not technique?! His watercolors, too, are astonishingly precise in line, color and composition – all aspects that the watercolor medium supposedly renders so difficult to control.

If I have a complaint about the show at all, it is trivial in the extreme – I was hoping the gift shop would have a reproduction of at least of one of the uncommon etchings. I would have bought one and hung it at home in a second. But, as usual, the lowest common denominator ruled the day, and all they had were the famous oils and a couple of later, colorful large-format watercolors. I contented myself with a poster of House at Dusk and a handful of postcards.