Edward Hopper

by Kirk Woodward 

[I commenced my art report on Edward Hopper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2007 by confessing, “I’m not really a fan of . . . Hopper.”  In his article on the artist and his work, my friend Kirk Woodward quotes my reasons for that feeling, then goes on to explain why his response differs from mine.

[Curious ROTters will find it interesting to look at my reports on Hopper’s art after reading Kirk’s “Edward Hopper” below.  Meanwhile, I’ll quote something else I wrote in “Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960.”  (Cross-references and links to these posts are provided in the afterword below.)

[These are comments I made regarding art and the responses I report when I write about what I’ve seen.  “Art—whether music, poetry, drama, or painting—means to me whatever I take from it, not what someone else tells me I should take from it,” I wrote.  I describe how I felt when I looked at a painting, say one of Hopper’s; I’m not making a definitive pronouncement about the art.

[That means I can’t tell someone else how to respond to a piece of art, either.  My responses are just that: my responses.  As I also said in “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA” (16 May 2019): “[M]y response to art isn’t analytical—I don’t know [the] rules in any case, since I’ve never studied art.  It’s purely emotional or psychological: I respond to a piece of art according to how it makes me feel.”

[As far as different responses to the same stimuli is concerned, this reminds me of something that happened on my 1980 trip to China (subject of my travel journal posted 24 December 2021-5 January 2022).  I explained that our meals in the People’s Republic were served “family style” (bowls of food for each table of 10-12 rather than individual plates).

[At one meal, after we’d begun to serve ourselves from the common bowls, one woman remarked that a particular dish was very spicy.  Another diner, a man traveling with his wife, didn’t think the dish was spicy at all.  I piped up that it was certainly spicy, but not heavily spiced.

[So three of us, eating from the same bowl, each had variant responses to the same stimulus.  Well, that’s what I see going on with Kirk’s and my responses to Hopper’s art.]

Visiting a friend in Norwich, New York, in a rented apartment one night with nothing to do, I picked up and started to glance through a book of reproductions of paintings by the American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967).

I had been cursorily familiar with a few of his paintings, particularly the famous Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois), a view of a coffeeshop in an empty urban street with four people inside, illuminated against the darkness. I knew Hopper as a painter of isolation and loneliness.

This is also how Rick sees Hopper. He has written about him three times in this blog (see the list in the afterword below). In “Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney,” he writes:

Hopper (1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless.  His lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and vacant.  Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.  I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience. 

Our responses to works of art are subjective. As we will see, Rick is accurate about Hopper. We see the same paintings, and the same things in them.

What’s more, Rick has a great deal of familiarity with painting, and I don’t know much more about it than I learned in a college survey course, plus the usual exposure through museums and reproductions. My favorite painter, I may add, is El Greco – when I would go through Washington, DC, I would often go into the National Gallery, look at the El Grecos, and leave.

But up in New York State, looking at the book of Hopper reproductions one night, I suddenly found that they spoke to me in a remarkable way, and I want to try to indicate why that is so. It’s possible that his paintings are a bit like those drawings which if looked at one way show a duck and looked at another way show an old woman. Which do you see?

Absent illustrations, I will try to describe the paintings and their features as best I can, also indicating where they can be seen. Of course there are also a number of books of reproductions of his work, for example Edward Hopper: Masterpieces of Art (Rosalind Ormiston, 2016, Flame Tree Publishing). Seeing the paintings in person, of course, might give a different impression from seeing them in reproductions.

My thesis is that the view that Hopper’s subject is loneliness of the human condition is insufficient – that in fact the opposite may almost be true. However, I admit that a look at Hopper’s biography may seem to endorse rather than contradict Rick’s point of view.

Hopper, according to every description I’ve read, was the opposite of an outgoing sort of person. His life is easily summarized. He was born in Nyack, New York, by the Hudson River above New York City. His mother was an artist, his father ran a store, and both encouraged his interest in art.

He signed up for a correspondence school course in illustration when he was seventeen; his parents felt that being an illustrator offered a career he could fall back on if necessary. As we will see, I consider this early training very important. In any case, the following year he enrolled in the New York School of Art and Design, the forerunner of Parsons School of Design, where he did well and actually taught some in his later student years.

Graduating, he traveled to Europe, where he would go three times over the course of his career. He did not claim to be particularly influenced by the Impressionists, but he was clearly influenced by the work of Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and even more by Edgar Degas (1834-1917).

He learned etching, and for some years he made a living on illustration work and etchings, before his paintings began to sell. His career as a painter began slowly; he did not become a major success until he was forty-two. After that his paintings sold well and widely.

Hopper does not appear to have been an unpleasant person, but he was a man of few words, and like some other taciturn artists – Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) comes to mind – he married someone, in Hopper’s case an artist named Josephine (Jo) Nivison (1883-1968), who was as lively and outspoken (and funny) as he was not. She once said, “Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.”

They lived for the rest of their lives in an apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan, and when they could afford it they built a second home on Cape Cod, at South Truro. He painted to an advanced age, when his health became precarious.

An outwardly uneventful life, then – but one that produced quite eventful paintings. But of what kind? I want to point out several things that impress me, starting with the fact that he worked for years as an illustrator.

He disliked the work, but did it well, winning a prize for a recruiting poster he designed in World War I. It was titled “Smash the Hun” and showed a muscular worker swinging an enormous sledgehammer. Confronting him are three enemy soldiers, except that all we see of them, on the lower plane of the picture, are three bayonets pointing toward him, the tips of their blades – surprisingly – colored orange.

The lower part of the background is solid blue; then come a varied set of triangles representing heavy machinery, possibly for boat construction; and above them, out of a factory smokestack and into the sky, a vivid, solid, dynamic swirl of smoke.

An illustrator, if talented, learns to make a clear point in a striking way. Hopper disliked his years in the trade, but it served him well in his painting. What’s more, many of the important aspects of his later painting are represented in the poster – the geometric foundation of shapes, the unexpected angle of vision, the dynamic presentation of objects other than human beings (although in this illustration the human figure is also vividly presented).

Hopper’s training as an illustrator gives a special quality to many of his paintings, a kind of dry humor that one wouldn’t expect of him. For example, Gas (1940, Museum of Modern Art) at first glance is a picture of a solitary moment: a gas station at night, with a man – perhaps the owner? – wearing a suit vest but no jacket, doing something with one of three gas pumps lined up in a row.

We can’t see what the man is doing - his hands are hidden behind the closest of the pumps. Why is he there? Impossible to know, but much is going on around him. The windows of the gas station building are brightly lit, and their glow spills out onto the pavement. The three gas pumps are lined up in a row, the closest appearing the largest. Between the pumps and the building is a sign that reads “Mobil Gas.” The sign is more than twice as tall as the pumps.

But look at the painting slightly differently, the same way you might study a multiple image drawing. The three pumps, their tops, like heads, round, with tiny symbols where the eyes would be – and you might easily see three soldiers following a flag. I did, when I looked casually at a reproduction of the picture. The three gas tanks appear to be – sorry – “Mobil-ized.” They look like a little army, following a flag marching ahead of them.

Remembering that Hopper had extensive experience as an illustrator, I do not believe this secondary impression is an accident. Hopper seldom just sat down and painted; he spent a lot of time thinking about the angle of vision of each painting, as well as about its subject and style. Few of his paintings show the “obvious” view of their subjects. There’s always something particular in Hopper’s mind, and often it’s something just out of reach.

A famous example of this is House by the Railroad (1925, Museum of Modern Art). Many will recognize it immediately as the inspiration for the design of the Bates’ house in the movie Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). If you’re familiar with the film, you will recognize the house in the painting at once. To put it mildly, the houses in the film and in the painting both make an impression.

But what, exactly, made the house seem appropriate for such a terrifying movie? There’s nothing odd happening – certainly no people in the picture. But the more you look at the painting, the odder it seems.

The front door is both in shadow and indistinct, and its first floor columns might vaguely make one think of a row of insect feet. The windows seem to have personalities; the panes could be eyes, mostly empty, sometimes dark. Much of the front of the house is in shadow.

Most strikingly, the entire bottom of the picture is completely at odds with the rest – a three layer horizontal swath of dark brown, lighter brown, and red, representing a train track that seems remarkably close to the house. Since the painting appears to look at the house from a slightly lower vantage point, the bottom of the first floor is blocked by the track bed. The effect of the contrast is surprising – one might almost say violent.

My experience is that there’s always something going on in a Hopper painting, something I’d call “dramatic” in the sense that there’s a mystery about it, but a mystery embodied in the painting itself, not particularly in a narrative about people included in it. He has plenty of opportunities to show “human drama;” he just doesn’t want to.

A few examples: in Hotel Room (1931, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) a minimally dressed woman sits on a bed, holding a piece of paper in her hand. A goodbye note? A poem? A map? We can’t tell, and it’s not even clear that she’s reading the paper, which she holds horizontally rather than vertically. What stands out in the painting are about a dozen four-sided blocks of color, the largest two white and yellow, filling the frame; the entire background for the woman’s head is a brilliant white.

Similarly in New York Movie (1939, Museum of Modern Art) a blonde usherette leans against a wall, lit by a three-bulb lamp, biting her fingernail. Visually she is almost entirely overwhelmed , however, by the ornateness of the movie theater.

An indistinguishable movie is on the screen – what is it? Many of Hopper’s paintings have one element in them that raises a question that can’t be answered. But the usherette is not really the center of the “drama” – the movie theater is.

One more example: in High Noon (1949, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio) a slim woman in perhaps an open dressing gown stands in a doorway of a house, which we see straight on from the front. She is looking out the doorway, her head at a slight angle. The house is gleaming white.

However, the sky does not seem particularly bright; in fact, it looks cloudy, although the sun, out of the picture at the left although we can’t see it, is casting a strong shadow. Once we take in the elements of the painting, the effect is one of opposites. But why? The painting maintains its mystery.

My contention then is that there is plenty of drama in Hopper’s paintings, but it is “painterly” drama, arising from the elements of the picture itself and not from a human story of the kind one might write a scene or a short play about.

Some of his paintings illustrate this point easily. One of my favorites, The Mansard Roof (1923, Brooklyn Museum, New York), shows a many-surfaced three floor house framed by trees on the right and left. In the picture it’s a windy day, and curtains are flapping from the second (main) floor balcony.

By the time one has studied the picture from left to right, it has almost become an essay in pure depiction of motion, with a swirl of tree branches that is almost abstract. The painting seems alive. And in one third-floor window is (perhaps) a window shade that, in contrast to everything else in view, is bright yellow. A small mystery.

I used the words “almost abstract.” Hopper claimed not to be interested in Abstract Art, which Wikipedia describes as using “visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.” Nevertheless his work has strong affinities both with Impressionism, as I noted above, and also with Abstraction.

His “abstractions” tend to be firm, not vague, in outline. In Room in Brooklyn (1932, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), for example, we see a woman in a rocking chair, and on a table a vase of flowers. But what attracts – practically overwhelms – the eye are the many geometric forms that make up the window, the floor, the table, the buildings on the other side of the street.

Particularly interesting is a rectangular piece of “sunlight” on the floor in the painting, which stands out and comes as a surprise. Rick writes:                                                                        

He was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation. 

I agree with his observation, but obviously not with his conclusion. True, Hopper is greatly interested in light, in its sources and in how it falls, and he makes this a subject (I wouldn’t say a “study”) in his work. Light after all is central to sight, to appearance, even, in physics, to the nature of matter itself. He is particularly interested in the sources of light – where it comes from.

He is also meticulous in his placement of shadows. In fact, in many of his paintings they almost become presences in themselves, as significant as anything else in the painting. He may not emphasize the presence of human figures, although there are exceptions, but he demonstrates that there are other kinds of presences, shadows being one of them.

But Hopper doesn’t as a rule present light in the way the Impressionists would. He gives light not so much texture as shape. Shadows and areas of light in his paintings have structure, solidity, of a remarkable sturdiness. They have presence.

More than anything they remind me of the paintings of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who famously said, “I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums.” I have not found any reference where Hopper acknowledged Cezanne as an inspiration.

But physical objects in Hopper’s paintings are unmistakably there, as they are in Cezanne’s works, and a principal reason is his use of geometrical shapes to a degree close to abstraction. Much in his paintings is a collection of squares, triangles, circles, and so on.

Obviously he is not alone in this. But my point is that in Hopper’s paintings, things are as significant as people. Hopper has a story to tell – not a literal story, a pictorial one – and he tells it through objects. It’s a story told through his chosen medium of painting. His story doesn’t rely on human interrelationships as they present themselves as drama. It’s a story told in and through paint itself.

So my disagreement with Rick is really only with the idea that Hopper’s work is “cold.” It doesn’t seem cold to me – it seems to me to be vibrant in observation, dynamic in construction, deeply appreciative in observation, and alert to the possibilities of human communication, waiting for us to use.

And speaking of communication, one of the features of Hopper’s paintings that is so obvious as to be almost invisible, is the many ways he depicts means of communication. He seldom shows them as alive with drama – he simply reminds us that they exist.

In that sense, his paintings, far from devoid of human communication, are alive with it. In the pictures discussed in this article, we have seen references to coffee shops and stores – places where people gather; automobiles; railroad trains; letters; movies; the Mobil sign.

A quick glance through a book of reproductions of his paintings also shows electric signs; pictures; plays; clocks; window lettering; newspapers; books; telephone poles; antennae . . . in addition to scenes of human interaction, of which of course there are a number.

But, again, the drama is in the painting, not a situation the artist has painted. The colors and shapes that Hopper has put on canvas are integral to his meaning. An artist – in any of the arts – is constantly saying, “Look at that! Look at that!” Through Hopper’s eyes I “see” things I otherwise would not have seen.

In that apartment in Norwich, on the morning we were going to leave, I woke up while it was still dark. The window shade was up, and through the window I saw – a “Hopper painting!” Geometric shapes, a light casting shadows, a street not yet busy with cars, a phone pole with wires stretching out of the “frame,” an unlit sign on a factory wall, not yet readable. There it was, a Hopper. Thank you, sir.

My appreciation of Hopper changed when my perception of his work "clicked” and I saw it for the first time as a depiction not of isolated people so much as of a world waiting for relationships and stories. The result for me has been a greater appreciation of Hopper’s work, and even more, of the world around me.

[This is a perfect example of what I used to tell my writing students was how writing works.  In “Why Write” (4 March 2013), I said:

I used to explain to my students that writing is a kind of conversation in print.  One writer says something and another picks up the idea, or a part of it, and says something else, and so on.  That’s how new knowledge is created, I told them. 

[In this case, I wrote something about Hopper’s paintings, and Kirk took what I said and wrote something back.  Now I could take what he said and say something more--or someone else could.

[There are several mentions of comments I’ve written about Edward Hopper and his art on Rick On Theater.  Below are the cross-references to those posts.  First, here are the reports I posted on art exhibits that featured Hopper:

⠂ "Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney," 23 April 2019 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/04/hopper-and-turner-at-national-gallery.html)

⠂ "Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960," 12 June 2018 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/06/where-we-are-selections-from-whitneys.html)

⠂ "Short Takes: Some Art Shows," 17 June 2018 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/06/short-takes-some-art-shows.html); see the section on Edward Hopper 

[Kirk specifically discusses two of Hopper’s canvases about which I also wrote.  The first is Nighthawks, which I discuss in "Where We Are.”  With respect to the dramatic implications of the paintings, I wrote: “[Y]ou wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street.”

[(Curiously, Nighthawks also comes in for a pertinent mention in my report on Three Sisters on 29 April 2012.  In fact, there are occasional references to Hopper’s paintings in a number of my play reports on ROT.)

[In “Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery” (in the section of that report on the two NGA exhibits) I make similar remarks about New York Movie: “The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)—what’s she thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her vision?”

[(In my report on Where We Are at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I relate the “stories” of some other Hopper works that are in that show.)

[Kirk also writes about Hopper’s relationship to Abstract art.  I also discuss this in "Hopper and Turner.”  (In the round-up of reviews of NGA’s Edward Hopper, following my report on the show itself, there are further observations by various reviewers and commentators on this subject.)

[Finally, Kirk writes extensively about Hopper’s use of shadow.  I hadn’t recalled this until I skimmed my old posts while prepping this post, but I did, too.  The discussions of Hopper’s paintings that include consideration of his emphasis on shadow are principally in “Hopper and Turner” (including, again, the review survey) and “Where We Are.”]

Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney

[On Sunday afternoon, 21 April 2019, my friend Diana and I went over to the Whitney Museum of American Art in the West Village just to see whatever was on show there.  We walked through a small exhibit of colorist paintings in Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s, an ongoing show that opened on 29 March 2019 and will close sometime in August.  Consisting of only two rooms in the Hurst Family Galleries on the eighth floor, it took so little time to cover that Diana and I decided to go down to the Robert W. Wilson Galleries and the Zelda Bloomberg Outdoor Gallery on the seventh floor to revisit Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960. 

[We’d seen this large show last year (see my write-up for Rick On Theater on 12 June 2018), so I won’t be writing another report, but there were over half a dozen Edward Hopper paintings on exhibit so I decided to post an old report from my archive from a 2007 visit to Edward Hopper at the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  On that trip to the Nation’s Capital, I also saw J. M. W. Turner at the NGA’s West Building, so I’m including that part of the 11-year-old report as well.

[I’ll also say a few words about Spilling Over at the Whitney at the end of the archival report on Hopper and Turner.]

EDWARD HOPPER & J. M. W. TURNER (National Gallery of Art, 2007/2008)

I was in Washington, D.C., several times since the fall of 2007.  I went down for Thanksgiving and then I returned for the year-end holidays and stayed for two weeks.  I did my now-usual Kosher Bus ride down on Friday, 21 December 2007, for a stay that would last until 4 January ’08.  While I was in D.C. the previous month, my mother and I had decided to try to see two art shows that sounded interesting and would still be running through the new year: Edward Hopper and J. M. W. Turner.

Now, I’m not really a fan of either Hopper or Turner, but I’ll give a very brief (well, superficial anyway) run-down of the two exhibits nonetheless.  Both fairly large shows were at the National Gallery of Art on the Mall.  We went down to see the Hopper on Boxing Day, 26 December, and encountered a very long line snaking around the second floor of the East Building.  The line kept growing even as we stood debating whether we should switch over to the West Building and give the Turner show a try; but fortunately, it moved quickly and we spent a pleasant-enough afternoon walking through the several galleries housing the 94 works of the show. 

Hopper (1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless.  His lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and vacant.  Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.  I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience.  He was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation.  (Oddly, Turner had a similar obsession with light and also repainted the same scene—his were landscapes—multiple times.) 

Hopper painted at the same time that many other American artists were turning away from figuration and experimenting with abstraction and expressionism (and, er, Abstract Expressionism), but he fiercely resisted the shift and became an icon among younger and later artists of figurative painting.  (Not surprisingly, I guess, I am a fan of abstract art; I know some commentators—not necessarily art critics, however—see that movement as a fraud on gullible viewers, but I’ve always found the works exciting and moving, emotional and expressive.) 

So I found the show, called simply Edward Hopper (16 September 2007-21 January 2008), pretty much just a curiosity; there was nothing I wanted to come back for on a Midnight Shopping Trip.  This doesn’t mean that I didn’t learn anything, however.  The earliest works in the exhibit were etchings; I never knew Hopper did any kind of print work, and the 12 small etchings on show here, though they all displayed the same focus on empty cityscapes and lonely figures, were somehow more interesting to me than the later large oils.  (Hopper also painted watercolors in his early days.) 

I will also add that there’s a strange kind of theatricality in Hopper’s paintings—not action or drama, but his interiors especially look like stage sets, a kind of set designer’s rendering.  There’s an implied plot in some of them.  People sitting, essentially isolated even in a group, in a diner, viewed from the street through a long expanse of window (Nighthawks, 1942), make you wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street. 

The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)—what’s she thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her vision?  (In my report on Where We Are at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I relate the “stories” of some other Hopper works that are in that show.) 

But these are intellectual curiosities, not emotionally-engaging ones.  A Hopper play would likely be one in which people sit around speaking in low tones—but only occasionally, leaving most of the play to silence.

In the Washington Post, remarking that NGA “understands what an odd duck it has on its hands,” Glenn Dixon labeled Hopper the “taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light” and a “voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary.”  Dixon observed, “It can’t have helped that his discomfort with the human form is palpable.  He would prove far less awkward handling architecture”; however, the WaPo writer found, “He was able to employ compositional stretches, subtle manipulations of reality, as psychological tricks.”  Commenting on those lonely scenes, Dixon called them “implication without incident, a kind of single-frame cinema that rebuffs drama but revels in mood.”  He asked, “What could be happening?”  Dixon’s interpretation?  “Nothing.  Isn’t that enough?”

“You must see it,” proclaimed Robert F. Bruner in the Post.  “His human figures remain imperfect,” cautioned Bruner.  “But what his brush strokes lack in detail, his paintings make up in mood.  Hopper’s special gift was to portray certain emotions of life in a big city, such as loneliness, detachment and introspection.”  He found that “the special impact of the exhibition came from a comment by a guide, halfway through the show: ‘If Hopper had been a better painter, he wouldn’t have been as good an artist.’  Think about that.”  The then-dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia asserted a remarkable analogy:

Business life is filled with lots of painters and fewer artists. The “painters” are the technicians, such as actuaries, time-and-motion efficiency experts, accountants who get the books to balance down to the last penny, logistics honchos who slim down your inventory, and derivatives analysts. . . .

However, the technical mind-set is too often focused on reporting data rather than creating knowledge (or, better yet, wisdom). . . .  Artists in business are visionaries, inventors, entrepreneurs and general managers, people who create something larger out of the assembly of resources.

 

On Artblog, art historian Andrea Kirsh agreed that Hopper had the “ability to people his works so as to suggest a narrative and create an emotional tension.”  Of what she called “Hopper’s narrative skill,” Kirsh said, “We sense that we are seeing a slice of a larger story and we project the rest of it onto the paintings, filling in past events or anticipating future ones.”  The Artblogger lamented, however, “I can’t say I gained an appreciation of Hopper’s paintwork, because for the most part it’s uninteresting, something that always disappointed me.”  Debating whether the artist was a Realist—my friend Diana says he’s an Abstract painter—Kirsh asserted, “Hopper gave us paintings that show things as we imagine them, or remember them.  Perhaps that counts as realism.”

David Yezzi of the New Criterion observed, “Edward Hopper’s paintings suffer from the same popular misconception that plagues the poems of Robert Frost: we feel that we know them.”  The New Criterion poetry editor went on: “The National Gallery’s Hopper retrospective . . . shows the painter as something more than a genial realist.  His attractive surfaces and inviting use of color notwithstanding, something darker and considerably lonelier, in a word, something more modern, haunts the shadows.” 

Hopper’s work has a self-assured continuity, from his lamp-lit nudes in stark bedrooms, to the sun-streaked lighthouses of Maine, to New York interiors glimpsed from an elevated train, to couples caught mid-scene in offices and restaurants.  All are situated in the (for Hopper) endlessly rewarding dynamic between vestigial and enigmatic narrative and the formal pleasures of form, color, and light as they inch toward abstraction. 

Yezzi cited Surrealist writer and poet André Breton as saying Hopper was “one of only a few American artists who could approach the dreamlike quality of Surrealism.” 

On DCist, Kate Mereand wrote, “The scenes are always striking: women at night, mostly alone, and then buildings, mostly in daylight.  Such is Edward Hopper’s art, finding voyeuristic fancy in two main types of subjects: ladies and places.”  Mereand found that “many of the . . . works . . . on display at the National Gallery of Art . . . portray the intense intimacy with which Hopper approached both flesh and brick alike.”  She characterized the painter’s work:

The somewhat photo-realistic quality of Hopper’s work blends more traditional and modern styles of art. The subjects are recognizable, bold, and at times intimate.  Whether it is thus milk-toast or middle-ground, art-lovers and haters of all kinds should be able to appreciate something that he offers.

She summed up by recommending that “you should see if for yourself.”

The next week, Mother and I traveled down to the Mall again to see J. M. W. Turner (1 October 2007-6 January 2008), a much easier show to get into, in the West Building.  Like Hopper, who was born 30 years after Turner died, the older painter was “fascinated with light,” noted Victoria Skelly of the Broad Street Review.  “Exploring the effects of light or the lack of it was a fruitful, lifelong focus for both men.” 

The problem I have with Turner (1775-1851) is that he’s essentially a 19th-century Romantic, a style for which I don’t have much feeling.  (I’m partial to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of the decades following, at the turn of that century.) 

In addition, Turner’s a landscapist, so his canvases are all wild nature, sea storms, crumbling ruins, and craggy precipices—all with no inhabitants.  So, from my perspective, he’s invoking a vision of the world which doesn’t really exist and in which no humans live.  This doesn’t grab me, despite the academic fact that he does it with a focused attention on the way the light—the sun, fire, lightning, moonlight, whatever—illuminates the scene. 

To me, this makes Turner a technical master, perhaps, but not an artist that speaks to me.  (His series on The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835, which he painted after actually viewing the event on 16 October the previous year, are a remarkable record of the loss—but they are illustrations of the historical destruction.) 

What did interest me, though, were the works at the end of the show (whose 146 canvases were arranged chronologically).  I never knew that Turner was apparently a transitional figure at the end of his career between the Romantics and the Impressionists: his late works, some of which were actually unfinished, are more intuitive interpretations of the subjects, less faithfully depicted.  It seemed to me, though none of the curatorial material bore me out on this (Jacqueline Trescott, however, did mentioned in a preview article in the Washington Post that Turner was “an important influence” on the Impressionists), that these late works were proto-Impressionism. 

The Washington Post’s Blake Gopnik declared, “Turner's greatness lies in his resisting, more than almost any artist you could name, any single notion of what great art might be.”  He added that the works in J. M. W. Turner “could almost be by half a dozen different artists—each busy breaking an entirely different set of rules.”  Gopnik then offered this conundrum: “If most great artists' surveys give something for everyone to like, the strong feeling in the Turner show is that there's something there for everyone, even his greatest admirers, to dislike.  There are radically incompatible ways of doing things scattered throughout the show.”  The Post art reviewer concluded, “Looking at Turner's pictures may have rather the same effect that visiting him had:  You never know quite where you stand, what oddness he'll throw at you next or whether to be impressed, appalled or flattered when he lets you watch him breaking rules.”

[Edward Hopper was organized by the NGA in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.  The curators are Carol Troyen, John Moore Cabot Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Franklin Kelly, senior curator, American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art; and Judith Barter, the Field-McCormick Chair of American Art at The Art Institute of Chicago.  The exhibit previously appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 6 May-19 August 2007, and will move on to the Art Institute of Chicago from 16 February–11 May 2008.

[J. M. W. Turner comprises 148 works organized by the NGA; the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with Tate Britain, London.  The curators are Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Dorothy Kosinski, senior curator of painting and sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with Ian Warrell, curator of 18th- and 19th-century British art, Tate Britain.  After Washington, the exhibit will go to the Dallas Museum of Art, from 10 February–18 May 2008, and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 24 June–21 September 2008.]

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SPILLING OVER: PAINTING COLOR IN THE 1960s (Whitney Museum of American Art)

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the West Village (for a brief discussion of the Whitney’s new building, see my report on the “Whitney Biennial 2017,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 June 2017) is an exhibition of paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s “that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception,” according to the museum’s website.  Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s collection, Spilling Over includes works by Josef Albers (1888-1976), Emma Amos (b. 1938), Richard Anuszkiewicz (b. 1930), Frank Bowling (b. 1934), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Sam  Gilliam (b. 1933), Marcia Hafif (1929-2018), Carmen Herrera (b. 1915), Alex Katz (b. 1927), Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Morris Louis (1912-62), Alvin Loving (1935-2005), Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), Robert Reed (1938–2014), Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Frank Stella (b. 1936), Bob Thompson (1937-66), and Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935), among others. 

The exhibit’s title comes from a statement artist Bob Thompson made in 1966, shortly before his death at 28: “I paint many paintings that tell me slowly that I have something inside of me that is just bursting, twisting, sticking, spilling over to get out.  Out into souls and mouths and eyes that have never seen before.”  Organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant, the show opened in the Hurst Family Galleries on the museum’s eighth floor on 29 March and will run until August (no specific closing date is given).  On exhibit are 18 paintings, created between 1959 and 1972 that span Color Field works—including several Washington Color School pieces—to Op Art. 

As I’ve confessed before, I find the mid-century period the most interesting in American art, when our painting and sculpture really emerged from under the shadow of its European forbears and established itself as a force of its own.  (This was also the period when I was first introduced to modern art because it was when my parents became involved with the Gres Gallery in Washington; see my three-part account of this experience, posted on ROT on 7, 10, and 13 July 2018.)  Both this show and Where We Are, also at the Whitney, center on this era (though Where We Are does go back some decades further), which delighted me.

After Abstract Expressionism, a movement launched in the ’40s in which color was especially significant (the work of Mark Rothko, one of whose pieces, Four Darks in Red, 1958, is downstairs in Where We Are, is a good example of this), broke the ground for non-figurative and non-representational painting, artists invented Pop Art, Psychedelia, Op Art, and many other styles that used bold, bright colors, often in large swaths and washes of pigment.  For the Washington Color School, color was all painting was about—there was no point to their work except to create a joyful experience of color. 

Among the artists exhibited in Spilling Over are several on whom I’ve blogged before, including Sam Gilliam (“Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011), Morris Louis (15 February 2010), Kenneth Noland (passing mention in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin”); all three are or were members of the Washington School of Color (about which I blogged on 21 September 2014).  Gilliam is the only artist from this show whose work I own; my parents’ art collection (see “A Passion for Art,” 21 November 2017) contains three of his pieces.  Larry Rivers (1923-2002) is the only artist in the show who exhibited at Gres (1960, his first solo show outside New York City). 

During the period covered by Spilling Over, artists were experimenting with many aspects of art, finding new ways to communicate through painted canvases and new styles and materials to employ.  Paint, usually unmixed and otherwise unmuted, was dripped (famously by Jackson Pollock, who’s not represented in this exhibit), poured (Morris Louis’s Gamma Delta, 1959-60), and spattered.  It was applied with a palette knife instead of a brush (Norman Carton, another mid-century artist not in Spilling Over).  The canvases were unprimed so the pigments soaked in and stained the fabric (Louis, Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction, 1968) rather than coating the surface, giving the painting a translucent quality. 

Acrylic paint arrived on the art scene during the ’60s. bringing a vast new array of colors and hues, and many artists began experimenting with this new pigment and looking for other media with different properties to work with.  Art slipped its bonds and literally and figuratively spilled off the canvas and outside the frames.  The old, established forms and norms no longer applied.  It was no longer your grandfather’s art.

Of course, the whole society was experimenting, not just in painting and sculpture, but the other arts like film, design, literature and drama, music.  All the rules were being challenged and changed: gender, race, sexuality, language, dress, and politics.  Painting was only a visual manifestation of what was happening all over the culture.  The small selection of paintings in Spilling Over are a representation of that shift, but only a small corner of it. 

Among the most significant pieces in the show is Helen Frankenthaler’s Orange Mood (1966), an acrylic on canvas with large expanses of blue, yellow, mustard, and orange.  Frankenthaler had given an important boost to color painting when she introduced Louis and Noland, who’d come up to New York to visit her studio, to her work.  This so impressed the two men that they went back to Washington and immediately began applying what they’d learned.  Louis destroyed all his work up to that point and began working in this new way, essentially starting, with Noland and a few others who joined them, the Washington Color School, a branch of Color Filed painting based in the Nation’s Capital.  (Sam Gilliam, who came to D.C. from Mississippi in 1962, is a second generation of Washington Color artists.)

Orange Mood is entirely non-figurative, an example of what became the mantra of the WCS—making art that  communicates nothing but a delight in the experience of color—but in the same gallery is Thompson’s Triumph of Bacchus (1964).  A depiction of the Roman god of wine, it was inspired by Renaissance paintings of similar subjects—except that Thompson used bolder colors for his palette.  His choices of colors are also bold—yellow people. blue horses, a yellow ram—and the artist’s friend, saxophonist Steve Lacy, called Thompson “jazz himself,” pointing out that “the way he painted was like jazz—taking liberties with colors.” 

Getting off the elevator on the eighth floor, visitors to Spilling Over are greeted with three very revealing pieces, considering the curatorial point of the show.  One is Kenneth Noland’s New Day (1967), a canvas of acrylic stripes of many vibrant colors.  (Stripes were Noland’s signature form.)  As an introduction to an exhibit about paintings in color, New Day couldn’t be more appropriate.  And as the first WSC canvas a visitor encounters, it’s a perfect example of color as pure visual stimulus.

A second painting on the wall across from the elevator is Carmen Herrera’s Blanco y Verde (1959), an almost blank canvas in white and green, as its title bluntly tells you.  Most of the painting is white, with only a small triangle of green in the center, as if demonstrating how “color” can be reduced to a minimum and still stand out.  In a display of brightly hued paintings all in brilliant colors, an almost all-white canvas is noticed. 

Not unlike Robert Reed’s Plum Nellie, Sea Stone (1972), a purple-and-white painting that Reed considered a landscape.  Across the center of the canvas is a wide wash of deep purple, swirling and eddying like an abstract rushing stream.  But right in the middle of the purple field is a white rectangle, a geometrical blank space that draws the eye even though the dominant color is churning and spinning. 

What are possibly the most seemingly conventional and least conventional entries in the exhibit are near one another in the gallery.  Sam Gilliam’s Bow Form Construction is a huge canvas that’s been stained with blue, green, blush, and maroon acrylic paint, diluted to the degree that it’s virtually transparent.  The canvas isn’t really hung, however—it’s frameless and formless, a practice Gilliam has used in many of his frequently-changing styles—but draped like some multi-colored bunting.  (Stained and draped or suspended fabric is also something this artist has done often over his career.  See my discussion of Close to Trees in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin.”)  Thomas Micchelli of Hyperallergic called Bow Form Construction a “fusion of painting and sculpture.”

Nearby is Alex Katz’s Edwin, Blue Series (1965), a portrait of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby (1903-83).  The portrait is painted on a bright blue background and both the background and the figure of Denby are flat and simplified.  Katz has cropped the side of the subject’s body on the viewer’s left as if some kind of door is blocking it and Denby is just exiting it.  If it weren’t for the flat, bright color of the background, Edwin, Blue Series could be a conventional—albeit Modernist, perhaps Expressionist—portrait.

I’d love to describe each of the paintings in Spilling Over, but even as small as this show is, that’s too much.  I’ve merely mentioned Louis’s Gamma Delta and I haven’t even done that with Emma Amos’s Baby (1966) and Kay WalkingStick’s April Contemplating May (1972), two artists who were new to me, and I regret that.  For a small show, Spilling Over was most interesting, but there’s just too much to cover here.

Short Takes: Some Art Shows

[I seem to be on something of an art jag on Rick On Theater just now (“Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait” on 15 January; “Art New York 2018” on 13 May; “Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900-1960” on 12 June), so I thought I’d dig up some comments on past art shows that are too brief to post on their own (they were parts of longer reports mostly about theater) and collect them in a “Short Takes”—something I haven’t done in a long time now—and post them for a look back.  (The dates on each section below are the dates I wrote the original report; they are not necessarily the dates of the exhibits or my visit.  Multiple dates indicate I wrote the complete report in installments.)  One of the following mini-reports is on Edward Hopper, an exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in 2008 and which I mentioned in my recent post on the Whitney Museum’s Where We Are.  Another segment below is on the Barnes Collection when it was at its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania, before it moved to Philadelphia.  I haven’t seen the collection since the move, so I don’t know if the lay-out duplicates the initial set-up, mandated by founder Albert C. Barnes, but that arrangement of the art was unique, to say the least, and I though it would be interesting to record my impressions of that peculiar display.  ~Rick]

PIERRE BONNARD: EARLY AND LATE

9 & 12 January 2003

Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (22 September 2002-19 January 2003), is interesting, but less so than its size would suggest.  It’s a big show, installed on three floors of the gallery (two flights of stairs to climb), and covers his paintings, etchings and prints, posters and illustrations, sketches, and photos.  That was part of the interesting aspect—that this artist, who really began as a dilettante, explored so many different forms of expression, including the very new technique of photography.  (The photos on display were all from around 1900—some original prints and some new prints from old negatives.) 

There were works from his earliest days right through the end of his life, but the most interesting works for me were his prints and etchings.  These were mostly small—though there was a wonderful three-panel screen (he did several screens, inspired, apparently, by the Japanese practice) of scenes from the Paris street.  Many of his prints were no more than four colors—a practice he experimented with frequently.  Bonnard (1867-1947) was also one of the first “graphic artists” and he got his professional start making advertising posters (for champagne, for instance), some of which resemble the famous theater posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.  He also did illustrations for books and was one of the very first graphic artists to use text as part of the artwork—not just the content, but the style.  Bonnard’s paintings were pretty much the least interesting part of this show. 

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THE CUBIST PAINTINGS OF DIEGO RIVERA: MEMORY, POLITICS, PLACE

11-13 May 2004

A small show, The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera: Memory, Politics, Place, was at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building (4 April-25 July 2004): an exhibit of Diego Rivera’s cubist paintings.  Rivera (1886-1957) went to Paris in the 1920s to study contemporary art on a stipend from the government from his home state in Mexico.  He was in the circle that included Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Marcel Duchamps, and others, and he began trying out all the current styles, including Cubism, for brief periods, trying to find his own voice.  None of these experiments lasted very long, and there weren’t many cubist works in the show—and most of them were interesting only as curiosities the way Picasso’s realistic works as a young artist are.  They merely contrast with the more identifiable works of the maturer artists—in Rivera’s case, the murals and Mexican history and folklore he worked with for most of his career.

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HENRI ROUSSEAU: JUNGLES IN PARIS

21-25 August 2006

On Wednesday, 16 August 2004, my mother and I went down to the East Building of the National Gallery to see Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (16 July-15 October 2006).  Rousseau (1844-1910) isn’t among my favorite artists; in fact, I find his paintings curious without being really compelling.  After reading the Washington Post review, however, I found him an interesting socio-artistic phenomenon.  First, he was unschooled as an artist.  He was a weekend duffer, so to speak, until he retired from his job as a customs clerk at 49—he was known in the art world as Le Douanier (the customs agent)—when he took up painting full time.  His aim was to be accepted by the Paris art establishment, which was committed to Realism, but he failed completely. 

He was, however, embraced by the avant garde, the upstart Impressionists and their literary confrères (Guillaume Apollinaire; Alfred Jarry, who gave him his nickname).  Picasso bought several of Rousseau’s paintings, as did others among the new, young artists and writers—whom Rousseau rejected.  (He found Matisse’s work “horribly ugly.”)  The irony is too much.  The fact seems to be that Rousseau really stumbled onto his naïve style and bold forms—he was trying to paint Realism and didn’t have the skill.  By sheer coincidence, he was doing naturally what the Impressionists were trying to do, and they had a fondness for “primitive” art.  They usually found this in far-off cultures like Africa, but in Rousseau, they saw their very own, homegrown primitive.  (All those jungle paintings, which were his most popular and are his most recognizable today, are the products of his imagination and his visits to natural history museums and international exhibitions or from magazine illustrations.  Rousseau never left France, and rarely left Paris.  His notion of the jungle wasn’t close to accurate—or he took tremendous liberties—since he combined images that don’t belong together, such as an American Indian fighting with a gorilla—in the rain forests of, what?  Illinois?) 

The Post even poses a provocative paradox: “Rousseau’s best paintings are undeniably great . . . .  But that begs the question of whether the man who made them was also a great artist.”  When he died penniless and was buried in a pauper’s grave, Picasso and fellow artist Robert Delaunay paid for a better plot, Apollinaire wrote a poem for the headstone, and sculptor Constantin Brancusi engraved it.  I don’t care much about his art, but Rousseau’s story is wonderful.

As part of the exhibit, the gallery is displaying many of the sources of Rousseau’s fantasies—a stuffed lion attacking an antelope from a natural history museum, illustrations in nature magazines, and so on.  Among these are two large bronze statues by Emmanuel Frémiet (described in the Post as “a hack realist”).  One of them is called Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman (1887), and that’s just what it depicts.  It looks exactly like a scene from King Kong (except that the woman is more Jane Russell than Fay Wray).  The museum labels and panels don’t say if this was in any way connected to the movie—say an inspiration for it—but you have to wonder if someone like the screenwriter or the director, whoever originally conceived of the movie, hadn’t seen the sculpture.  I mean, it’s just too exact.

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A VIEW TOWARD PARIS: THE LUCAS COLLECTION OF 19TH-CENTURY FRENCH ART

17 January 2007

Mom and I drove over to Charm City (I don’t know, either) to see an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art and got my cousin, who lives in Baltimore, to meet us there.  The show, A View Toward Paris: The Lucas Collection of 19th-Century French Art (1 October–31 December 2006), had gotten an interesting review in the Washington Post and was going to close on the last day of the year, so we went over on Thursday, 28 December 2006, on what turned out to be a beautiful afternoon. 

George A. Lucas (1824-1909) was the heir to a Baltimore papermaking fortune who made a trip to Paris in 1857 and ended up staying 52 years, until his death.  He became an art collector, both for himself and as agent for others back in the U.S (including Duncan Phillips, whose art became the basis for the Phillips Collection in Washington; William and Henry Walters, who formed the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore; and William Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C.).  Lucas was instrumental in bringing many of the late-19th-century painters on the Paris art scene to the attention of American collectors and critics.  But he had one peculiarity in retrospect (though it wouldn’t have seemed so at the time): he liked the art that everyone else liked, including the contemporary critics—the mainstream art, not the avant-garde work by the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists.  As a result, the works and artists he championed weren’t the ones that later went down in art history as the greats of the era and have emerged as the icons of modern art. 

This isn’t to say Lucas collected bad art or supported mediocre artists—they were the stars of their day, in fact, and the point of the exhibit, in a way, is a reappreciation of these neglected painters who are often totally unknown today—undeservedly so, according to Post critic Blake Gopnik.  (Gopnik points out that one artist, August Molin, “doesn’t appear once in the 32,600 pages of the Grove Dictionary of Art, and even a thorough Google search comes up with all of two hits that have anything to do with him.”  He suggests that “his impressive walk-on part in the Lucas show will get some graduate student to dig deeper.”)  Since most of the works fall into the Realism and Romanticism categories—not my favorite styles of painting—and only a few barely touch on the emerging Impressionist challenge, the medium-sized show (200 works) became a little repetitive for me, but there were certainly some charming pieces.  (Nothing for a Midnight Shopping Trip, though.) 

What’s more, a number of the artists in the exhibit were the teachers of the emerging Impressionists or had been influential on their development.  In addition, the comparison of the works in Lucas’s collection—he ended up with 300 paintings and almost 20,000 prints—with the more famous works of the late 19th century not only shows a little of the development of the groundbreaking innovation that was Impressionism but also raises your appreciation for those iconoclastic artists and their work. (Impressionism is one of my favorite styles of art.)  It wasn’t a great art exhibit, and not to my mind as interesting as the Picasso and American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City a few months ago (28 September 2006–28 January 2007), but it was more than pleasant, and had its virtues.  (One curiosity, because Lucas developed relationships with many of the artists whose works he bought, was that some of the painters presented him with their palettes—some just as they had been used for work and others with art added as a lagniappe.)

Besides the art, Mom, my cousin, and I had lunch in the museum restaurant.  And, since we were in Baltimore, I got to have crab cakes from an authentic Maryland kitchen!  Unless you’ve had crab cakes from within shouting distance of the Chesapeake, you haven’t lived!!  (If you’ve had them anywhere else, conversely, you have no idea what you’re missing.)

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THE BARNES COLLECTION (Merion, Pennsylvania)

20 August/20 September/27 September 2007

[The Barnes Collection reopened at its new building in Philadelphia on 19 May 2012.]

On my return to New York City on Friday, 17 August 2007, after a visit with my mother in Washington, Mom decided to accompany me so we could make a detour to Merion, Pennsylvania, the suburb of Philadelphia where the Barnes Collection is located (until they move to Philadelphia as they plan).  In part because of the way Albert C. Barnes set his foundation up and the restrictions he put on it in his will, this is also a confusing collection—although the quality of the art makes up some for the oddness of the display.  (I won’t go into all the peculiarities of the legal set-up—it’s been in the news for the past several years as the board has sought permission to move from Merion into Philadelphia—but he mandated that no painting could be moved, either on the walls or from the building.  This is why the courts are involved in the proposed move, which the museum’s directors feel is necessary to increase attendance and income in order to maintain the collection.) 

Barnes (1872-1951), who became wealthy from a pharmaceutical invention he made in the early 20th century, also became interested in art, especially modern art (though he also has an extensive collection of African pieces) and began collecting here and in Europe at the turn of the last century into the years before WWII.  Now, some guys who do that end up with awful pieces by some of the most famous artists of the modern canon, but Barnes had excellent taste and he has a beautiful collection of Monets, Cézannes, Prendergasts (both brothers), Modiglianis, Lipschitzes (mostly sculptures), Klees, Picassos, Rouaults, and so on. 

But the paintings are mounted on walls in no order or thematic arrangement whatsoever, and they are hung from about waist height to about 10-12 feet off the ground.  (Mother said that when she first went there years ago, they were hung all the way to the ceiling.)  They’re not labeled (though the artists’ last names are sometimes on the frames) so the only way to identify the paintings (none of the sculptures or other objects—there are some tapestries and a lot of furniture pieces—are identified at all) is to go to the small placards placed in each room.  These are a photograph of each wall (or, when the wall is long and full of art, half the wall) with each picture frame numbered.  Below the photo of the wall layout is a list with corresponding numbers that names the paintings, the artists, the dates, and the media, like the wall labels on most other museums. 

Since there are at least four different layouts in each room, and there are several copies of each placard, you have to shuffle through all of them to find the wall you want to look at, then find the next one, and so on.  Not only is this an annoying task, it’s also time-consuming; the visit to each gallery takes at least half again as long as it otherwise would.  The galleries—there are two floors of art; Barnes had 2500 pieces when he died in 1951—are also dimly lit and there are no lights on each painting.  (This is not a building converted from a residence or anything; it was built, albeit in the ’20s, to be an art gallery.)  As I said, if it weren’t for the quality of the man’s art, the Barnes would be a monumentally frustrating place to visit. 

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EDWARD HOPPER

            4 February 2008           

(21 December 2007-4 January 2008)

[I quoted from these comments in my report on the Whitney’s Where We Are.]

I’m not really a fan of Edward Hopper, but I’ll give a very brief (well, superficial anyway) run-down of the National Gallery exhibit nonetheless.  A fairly large show was at the East Building of the NGA on the Mall.  We went down to see Edward Hopper on Boxing Day, 26 December 2008, and encountered a very long line snaking around the second floor of the East Building.  The line kept growing even as we stood debating whether we should switch over to the West Building and give J. M. W. Turner a try; but fortunately, it moved quickly and we spent a pleasant-enough afternoon walking through the several galleries housing the 110 works of the show. 

Hopper (1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless.  His lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and vacant.  Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.  I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience.  He was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation. 

Hopper painted at the same time that many other American artists were turning away from figuration and experimenting with abstraction and expressionism (and, er, Abstract Expressionism), but he fiercely resisted the shift and became an icon among younger and later artists of figurative painting.  (Not surprisingly, I guess, I am a fan of abstract art; I know some commentators—not necessarily art critics, however—see that movement as a fraud on gullible viewers, arguably most famously the late Morley Safer’s “Yes . . . but Is It Art?” segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes on 19 September 1993, but I’ve always found the works exciting and moving, emotional and expressive.)  So I found the show, called simply Edward Hopper, pretty much just a curiosity; there was nothing I wanted to come back for on a Midnight Shopping Trip. 

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t learn anything, however.  The earliest works in the exhibit were etchings; I never knew Hopper did any kind of print work, and the 12 small etchings on show here, though they all displayed the same focus on empty cityscapes and lonely figures, were somehow more interesting to me than the later large oils.  (Hopper also painted watercolors in his early days.)  I will also add that there’s a strange kind of theatricality in Hopper’s paintings—not action or drama, but his interiors especially look like stage sets, a kind of set designer’s rendering. 

There’s an implied plot in some of them.  People sitting, essentially isolated even in a group, in a diner, viewed from the street through a long expanse of window (Nighthawks, 1942), make you wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street.  The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)—what’s she thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her vision?  But these are intellectual curiosities, not emotionally-engaging ones.  A Hopper play would likely be one in which people sit around speaking in low tones—but only occasionally, leaving most of the play to silence.

[I mentioned in passing a “Midnight Shopping Trip” above a couple of times.  As regular ROTters will recall, this was my mother and my private joke, used as a benchmark for art shows we liked, suggesting a return after closing to pick up the pieces we liked.]