EDWARD HOPPER DIED in 1967, nearly 30 years ago, but he remains one of those artists whose work--no matter how familiar and often reproduced it has become--comes up fresh whenever you see it. This diffident son of a Nyack, New York, dry-goods merchant had a long working life, almost all of it in America, and a sober style, some of which came from France and particularly from Manet and Daumier. One of his few public utterances--in 1927, to the effect that "now or in the near future, American art should be weaned from its French mother"--used to be taken by cultural America-firsters as a manifesto of secession, but it wasn't. He knew that real originality is made, not born; that it doesn't appear in spasms and tics but rather in a long digestive process, modified by anxiety. And he was a ruminator: placid, sometimes, on the surface, but an artist of incalculably deep feeling. Along with Jackson Pollock, his polar opposite in every way, he was probably the most original American painter of the 20th century.
The 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 just right.
Instead of the usual scholarly catalog, the museum has opted for a collection of texts, poems and stories by (mostly American) writers, ranging from Paul Auster to very early Norman Mailer, from Ann Lauterbach to William Kennedy. 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's peasant with a hoe, raking grass outside his house in the sunlight, not hewing at the coal face in darkness. No hints of class conflict intrude on Hopper's vision of American society, which he painted one isolated person at a time.