I saw the Edward Hopper show at the Boston Museum of Fine Art yesterday afternoon. This is not what I would call a retrospective so much as a review of some of his work done in a few American locales. If you have never seen Nighthawks in person, it's there, in a room with Office At Night and New York Movie and nothing else. Those three are considered "iconic" works by Hopper, and I suppose they are, although Office At Night is over-rated, imho. The boss is disinterested in his sexy 'J-Lo from a scene in Out of Sight' secretary. Snore. Of the three, New York Movie is the most interesting. The usherette is lost in her thoughts, having seen the movie playing on the screen in the left side of the painting. It's a wonderful juxtapositioning of two versions of the fantasies we all play out in our heads.
Hopper's career came late, when he was in his late thirties, and didn't really form until he was in his forties. He made a living as an illustrator, and hated the term. Most people in the art world will tell you, privately if not publicly, that illustrators are not considered real artists. The truth is, many so-called illustrators are very fine artists indeed, and many well-known, well-heeled artistes owe their careers to a small group of critics and to snobbery. I'll leave that for another day.
There are no drawings in this show, none of the illustrations from his early career, which is a disappointment. Two notebooks in a display case are very interesting, but you really want to turn the pages and see the thumbnail drawings Hopper made of his various works that were displayed or sold. In most cases, the thumbnails are far more interesting than the oils.
The shame of Hopper's illustration career is that while he hated being an illustrator, he was a very good one. This show is weak on great oils, but heavy with excellent watercolors and etchings. The etchings are very fine, and it is regrettable to me that he gave up printmaking in the early 1920's. He was quite skilled. His watercolors are wonderful, far more textured than almost any of the oils. There is a room of work from his Gloucester years, mostly watercolors of houses (remember, he said all he ever wanted to paint was the light on the side of a house). Two works stand side-by-side, both of the same street scene in Gloucester (Prospect Street), and the oil looks like a lazy man's copy of the watercolor. I don't mean that it is flat, or lacking in detail, it is simply lacking. It has none of the atmosphere of the watercolor.
None of the early Paris paintings are in this show, but if the oils up to the early twenties that are here are any measure, we aren't missing much. It wasn't until the twenties that Hopper's paintings became his own, more than his spin on George Bellows or Robert Henri. Even so, I'm not a huge fan of his oils, especially of the female nudes. He never seemed to differentiate flesh from the walls in whatever room he was painting, and that matters, at least to me. I don't find his nudes sensual at all, or even interesting. If you've ever looked at female breasts in a work by Michaelangelo, you know what I mean. Hopper's clothed figures are far better, but they are not what interests Hopper. Even the rooms and buildings play second fiddle to the light, which is his real subject. The final piece in the show, Sun in an Empty Room, is one of the best. Simple, not grandstanding, no theatrics, not trying to be something it isn't. It is a painting of light on a wall in a room, and that's enough.
About halfway through the show, I was struck by a thought of Hopper living in today's world. I looked at Early Sunday Morning and couldn't help but think how much he would love Google's Street View. It would be, so to speak, right up Hopper's street.
