Art: The Realist at the Frontiers

In New York, a definitive Edward Hopper show

The Edward Hopper retrospective that opened last week at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art may well be the only incontestably great museum exhibition of work by an American artist in the past decade. The word great is crippled by hype these days, and perhaps it merely clouds what it seeks to praise; yet the qualities it suggests—patient, lucid development; the transcendence of mere talent; richness and density of meaning; and a deep sense of moral dignity in the artist's refraction of his own culture—are so evident in Hopper that no other word will really do. The show consists of nearly 400 paintings and drawings assembled by Gail Levin, who is curator of the Whitney's permanent Hopper collection. She has done so well that, without comparing Hopper to Cézanne as an artist, one may say that this exhibition is to the Whitney what the Cézanne show of 1977 was to the Museum of Modern Art: a fulfillment of the museum's very purpose, carried out at an exemplary level of curatorial skill and corporate support.

Hopper was 84 when he died in 1967, and to the end of his life he remained a somewhat misunderstood figure. The problem was not lack of fame or acceptance; he had plenty of both, at least in the U.S., and even the abstract painters (whose work he tended to see as a threat) respected his exceptional formal gifts. Rather, the misunderstanding lay in the nature of Hopper's Americanness.

Hopper belonged to the first generation of artists whose work voted for secession from Paris. In 1927 he stated his belief that "now or in the near future"—the caution was typical of the man—"American art should be weaned from its French mother." But by the end of the '30s, his aching, rigorous vision of American social isolation, the vacant brownstone windows and blowing curtains, the solitary coffee drinkers, the aloof houses robed in chalky light against the sky, had been assimilated, against his will, into something much coarser: the kill-Paris chauvinism of the "American Scene" painters, so that to inattentive critics it seemed all wrapped in the same nationalistic package.

"The thing that makes me so mad is the 'American Scene' business," Hopper told an interviewer in 1964. "I never tried to do the American scene as Benton and Curry and the Midwestern painters did. I think the American Scene painters caricatured America. I always wanted to do myself." Yet the idea that he was a cultural nationalist lingers to this day, and one still reads in current histories of American art such remarks as, "For Hopper, contact with Europe meant little, even though he visited Paris three times between 1906 and 1910."