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...