Art:

...only now it is the urban that dominates nature...

...George Bellows's lower East Side, John Sloan's crowded Fifth Avenue, Reginald Marsh's subway riders have no true equivalent in -Hopper's work...

...The Hopper that Levin's book and the Whitney show reveal is, however, a man whose affinities with the urban artists of his time do not begin to explain his originality...

...For Hopper, this sense of the potential timelessness in the man-made is apparent even before we come to his urban masterpieces...

...History has been Hopper's enemy just as it was the enemy of the landscape artists of the nineteenth century, who did their best work at a time when the destruction of the American wilderness was beginning...

...Nothing is out of place here, and when we follow the light from the diner back into the deserted streets, we see that, while the city it spills into is dark, it is not menacing...

...For what Hopper's urban classicism embodies is not a sentimental aesthetic but a vision of the city in which order is a matter of clarity plus humanness of scale...

...Cutting across Hopper's canvas and separating foreground from middleground are rail-rpad tracks that by conventional logic ought to represent an intrusion on the scene...

...Take away the tracks, and we would still have a compelling landscape, but not a sunset that dominated foreground and middleground so completely nor a world in which the man-made had such visual power...

...Hopper's affirmation of the city feels dated...

...Yet Hopper's urban classicism is no more to be dismissed than the pastoralism of a century before...

...In Early Sunday Morning, originally titled Seventh Avenue Shops, a row of flat, two-story buildings with their evenly-spaced windows is all Hopper has given himself to work with, but here, too, less is more...

...Order is everywhere...

...A year later in Early Sunday Morning we find these same stylistic principles at the center of Hopper's work...

...We do not need nature to redeem the stillness of this view of Seventh Avenue...

...and because the buildings run to the edge of the canvas (are cropped rather than come to an end) our attention is drawn beyond the borders of the picture...

...We do not trust his argument from design...

...The painting itself is dominated by a sunset as awesome as that of Frederic Church's Twilight in the Wilderness of a century before, but what gives Railroad Sunset its...

...Yet when we look closely at Nighthawks, we find that neither Hopper's diner nor his nighthawks represents anything so morbid...

...For Hopper, the city-minus a covert theology on his part-is what nature was to the landscape artists of the nineteenth century: a holy text...

...At this point it does not matter that the only signs of nature are a thin, blue horizon line and the bright, early morning sun...

...The subject of Nighthawks, an all-night diner in which a lone counterman and his three customers seem caught up in their separate worlds, is one that has prompted Hopper's critics to categorize him as an artist of the desolate...

...The evening light glints off the steel rails with a brightness no natural object could convey, and the rails in turn allow Hopper to structure his painting in terms of receding horizontal bands...

...The enframing darkness that borders the pictures leads us to the windows that set off the interior space of the diner, and from there we move to the long triangular counter around which the diner's three customers sit...

...Norton, $35) go a long way towards explaining why Hopper has so successfully withstood this century's shifting tastes in art...

...They have not been robbed of their identity by an oppressive city...

...We see it as early as 1929 in his famous Railroad Sunset...

...Once again, it is solitude, not isolation, that Hopper evokes, and what is brought home is the permanence and symmetry that underlie his New York...

...It is its stillness and harmonies that fascinate him, and in emphasizing the city's special light, its repeated geometric forms, its horizontality, Hopper seeks to capture the ways its man-made forms carry with them a permanence as significant as anything in nature...

...He does not paint the city in order to capture its dynamism or express his sympathy for the poor...

...Although the faces of the nighthawks are lacking in detail, they are by no means prototypes of the featureless mannequins of George Segal's The Diner...

...The diner is a comforting source of light (we do not see a light bulb any more than we see the sun in a luminist painting), and in a darkened city, the diner provides room for contact without the requirements of intimacy...

...That is not, however, a question Hopper leaves in doubt, and in his 1942 masterpiece, Nighthawks, we see his urban aesthetic at its fullest...

...When we think of Edward Hopper, we tend to think of an artist whose major work represents the culmination of an "American realism" that has its origins in Robert Henri and the Ash Can school...

...Yet the opposite is the case...

...The strong horizontal lines of the buildings, the repetition of windows and storefronts moves the eye laterally across the picture, as Lloyd Goodrich, one of Hopper's earliest admirers, has pointed out...

...The railroad tracks do not separate the natural from the unnatural nor isolate the sunset from the rest of the picture...

...Gail Levin is correct when she writes in her Edward Hopper that his paintings "do not intend to be just descriptive or topical, but aspire to the universal...

...The sidewalks are free from litter, and the surrounding buildings (virtual duplicates of the stores in Early Sunday Morning) also convey a sense of order...

...NICOLAUS MILLSOLAUS MILLS...

...More life-traffic, even a small crowd-would in fact violate the solidity and sense of proportion Hopper's starkness conveys...

...In 1981 that seems particularly hard to justify, but the current Hopper retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, which after a European tour will travel to Chicago and San Francisco, and Gail Levin's new Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist (W.W...

...What we are seeing, we are implicitly reminded, is part of a larger scene, part of a vast city...

...From the vantage point of 1981 this vision of New York is, it goes without saying, hard to accept...

...What the nighthawks have in common is ease with their surrounding...

...We are not cramped for space nor bored by the sameness of what we are shown...

...In its concentrated modesty Early Sunday Morning is the quintessential Hopper cityscape...

...unique power is the degree to which it builds on the compatibility of nature and the man-made...

...Instead they emphasize the horizontal perspective that Hopper achieves with his red-streaked sunset and elongated clouds...

...In his vision of city life-specifically New York-Hopper seems as far from the landscape and genre painters of the nineteenth century as the abstract expressionists who came to rule American art while his career was still at its peak...

...AH that is missing from Early Sunday Morning is an indication of whether these same aesthetic judgments could be made in the absence of any hint of nature...

...They show no signs of fear, and when we look more closely at Nighthawks, we see why...

...The lack of detail that so often characterizes his realism, his insistence on painting parts of the city in which the horizontal is more important than the vertical, his fondness for soft rather than harsh light run counter to our image of current New York and the complex view of the city the photo-realist painters of the last decade offer...