An American Vision

...Without investing it with false heroics or inappropriate rhetoric, Hopper raised this imagery to the level of poetry where it stands free of both easy sentiment and facile historical encumbrances...

...Often it means only that a lucky formula was hit upon early in a career which was thereafter sustained by a ready audience...

...But from the '20s onward, he deliberately and painstakingly expunged this alien elegance in the interests of a native subject-matter —and a native emotion—which the prevailing Gallic pastiche could hardly accommodate...

...Between an artist like Richard Diebenkorn, the doyen of West Coast figurative painters, and Hopper, there exist some remarkable affinities of method and motif...

...Thus, while figures are not infrequent in Hopper's pictures, they are almost never "characters" or personalities...

...In the decade following World War I, Hopper settled on a vein of imagery which has been his special glory ever since...

...Whether or not this optimistic —in my view, much too optimistic —view of Hopper's relevance to the present scene turns out to be correct, his place in American art history looks secure...

...Their presence sharpens but does not itself create the prevailing mood of Hopper's world, as one can see easily enough in those pictures—among them, Hopper's best—in which the atmosphere of alienation and ennui dramatically persists even though there are no figures at all to be seen...

...Details are minimized and broad optical contrasts boldly emphasized in order to secure a maximum visual power from a relatively few pictorial elements...

...The mode he practiced could very easily have degenerated, as it did with so many of his contemporaries, into something utterly parochial and provincial...

...Hopper mastered this French manner very early, as the succulent surfaces of two pictures at the Whitney—Le Pavillon de Flore, Paris and Le Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris (both 1909)—make unmistakably clear...

...the white clapboard houses and fantastic 19th-century mansions of New England, with their peculiar geometry of mansard roofs and dormer windows—which are now among the standard visual archetypes of our native imagination...

...In New York, too, especially among painters who have begun to operate, albeit tentatively, under the banner of a self-proclaimed "Realism,' one hears Hopper spoken of in the present tense—as an artist whose practice may just possibly belong to the future as much as to the past...

...It arrives, moreover, at a moment when Hopper's particular loyalties as an artist—his abiding interest in the visual surface of American life, and his canny use of that surface for expressive purposes that are at once rigorously formal and delicately poetic—are being re-examined by some interesting younger artists for whom the abstract and symbolic styles of recent years have worn thin...

...And it is this same luminist rigor, together with his gift for a stark pictorial geometry which never engulfs its themes but, on the contrary, delivers them to the eye with a beguiling and affecting modesty, that separates Hopper's painting from the multitude of inferior artists who essayed similar American subjects in the '20s and '30s...

...Among the latter are the rarely seen etchings Hopper produced in 1915-1918 when he was doing very little painting...

...His art continues the line of Eakins and Homer, and does so under conditions, esthetic and otherwise, that have not been conducive to so forthright a confrontation of American experience...

...Yet in the case of Hopper, whose work is certainly not lacking in formulas and repetitions, this classic status has been well-earned, and looks assured for the future...

...In Diebenkorn, too, figures are often present but only as pictorial fixtures, never as clearly particularized personalities...

...They are never portraits of specific individuals who might interest us, even visually, apart from their pictorial roles...

...Their pictorial function is to convey an emotion rather than a "biography," and this is a function which, given the unity of Hopper's style, they can discharge only by becoming fixtures in an environment they never dominate...

...He approaches the composition of a painting rather as a theatrical director might set the scene of a play...

...It is a quality the artist has consciously pursued...

...The exhibition—184 works in all —thus constitutes the strongest possible showing of an artist who has worked slowly but steadily for nearly 60 years, and is, incidentally, one of the most impressive events ever staged at the Whitney...

...Hopper's figures are mainly types rather than persons...

...Diebenkorn revives the bravura effects Hopper long ago abandoned, for the Abstract Expressionist movement, in which Diebenkorn made his debut, gave special priority to such surface dynamism...

...By exerting an incomparably greater visual pressure on the materials of anecdote, Hopper's art transcends the limits of pictorial story-telling without repudiating the intrinsic human interest which such story-telling still holds even for the sophisticated public...

...But when one encounters his pictures elsewhere, particularly in those large surveys of contemporary American art—mixtures of fireworks and firesales—which are among the minor afflictions of our cultural life, one has the exhilarating sensation of meeting an artist who knows his own mind, who sees the world with his own eye...

...Those dazzling bravura flourishes that were once the standard export of French painting and that, in Hopper's youth, were still the distinguishing marks of high style among his ambitious coevals, are nowhere to be found in his own mature art...

...Not the least of Hopper's distinctions is the firm will with which he has sustained and purified his vision in the face of so many countervailing currents...

...But in the new synthesis which Diebenkorn—and the host of younger artists he has influenced— aspires to, Hopper's characteristic way of conceiving a picture plays a role, notwithstanding the distance that separates Hopper from his younger contemporaries in other respects...

...Nighthawks (1942), from the Art Institute of Chicago...

...The current retrospective exhibition of his work at the Whitney Museum confirms him as an artist of unique, if narrow, vision—a vision which bequeaths little to the esthetics of painting but which nonetheless penetrates American experience with a particularly incisive eye...

...Recognizably American in its architectural and landscape subjects and in the character of its urban desolation, this imagery has established a repertory of scenes and motifs—the lonely, nocturnal glimpses of nearly deserted restaurants, theaters, and hotel rooms...

...The specific mise en scène is selected—the lunch counter or filling station late at night, the hotel room early in the morning, the many-angled clapboard structure in the afternoon sun—and is then drawn in such a way that the crux of the pictorial drama consists almost entirely of the play of light and shadow in the scene depicted...

...Like Hopper, Diebenkorn projects an imagery—both interiors and landscapes—in which the formal, quasigeometrical division of space is the dominant motif...

...The history of American art is strewn with the corpses of artists whose success, won through the clever and persistent rehearsal of a single theme, masks a terrible paucity of energy and ideas...

...Thus, what a decade ago would have been a largely historical exhibition, inspiring respect, no doubt, but having little relation to what most painters were immediately concerned with, takes on in the present context a more compelling relevance...

...and a dozen or more nearly perfect watercolors of New England houses...

...Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947), from the Butler Institute...

...Among the former are Gas (1940) and New York Movie (1939), both owned by the Museum of Modern Art...

...At the center of this style is an obsession with light—the natural light of the sun as it defines the broad planes and gee-gaw oddities of old houses, and the cold, artificial light of the modern city as it isolates moments of boredom, loneliness, and private ennui...

...It is Hopper's skill in shifting the center of expressive gravity away from the sheerly anecdotal and onto this more purely visual drama of light and shadow that keeps his art from falling into literary theatricalism...

...To effect so confident a transmutation of commonplace materials, Hopper developed a style remarkably dry, dispassionate, and plain-spoken in its visual effects...

...At the Whitney, where his assembled life's work creates a complete world of its own, one might be tempted to take this exemplary steadiness for granted...

...The Americanness of Hopper's art is by no means fortuitous...

...The exhibition at the Whitney, covering the period 1906-1963 and consisting of paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings, brings us many of Hopper's most famous works together with some—especially the prints and drawings— that are relatively unfamiliar even to Hopper enthusiasts...

...Parker Tyler once spoke of Hopper's method as "alienation by light," and it is indeed this obsession—and his characteristic ways of accommodating it to the diversity of his subjects—which confers a vivid consistency on everything Hopper has produced in the last four decades...

...And it is not only on the West Coast that one can detect a new affinity for Hopper's style...