A POET OF PLACES

...Writing in 1957, James Thrall Sobey agreed, with the reservation that Hopper's work lacked ominousness and seldom hinted "at any such metaphysical allusion...

...As far as I know, the role of the artist's wife in the production of his work has not yet been studied...

...The painter-writer Guy Pene du Bois commented on the "definite static quality" of his pictures, "a stillness which has its counterpart in the calm preceding the storm...

...Still, his figures at night in shadowy parks and streets are full of mystery...

...Most often he treated vegetation as if it were hair on the human head-A lesser form reiterating the basic shape of the skull...

...When he came home from Europe for the last time in 1910, Hopper was overwhelmed by what he called the "hideous beauty" of the native scene...

...Critics, even when they could not be encouraging, seem to have been always gentlemanly, skating in a stately way over the surface of art...

...While he is many psychological as well as technical miles from the 19th-century landscapists, he may have had more than a streak of the early settler, for whom the land was as much an enemy as the Indians...

...He revealed a natural affinity for watercolor, another new medium for him, one that clearly released a hidden energy and in turn affected his oil painting...

...Of course, the medium itself tends to romanticize work done in it...

...But no particular system was evident in the selection-consisting of 53 drawings, etchings, watercolors, and oils-though some emphasis was placed on the initial 20 years of Hopper's career...

...Several pictures in the show not only confirmed this theory but took it a step further...

...It was 1920 before Hopper was able to mount a show of his Paris oils, at the Whitney Studio Club...

...best of all, scenes involving human works...

...Nevertheless, Hopper could not escape the ambience of Paris itself, especially its light, a revelation to which most of the early oils in the show testified...

...A rock standing in a desert landscape, for example, casts not a purple shadow on the yellow sand but a greenish one...

...Frugality, while hardly a necessity after Hopper achieved fame, was a compulsion with them, whether in their extremely simple meals, unchanging household furnishings, or plain and sensible clothes...

...Notwithstanding his later denial that he ever gave up, he painted little during the teens, and possibly in a spirit of desperation he turned for a while to etching...

...In later life he was to comment on the "papery" quality of Cezanne's work...

...Hopper was a very taciturn man to begin with, and talking with him could be, as his wife said, "just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn't thump when it hits bottom...

...Hopper was in his early 20s when he journeyed to Paris, yet he was almost perversely uninterested in the Post-Impressionism that was absorbing other young aspirants...

...They lived and painted together until Hopper's death in 1967, followed by hers less than a year later...

...Nineteen Living Americans, in 1929, and had his first retrospective there in 1933 at the age of 51...

...Lloyd Goodrich, Hopper's biographer, has observed that he was a "masculine" painter of nature, preferring structurally interesting landscapes and...

...She was a Henri student too, but after her husband's time...

...An inseparable couple, they were reasonably sociable and took long painting trips around the country...

...To anyone unfamiliar with the grim majesty of this artist's major work, he must have seemed merely a competent painter in transition from a 19th-century French style to something more personal and American...

...The quality and scope of the works . . . place [Hopper] in the very forefront of American painters," said the Arts reviewer of 1929...

...Presumably part of the financial community's attempt to warm up its image, the museum-ette is situated on the mezzanine plaza of what is known as the Uris Building and can be reached by an escalator that runs in from the sidewalk...

...For a man who painted so much of nature, Hopper seems to have had little affection for it...

...His country houses, like the white one in Cape Cod Sunset (1934), are usually bastions of humanity surrounded by an alien presence...

...Hopper's preeminence was surely inevitable, yet forces were at work in America that proved helpful...

...Some of the pieces at the Downtown Whitney displayed such a Fauve-like brightness that I had to look twice to assure myself he had not resorted to the complementary palette...

...Hopper's The House by the Railroad Tracks-A donation of the collector Stephen Clark -Also became moma's very first possession...

...Most of their time, however, was spent working and reading, and they divided the year between their small apartment in Washington Square and a house on Cape Cod...

...When it is, the couple's relationship will doubtless turn out to have been pretty run-of-the-mill...

...To judge from the little that has been reported of it, their relationship was somewhat ingrown...

...Just the same, Hopper's strangeness-his surreal-ness-was already becoming apparent to the audience...

...If his impressionistic brushstroke was inherited from his teacher, the tasteful greens, grays, pinks, and ochers were his enthusiastic response to the city, and they in no way interfered with his innate feelings for architectural form...

...These striking prints aroused the first critical interest in him, but m retrospect they appear to have been the backward step taken for the greater leap forward...

...Though the Whitney was eventually to be Hopper's "home," he participated in the new museum's second show of native artists...

...To prevent it from being brought out, the artist's wife for unknown reasons said she had destroyed it...

...Picked at random, these observations pinpoint, I think, the quality that has kept Hopper's work alive through an incredibly convulsed period in art...

...And the real turning point of his life is considered to have been the exhibition of watercolors he had four years later at the Rehn Gallery, which became his lifelong dealer...

...The absence of tenderness is more noticeable in Hopper's handling of living things than in the way he treats a cornice, a shadowed window, a lighthouse, or a locomotive...

...An American scene painter who detested that designation, he remains unobscured by the radical developments that made America a world power...

...One of its attractions this summer was a small exhibit of pictures from the Edward Hopper bequest, first shown at the uptown Whitney in 1971...

...In those days, art criticism was a more cheerful, less ravenous enterprise...

...Later on, Goodrich likened Hopper to de Chirico for his "poetry of buildings and places...

...Vaudevillian as this marriage appears to have been-the two didn't hesitate to squabble publicly and with hair-raising candor-it would be a mistake to see the quality of despair in Hopper's work as a reflection of his domestic life...

...Hopper's 20th century turns out, after all, to be the whole world's...

...Nonetheless, she did not make things any easier by constantly commandeering the conversation and, like a bird distracting a predator's attention from its nest, employing all manner of diversionary tactics...

...Attractive and efficient as his Parisian pictures are, they struck the American audience of the time as rather stark and angular, and there followed on Hopper's return to the States a period of discouragement, exacerbated by his having to work as a commercial artist...

...By 1971, the poet Mark Strand, having examined the Whitney bequest show, found "an oddness, a disturbing quiet, a sense of being in a room with a man who insists on being with us, but always with his back turned...

...Aside from the growing national self-awareness of the '20s and 30's, to which he and others addressed themselves, consciously or not, the inauguration of the Museum of Modern Art was a boost...

...For the time being, Jo Hopper seems to be going down in history as a pain in the neck...

...He applied himself instead to the older masters he had already encountered under the aegis of his teacher, Robert Henri-manet, Courbet, Daumier, et al...

...Any contact with her husband had to include her, and conversation was by all accounts difficult...

...The picture was later found in the Hopper bequest, along with a portrait she had done of him...

...The characterless grove of trees that turns up in many of his canvases invariably gives the impression of being about to close in on the lonely outpost...

...In a memorable interview done for Art in America a few years ago, the critic Brian O'Doherty told of an exchange over a Hopper self-portrait...

...His canvases can appear quite unsophisticated, their drawing primitive and their colors anywhere from dreary to gaudy...

...he even manages to make a house in the noonday sun look haunted...

...He went on to itemize this, not as a violation of the countryside, but in terms of the architecture's confusion of styles and the ineptness of its planning...

...The year 1924 was marked also by the artist's marriage to losephine Nivison...

...Admittedly, not enough is yet known to form anything other than the most tentative opinions, but his could well have been the kind of sensibility for which bleakness was the only reliable, inarguable truth in life...

...Despite being intrinsically American, they speak not of the peppy, confident side of the national persona, but of the underlying melancholy and boredom it so vociferously tries to deny in all its pragmatic activities...