During the frantic rat-race of midterm work, a two and a halfhour trip to Boston might sound overwhelming, but spending an afternoon away from Hanover has never looked better than Hopper's solitary lighthouses or darkened city streets.
Hopper, an American icon whose work has been irresistible to all divisions of society throughout the 20th century, paints with simplistic realism. He chooses subjects, not for their glamour or stunning allure, but for the fragile stream of light that passes a geometric street corner or a bold hillside. Hopper's natural incliniation towards 'courageous beauty', which takes the form of a storefront, a light house or a road receding into the distance, evokes the word "honesty" to onlookers who pass by each work.
What's most impressive about Hopper's skill is his ability to capture the lonely realism of middle-class America and the character of what goes unnoticed. Capturing an era between wars, Hopper paints human emotion in its truest form. In his New York City classics like "Nighthawks" and "Chop Suey," visitors experience a sober stillness rarely seen on city streets today.
In conjunction with America breaking the puritanical roots of its history, Hopper defies cultural taboos in works like "Summer Interior" and "Drugstore" -- the former depicting a young girl, dejected and exposed on her bedroom floor, and the latter being a drugstore displaying a billboard that reads "Ex-Lax" in bold.
Though the exhibit crowd can become daunting and obtrusive on a Saturday afternoon, the work promotes a silent eeriness when peering into the private stills of another's life, which Hopper so successfully exposes in much of his work. Rambling from room to room, the viewer feels almost embarrassed, caught in the intrusive act of spying through glass windows and open doors -- a signature theme. Each image begs to tell a story, but the curator of Boston's exhibit warns us not to put too much stock into any one reading.
"They are narrative works, in the sense that they seem to capture a moment in a story, but Hopper almost never reveals what the story is, what has already occurred, or what will happen. He does not tell stories; he provides moments within them," reads a sign on the exhibit wall.
Hopper never entertains us with drama or adventure but is more concerned with evening light, filtered through Venetian blinds and cast across stark rooms where lonely families dine in silence, precisely placed at a distance from each other. This awkward isolation appears in many of Hopper's scenes, evoking the pathos of his characters' despondent lives.
Like time flying by his motionless frames, Hopper saw the ephemeral flux of the avant-garde as surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art and other movements elapsed during the 20th century. Though he was a contemporary of artists like Warhol, Rothko and Pollack, Hopper remained faithful to his simplistic realism, disregarding the trappings of popular demand.
Defining Hopper's career, a sign on the exhibit wall reads, "Austere, empty yet not bleak, and with the absence of almost all pictoral motifs, except light -- valedictory."
Passing through the rooms of this exhibit, we come to understand how Hopper transformed the ordinary object, the mundane form and the commonplace image into what we view on his canvas as the extraordinary.
