The Edward Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is worth seeing. I enjoy the realism of Hopper, Caravaggio and Vermeer and the Dutch Masters. This may qualify me for philistinism in certain abstract circles, but I appreciate Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, too. Like politics, art diminishes when it is reduced to warring camps.
Hopper's later work reminds me of simple elegance of, say, Curt Swan's comic-book panels for National Periodicals in the 1960s. I guess it's a preference that helped steered me to a love of photojournalism 30 years ago. Even Hopper's fondness for acid yellows, burnt oranges and brick red colors reinforces this familiar warmth and depth.
We like to think of the frozen moments captured in Hopper's Automat (1927) or Chop Suey (1929), two of my favorites (below), as telling a story. And yet the MFA exhibitors suggest instead that, "He does not tell stories; he provides moments within them." Yes, why not? After all, we like to consider whether the two women in Chop Suey had just arrived or were ready to leave the restaurant. And why as John Updike famously commented did they both appear to be listening? And what about that seemingly lonely woman in Automat? Did she already eat and was that a last or first sip of coffee she was about to take? Hey, you don't even know she's in an old automat except for the title of the work. What are the stories behind these glimpses?
As I conjured my own stories about the lives of Hopper's subjects, I returned home to read a story about a new University of Maryland opera, Later That Same Evening. It seems that Maryland has teamed with the National Gallery of Art to bring subjects from five Hopper paintings to life and actually have some of them interact in story lines that start from the glimpse captured in each work, including Automat.
I stopped marveling about the constant serendipity of life many years ago and simply rejoice in its own delicious narrative.
Hopper's later work reminds me of simple elegance of, say, Curt Swan's comic-book panels for National Periodicals in the 1960s. I guess it's a preference that helped steered me to a love of photojournalism 30 years ago. Even Hopper's fondness for acid yellows, burnt oranges and brick red colors reinforces this familiar warmth and depth.
We like to think of the frozen moments captured in Hopper's Automat (1927) or Chop Suey (1929), two of my favorites (below), as telling a story. And yet the MFA exhibitors suggest instead that, "He does not tell stories; he provides moments within them." Yes, why not? After all, we like to consider whether the two women in Chop Suey had just arrived or were ready to leave the restaurant. And why as John Updike famously commented did they both appear to be listening? And what about that seemingly lonely woman in Automat? Did she already eat and was that a last or first sip of coffee she was about to take? Hey, you don't even know she's in an old automat except for the title of the work. What are the stories behind these glimpses?
As I conjured my own stories about the lives of Hopper's subjects, I returned home to read a story about a new University of Maryland opera, Later That Same Evening. It seems that Maryland has teamed with the National Gallery of Art to bring subjects from five Hopper paintings to life and actually have some of them interact in story lines that start from the glimpse captured in each work, including Automat.
I stopped marveling about the constant serendipity of life many years ago and simply rejoice in its own delicious narrative.