Fine Art Friday

"Office at Night" (1940)
Edward Hopper, American (1882-1967)

From "The quiet American" (Chicago Sun-Times, February 15, 2008):

"The beauty of Hopper's work is that he's both a realist and a modernist, using reality but paring it down to its basic geometry," Barter says. "There's never anything extraneous. He's interested in how light defines a subject, how it creates mood, but I don't think he's interested in narrative. When he looks at a couple through a window [as in 'Room in New York'], there's certainly a sense of cinema there, but it's more like a frozen movie still -- a random moment that's plucked out. I don't think he cares a bit about what happens next."

Perhaps. But a surprising number of Hopper's greatest paintings, from "Room in New York" to "Nighthawks," show couples intensely ignoring each other -- accumulating into a kind of ongoing narrative about the difficulty of human connection, especially between men and women. Read that way, they amount to one of the most harrowing portraits of marriage to be found in modern art.

In Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, author Gail Levin sees many of Hopper's paintings as rooted in the artist's love-hate relationship with his wife, Josephine. It was a study of opposites who stayed together for decades but didn't always attract: Jo Hopper was a vivacious extrovert, social and ambitious, a skilled if never visionary painter stuck in her husband's shadow; Edward Hopper was a dour introvert, taciturn and solitary, a great artist who tended to dismiss his wife's artistic ambitions. Not unexpectedly, their relationship was often fraught with tension that occasionally burst into verbal and even physical violence.

I had seen (and coveted) the Levin bio when we visited the museum shop after our last trip to the Art Institute. It's now on one of my towering TBR piles.

You'll find:

■ interesting commentary on the featured painting here;

■ more about the Hopper exhibit here;

■ an 1987 NYT article about the Hoppers here; and

■ a Hopper bio and gallery of images here.