Volume 42, Number 13 · August 10, 1995
Hopper's Polluted Silence
By John Updike
Edward Hopper and the American Imagination 22–October 15
an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June
Edward Hopper and the American Imagination
catalog of the exhibition by Deborah Lyons, by Adam D. Weinberg. edited by Julie Grau, with contributions by fourteen others
Norton/Whitney Museum of Art, 252 pp., $39.95; $25.00 (paper)
Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist
by Gail Levin
Norton/Whitney Museum of Art, 304 pp., $35.00 (paper)
Edward Hopper's New England
by Carl Little
Pomegranate Artbooks/a Chameleon book, unpaged pp., $21.95
Hopper
by Mark Strand
Ecco, 65 pp., $21.00; $12.00 (paper)
Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné
edited by Gail Levin
Norton, 1006 pp., $600.00 (three hardcover volumes and a fourth volume on CD-ROM)
The exhibition 'Edward Hopper and the American Imagination,' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, consists of two shows, really: there is a splendid one of fifty-nine of Hopper's best paintings—canvases calm, silent, stoic, luminous, classic—and then there is another, wrapped around it like an engulfing predator, meant to represent 'the American Imagination.' This nebulous excrescence can be heard, while one walks along the elegantly diagonal partitions of the third-floor exhibit space, as the unintelligible voice-over and sudden musical flare-ups of a three-screen video show relating Hopper's imagery to contemporary movies, photography, and art, and it can be read, in the form of large-writ wall mottoes from such exemplary Yankee scribes as Emerson, Frost, and E. B. White.
Review, 3285 words
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