"Final Cut. Edward Hopper" by Eric Mircher

[One of the big blockbuster exhibitions in Paris in the Fall of 2012 was the large career retrospective of Edward Hopper at the Grand Palais.  I wrote about this in a post from that time called, "Not so sure, as if."  This is the third of my translations of Eric Mircher's articles.  Please read this introductory post for the background behind this collaboration.]

It is the blockbuster exhibition of the winter season in Paris with a dazzling 600,000 tickets sold since it opened in early October at the Grand Palais.  It has been so successful that the museum has decided to give it an extra weekend where the exhibition will be open to the public day and night, 68 hours straight.  A big retrospective of this sort has never had such a massive attendance and it is not bragging to say that the French museums have a remarkable track record in putting together excellent museum retrospectives, but perhaps they do too much . . .

We'll ignore the abundance of what appears to be traveling clubs that appear to make up the majority of those visiting the show.  These appear to be large groups of  women of a certain age, with their guides who speak softly into a microphone, the commentary directly relayed to the headphones of the members of the club.  One is no longer able to eavesdrop or overhear tidbits of information about the work on display but despite feeling like a solitary traveler in a deaf and overpopulated land, the benefit of relative silence is welcome.

We will also ignore the certain aggravation due to the tides of visitors that cling to the wallcard of each painting, making different comments while brushing you aside as if one were in a supermarket.  His retrospective is a big deaf and brawling affair and this would no doubt have surprised Hopper himself, 50 years after his death.

Instead, we will speak of the curation itself and its desire to show the work of the master in extenso, a bit tiresome in its will to trace all that influenced Hopper and all those that he influenced, from Paris through to the United States.  Too much becoming a bad thing.  There are rooms with work of Robert Henri, with whom Hopper studied in New York, with paintings by Marquet, Degas, and Vallotton, which all without a doubt left their mark on the young Hopper during his stays in Paris, the Mecca of art at the turn of the twentieth century until 1945.  This in itself is not a bad thing as there is a certain pleasure in seeing the work of these excellent painters.  However, one is forced to go through rooms filled with the work of contemporary artists who are seen to have been influenced by Hopper himself.  With this, one feels that some of the air in the sails of the show is lost.  This recent trend in curation where retrospectives will include works of contemporary artists in order to give the show a boost, in this instance, seems to have reached its limit and borders on the ridiculous.

All these fillers were erhaps needed because Hopper's artistic production was not voluminous, having painted just around 100 canvases during a career that spanned 50 years.  With this output no doubt leading to the limited number of canvases one could bring together, the retrospective included many watercolor studies, often banal (even to Hopper himself, as he would at his maturity paint directly on his canvases straight from the motif), and many sketches and illustrations.  They do show the long path he took to reach maturity as a painter.  It is true that Hopper had a late career.  He needed time to find his subject matter, and time to find a way to paint this, his mature style being so tied in to his personality.  He needed time to mature, and it was around the age of 48 that the horizons opened up for him and that Hopper as an artist found growing recognition.  This recognition is secure.

The museums in Paris do not have any Hoppers but every Parisian will have seen a reproduction of one of his paintings, everywhere, either in the spambox or on a poster.  “Nighthawks” has become an image of our collective subconscious.  This painting is also the anchor of the  retrospective at the Grand Palais.  This woman with her arms folded on the bar, surrounded in the solitude of the night by other bar patrons.  The barman serving drinks to this isolated group of solitary people.  The large glass panes of the facade allows one to see the interior of the diner and the empty deserted streets outside it.  Hopper's connection with cinema is clearly seen here.  He achieves a balance of adapting the lessons he learned in Paris to the light and space of America.  That is his genius and his achievement.  All of a sudden, the skies become a raw cerulean blue , far from the low gray skies of Paris that he painted, and the architecture of this expanding American economy in full bull-market invades his canvases, framing it and giving it the proportions of the New Athens that is New York.  There is spectacle everywhere, social life comes into play, and with it, eroticism.  Strangely, in his canvases of New York, despite all this underlying exuberance of city life, the figures are walled-in by questions and by silences.  It is as if the modern comforts of city living adds to its solitude a dimension of cruelty.

To see these canvases in person, for a Parisian, is to see images that have been inscribed into our collective memories.  To see first hand some of the paintings in the retrospective at the Grand Palais are worth all the inconvenience of the blockbuster show, and that is a lot.  

• Article written by Eric Mircher
• (Translated from French by Roy Forget)