This weekend, I plan to attend the new, mammoth Edward Hopper exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I’ll be going with friends—which may not be entirely apt, given the common image of Hopper as American painting’s poet laureate of loneliness. To me, the image seems accurate enough: Hopper imparts mystery and even a sense of chic to the fact of human isolation, splashing it with sunlight here, shrouding it in urban darkness there, but in any event framing its austere truth against a background of lavish color. His compositions, dramatic or even cinematic in form, lend focused dignity to figures who would otherwise fade into a bleached (or blackened) oblivion.
But Peter Schjedahl, reviewing the show in the New Yorker, dismisses that standard gloss on Hopper.
His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint.
Sentimental or not, the intimation of solitude is something that I’ll no doubt carry with me as I trudge through the show—and through a crowd of duly appointed fellow art lovers. (The MFA, somewhat like a doctor’s office, is scheduling visitors in half-hour intervals.)
