Art October 2023
Exhibition note
On “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape,” at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Edward Hopper’s reputation is a long story of praise by faint damnation. “His limited vision is good, but it is not enough,” wrote Louis Mumford in 1933; “Visually speaking, one may follow Hopper on the pedestrian level; following [John] Marin, one must risk one’s neck in an airplane.” Clement Greenberg, in 1946, wrote that Hopper “is not a painter in the full sense; his means are second-hand, shabby, and impersonal.” In ARTnews in 1970, John Ashbery noted of Leland Bell that he “likes [Hopper’s] moods but not the painting.” Even in these pages, in 1996, Michael J. Lewis has written that Hopper “is one of those artists whose paintings often suffer from close study.”
If an angel seemed to help Sargent’s brush fly, some dumpy devil sat ever upon...
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