Hopper outdraws Picasso in his own hometown, people standing in line in the rain in front of the Grand Palais in the middle of the night, and big crowds too all around Europe. Now isn’t that strange? Hopper isn’t new. Before Warhol there was Hopper, but he was regarded as retrograde and obsolete by modern abstractionists, the conceptualists, all those who think of novelty as the highest achievement in visual art and its ultimate goal. Hopper’s art hasn’t changed -- what has?
The mentality of an age can be discussed and written about endlessly but it’s quite visible for all to see in the art. The personality-cult commercialism of Warhol stands as emblematic of the greed and derision of personal integrity which collapsed the world’s financial markets, and maybe one didn’t cause the other but they reflect the same values. In fact we’ve fought through thickets of theory, splashes and stripes and deconstructions, all looking for something, what, ourselves? It takes so much faith, and energy, to find significance and meaning in the accidental, in the sneering offhand gesture, in the fat ginned-up resume.
No need to work that hard in front of a Hopper -- he takes you there. Blowing curtains evoke a rush of warm air on a summer evening before air conditioning, last light, damp smells and faint echoes, all sorts of things that don’t come through with a photograph, that thinnest slice of reality. People find themselves and their own experience verified in Hopper, and he pulls at them to stretch as well, to see more, to feel more, the reason people love art. Suddenly there’s many more who like Hopper. These people seek something more substantial than fashion, something more enduring and thoughtful than soup cans. Art is going to change.
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