A selected review

On my escapades thoughout internet land i have found myself on most occasions accumilating a collection of reviews on Edward Hoppers works.I felt this abounding and ceasless mass of information rampaging through my mind too much for my brain to contend with.My eyes drift through cyber pages of words,critically analizing Hopper as a person a painter and an artist,but i cease to sometimes understand these sentences and short paragraphs of text.

So i succomb to the conclusion that i must provide myself with a focus.Selecting a review which i can in some way relate to,therefore i chose a piece written when Edward Hoppers works prevaded on these shores.

The exhibition situated within a gallery that i am very familiar with provides the words with more meaning for myself.I particually appreiciate how the Tate Modern has been conveyed here.The distibution and presentation of an artists work is vitally important for how an audience will understand and recognise you as an artist.You could say it is an art to creatively and seemingly effortlessly display these works of art.How the reviewer apprehends the anoymous minds,the nameless people behind this is rather interesting.

made anything reviews Exhibition Review, Edward Hopper, Tate Modern, London, May 27-September 5, 2004
Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham

As you enter the gallery holding the retrospective of Edward Hopper's work at Tate Modern you are confronted with a wall of welcoming text that begins: ‘More than any other artist, Edward Hopper has coloured our vision of America.’ The suggestion being that Hopper’s work is the axis on which our vision of America spins: no questions, just a statement of fact. It is difficult not to pause here, before one even begins looking at the paintings and drawings and ask; is this fanfare justified? Has Hopper really coloured out vision of America?The works on display at Tate Modern are culled from those regarded as Hopper's most significant and are arranged chronologically across twelve rooms whose aim, one assumes, is to chart the artist's aesthetic and intellectual development. I say 'assumes' because by Room 12 it becomes very difficult to identify what exactly changes in these paintings between 1905/6 and 1966: subject-matter, technique, form, none of them undergo paradigmatic shifts. So, in truth, this more an exhibition about recognition; recognising the importance and influence of Hopper in terms of his 'Americanness' but also the translatability of this Americanness to a transatlantic audience. But as to what Americanness might be and how its translates, this exhibition leaves to the audience. Two questions come to mind. Firstly, does Hopper's work deserve this level of recognition? And why, moreover, is it we seem to want Hopper’s America to be the real America?Such questions appear far from the minds of either the exhibition's curator or the multitudes of visitors milling around the exhibition. Instead questions have been fudged in favour of unsubstantiated assumptions but this will not diminish the exhibition's popularity. If the success of this exhibition is to be judged purely on the numbers of paying visitors, then this exhibition will surely exceed expectations. But then again, perhaps not. Hopper remains one of the most popular artists of recent times and one cannot help but think that an exhibition of his paintings at one of the nation’s most popular art galleries was always going to be a (financial) success. Therefore it is no surprise to find that the exhibition's exit leads visitors into what is best described as Room 13, where an extensive range of Hopper-ised products await mass consumption.Cynicism aside, seeing Hopper's work in the flesh allows us to explore the questions I posed earlier. This exhibition reminds us not only of how odd Hopper’s works actually are, in terms of their depiction of time, space and human relationships but how odd it is that people in their millions have hung these miserable pictures in their homes. The serial miserabilism that saturates these works has of course provided a rich buffet for critics of Hopper’s work to pick over—Hopper's strained relationship with his wife; his deliberate isolationism—but critique based purely on biography or artistic intentionality can only help us understand Hopper's vision to a degree. These images seem full of dead air and emotionally numb individuals. They are painted fragments of time, moments that seem beyond stillness, which are more than silence, because nothing can actually move and nothing can make noise. How Sundays used to sound. But, despite this other worldliness, Hopper’s paintings produce a feeling of the strangely familiar that Freud defined as Unheimlich: the uncanny. Freud’s uncanny, in many respects, accounts for the repetition of theme, form and content in the artist’s work, too. But do the artworks collected for the Tate exhibition support or contradict this conception of Hopper, an artist ignored in America by Americans for much of his career.Laid out from its beginnings to its end, one recognises a certain repetitive pulse in the work that echoes in practically every image on show. Although I do not believe it was the intention, the effect is to remind the viewer that Hopper lived through, and apparently, ignored, the advent and influence of Dada, Socialist Realism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop (to name a few) on wider American artistic sensibilities. In order to account for repetition, especially with reference to theme, the notion of alienation is scattered liberally across much of the critical literature on Hopper. But one has to ask what kind of alienation is Hopper painting? Surely, it is not enough to merely paint individuals staring out of windows to capture the social alienation of, say, poverty in America during the 1920s/1930s? When contrasted with the work of, say, Reginald Marsh, who captured more convincingly images of the alienated poor, Hopper's works are all stylised alienation; romanticised paintings of gloomy introspection which suggest but do not convey emotional depth. Where many scholars have seen this mono-thematicism as the dedication of the artist to his search for some kind quasi-divine vision, the truth is more mundane: Hopper had only a handful of ideas. The best of these is Hopper's stated intention to paint light, perhaps the most convincing aspect of his work. Looking at the paintings and drawings on show, it has to be said that Hopper's eye for light is delicate, knowing and convincing. He was not, however, the greatest painter of the human form. Hopper's men and women sit awkwardly on chairs and stoops, they lean against walls and counters in the most unnatural of ways; their faces and bodies are often vague, unfinished or just wrong, for example, see A Woman in the Sun (1961). When Hopper brings the elements of a picture together—whether an interior or exterior space, human form(s), perspective, etc.—things do not stand up to scrutiny; they become more like a plastic model formed by the impatient, gluey fingers of a child. Commentators take this awkwardness, this vagueness, this ungainliness as deliberate; these painterly aspects help convey exactly that emptiness, alienation at the heart of the American psyche; where the psyche of the individual and the crushing loneliness of the city converge. And I agree to an extent because bad painting does not necessarily equate with a bad artwork. But, there is more going on in Hopper's work than many have been prepared to admit: for example, Why does Hopper's work not 'work'? At only two points in the show are the more intriguing aspects of Hopper's practice put before the audience, aspects which might account for the unfinished quality in Hooper's work (that is, the abstraction of architectural details, not including text of shop signs, etc.). Both Nighthawks (1942) and Office at Night (1940) are accompanied by a series of preliminary sketches which spectators can then connect to the finished works. What one notices about these sketches is how much more competent and detailed they are in comparison to the finished paintings. But questions such as, 'what happens in the interim between sketching and painting, and is this deliberate?' or 'why the inclusion of inaccuracy?' fail to register because only these two works are contextualised in this way. An opportunity missed.For those of us who like Hopper but always felt the scholarship on his work too narrow in its analysis, too often an exceptionalist view of twentieth century American artistic tradition, this show is disappointing. This is because of a withdrawal on the part of the Tate Modern from posing difficult questions, either in relation to the work or in its own biases and presumptions. The circuitous path of the show is never under pressure to prove the opening statement; Hopper has coloured our vision of America because this exhibition says so; it is museum-sanctioned legitimacy. To be critical is not to be dismissive Hopper's work but subject the paintings to sustained critique because with Hopper it seems that what we cannot see is perhaps much more important and moving than what we can.