Ordinary People.(Edward Hopper's paintings captured the concept of ordinary city life)

Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don't we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with "Nighthawks" (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist's office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern--and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If "Nighthawks" is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.

A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.

The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper's greatest hits--each a world, created ex nihilo--that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including "Pennsylvania Coal Town" (1947)--a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car--and "Office in a Small City" (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist's death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show's curators, Carol Troyen, has deemphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper's long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator. While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled--with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water--Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.

There isn't a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper ...