Edward Hopper at the Whitney

Praise for Edward Hopper at the Whitney: “Hopper, if provincial, is powerfully so. He sets today’s conventions, in art and elsewhere, into relief. He enriches the American darkness.” The new exhibition “is a survey of another, earlier America. Yet the invitation to nostalgia—to an America when the modern still seemed homespun—need not be accepted. Because of Hopper. He is, despite the endearing retro bits, a great American pessimist who should particularly interest our own dispirited time. Hopper is both a dreamer and a dream-slayer; he stills fashion, hope, solace, and conviction. He did that in his era; he can do it now.” In locating Hopper’s place in American art, New York Magazine calls him a melancholy Norman Rockwell.