ABSTRACT
Edward Hopper has long been a living classic of American art. The history of American art is strewn with the corpses of artists whose success, won through the clever and persistent rehearsal of a single theme, masks a terrible paucity of energy and ideas. The Americanness of Hopper's art is by no means fortuitous. To effect so confident a transmutation of commonplace materials, Hopper developed a style remarkably dry, dispassionate, and plainspoken in its visual effects. It is Hopper's skill in shifting the center of expressive gravity away from the sheerly anecdotal and onto this more purely visual drama of light and shadow that keeps his art from falling into literary theatricalism. By exerting an incomparably greater visual pressure on the materials of anecdote, Hopper's art transcends the limits of pictorial storytelling without repudiating the intrinsic human interest which such storytelling still holds, even for the sophisticated public. Certainly, Hopper's place in American art history looks secure.
