This past Saturday Mr. and Mrs. U visited the Edward Hopper exhibit at Washington D.C.'s National Gallery of Art and walked away with a not entirely uncharacteristic difference of artistic opinion.
Mrs. U Respectfully Declines
Before this exhibit I didn't know much about Hopper's work. I knew about one of his most famous paintings, Nighthawks, but that's about it. I was very excited to finally get a chance to see what NGA described as the "first comprehensive survey of Edward Hopper's career to be seen in American museums outside New York in more than 25 years." I mean, that's a big deal! I had friends who had already seen this exhibit and told me I would love it.
Boy, were they dead wrong.
Let me start off by saying that I recognize that Hopper was a great artist. His paintings, I also recognize intellectually, are also "great works of art." But let me tell you, by the time I had walked through that whole exhibit I felt like I had just taken a tour through Stephen King's world in The Stand after the Captain Trips disease just hit it. Unnerving images kept flying by of empty streets that should have been busy. There were houses with spooky windows and lone figures left behind in the aftermath. And constantly, there was the sickly green in so many of his paintings, like the green of death by infectious mucous. His paintings frightened me and left me grasping for Mr. U's hand so I knew that I really wasn't IN this apocalyptic world where I might run into that frightening zombie mask of a face in Chop Suey.
There was but one saving grace in all of his paintings and that was his watercolors of houses and lighthouses. I loved how he painted the sunlight on architecture. Specifically, there were two I liked, The Mansard Roof and Haskell's House. Even those have a creepy Amityville Horrorness about them though. Wait! Did I just see Norman Bates's mom look out of the upstairs window?
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