America after the Fall and Edward Hopper
American art and British too has frequently divided into a battle between figurative and abstract art in the twentieth century. On one hand you have the artists like Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns associated with modern expressionist abstract and in the other corner of the canvas Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. The exhibition America after the Fall: painting in the 1930s was very much the domain of the figurative. It only had 45 pictures and was held in the Arthur Sackler wing atop the Royal Academy.
Aside from a walk up two flights of stairs not for vertigo sufferers there is little natural light – the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery is similarly afflicted. When I finally ascended there was the familiar throng of 10 visitors round every picture that inhibits appreciation. After a quick tour in which I found nothing to capture the eye I centred on three works, two By Edward Hopper and American Gothic by Grant Wood. The latter has never left American shores as is an arresting study of a father and daughter. I will let the reader make up his own mind but it’s a fine example of American realism. He was attracted to the close detail that characterises the best of European 15th century art.
I have always been an enormous Edward Hopper fan. I am drawn by the starkness of the composition, the brilliant use of the light and the eerily deserted quality of his paintings that rarely contains more than one individual , the pictures on view Gas and New York Movie have one each. Hopper was not recognised in his lifetime and derided by critics. He started as an illustrator and struggled as an artist. He is now recognised alongside Wyeth as one of the foremost American realists and his work fetched the prices of the abstractionists. The personality of artists always interests me. Picasso for example was master not just of painting but of promoting his art. Intensely political he was a director of the Prado during the Spanish Civil War and notoriously hard on any dealer. At one point at the height of his fame he would only sign a picture after it was bought. Hopper was conservative and taciturn. He said his pictures should speak for themselves and declined to comment on them. Wood was influenced by Durer then Hopper more by Degas and Matisse.
Finally I must mourn the passing of Sir Howard Hodgkin. He was harder to characterise but in the European style of Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, his trademark often extending the paintwork onto the frame. A fine colourist he will be long recognised amomgst the foremost of British artists.
