Buying Hopper

There's a painting by Edward Hopper, East Wind over Weehawken, that I always found evocative; but as with many of his paintings, I'm not quite sure what feelings it actually brings to mind or what the source of those feelings is. The painting itself, an oil from 1934 (just for reference, the widely known Nighthawks was done eight years later) is archetypal Hopper—untended houses on a deserted street, oddly mixed architectural styles, lawns overgrown and dried a pale yellow, cirrus and cirrostratus obscuring the blue sky, and an obvious lack of human life, save for some insignificant creatures barely entering the frame in the lower left. In the immense canon of his work, this particular piece garners very little attention; in fact, the exhibit currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston does not include it, though it does include Apartment Houses, its partner in residence (usually) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

I saw that Boston exhibit yesterday and it was spectacular beyond description. I realize that there is a glaring weakness about describing anything as being beyond description, but I really didn't come here to describe anything. The MFA website will suit you better—with pictures! I will say this: ordinarily I love to see the Monets and to just idle through the rest of the collection. But the Hopper exhibit was so exciting that, afterwards, the rest of the museum seemed dreary, dark, and uninspiring. If you've ever been there, you know that's not true.

But I really wanted to talk about merchandising. Now I'm not going to lament the commercialization of a fine artist or the degradation of art when it is placed on a refrigerator magnet or a bookmark or a dish towel. I just wonder if the artist himself—if Edward Hopper, who died forty years ago and who, for the most part, finished his active career nearly fifty years ago—could ever have envisioned a day when people would gladly part with $30.00 for a tote bag emblazoned with a Maine lighthouse. I don't think he was a humorless man, despite the starkness of so much of his work. But even such an incisive chronicler of the human condition would have been astounded at the money his paintings are earning past their basic sale and exhibition values.

Apparently Hopper hated commercial art, though he earned a living from it until his genius was recognized. That's why I wondered yesterday if the commercialization of pieces like Nighthawks and Chop Suey, as well as his numerous lighthouse studies, would have offended him, or if he would have simply bucked up, taken the millions, and run. And as I pondered those and other ultimate questions in that special gift shop devoted solely to the Hopper exhibit, I went for the bookmark, t-shirt, and hat; my wife, the tote bag. We'll share the book.