Overcoming my hostility to any art with the word 'modern' in its description, yesterday I went to the Edward Hopper exhibition.
Hopper did not really believe other people existed. His human figures aren't, with the exception, revealingly, of his two self-portraits.
A quote of his: "I think I’m not very human." Poor fellow.
But the exhibition is redeemed by one painting, a painting which takes pride of place at the end of Brian O’Doherty’s film – Sun in an Empty Room. Hopper really came alive with this painting which eschews any pretence of being about anything. Anything, that is, but light. There was a long tradition of painters transfixed by light, from Turner, that Impressionist avant la lettre, through the Impressionists themselves (who still lived and worked in Hopper's early years), to EH himself. Having come to this conclusion it was immensely gratifying to the ego to read a quote in the catalogue. Hopper, 1962: "I think I’m still an Impressionist."
Later, to the National Gallery to see the exhibition of Russian landscape artists of the late nineteenth century. I had often wondered what Russian painters were up to in the age that produced writers like Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, the age that produced composers like Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Rachmaninov. The answer, of course, is that they were painting Russia. Ivan Shishkin's paintings do the country justice. They are painted with the meticulous attention to detail that reveals a true mature love of place. The other boys in the exhibition aren't bad either, especially Levitan and Savrasov, but Shishkin deservedly has the central hall.
I would not want to visit Hopper’s America. I’d much prefer to visit Shishkin’s Russia .