Looking at Hopper: An Art of Subtraction

One of the great canonical shifts of recent decades has been the enthusiastic rediscovery of earlier American painting. Thanks to the success of the abstract expressionists after the war, Americans began to realize that they too had a world-class art, not simply a minor native vintage. But the waning of abstraction in the 1960s also lent new prestige to figurative painting. Advanced critics, museum curators, art historians, and finally collectors and crowds turned hungry eyes toward the landscape painters of the Hudson River school, the major and minor American impressionists, and above all the craggy, idiosyncratic American realists—such isolated, brooding figures as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Edward Hopper. If 1996 was the yea...