Cape Ann Museum II

 

Cape Ann Museum

27 Pleasant Street

Gloucester, MA

 

 

 

I recently posted a review of the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum (CAM). I liked it, but wasn’t blown away by it. 

 

 

Fitz Henry Lane

 

That said, there are reasons to pay a visit to the museum that will compensate if, like me, you wanted a bit more from the Hopper show. Know first of all, that the museum has been in Gloucester since 1875 and in its present location since 1923. During the 1930s the museum began collecting the work of Fitz Henry Lane (1804-65) and now has the largest repository of his work in the world. 

 

 

 

Lane is something of an enigma, so much so that it wasn’t until 2005 that art historians realized his name was actually Fitz Henry, not Fitz Hugh as he had been mistakenly attributed for over a century. He was born in Gloucester, lived in Boston and worked as a printer between 1832-45, then moved back to Gloucester for the last two decades of his life. Gloucester has long been a fishing town and Lane had a clear affinity for the sea and ships. He was particularly good at capturing changing weather conditions, as can be seen in his contrasts between calm and stormy waters. (Alas, death at sea is part of Gloucester’s historical legacy. Remember The Perfect Storm? It was one of many such tragedies.) 

 

 

 

Lane was such a keen ship-spotter that he could tell boats from afar without seeing their nameplates. If you’re a landlubber like me his boat canvases can wear thin after a few, but his obsession was no more unusual than the car aficionados or other enthusiasts of our day. 

 

 

 

Lane is considered a master of luminism, which as the name implies, is about representing light. Luminist painters are often instantly recognizable as their works exude an inner glow. It’s as if they are backlit by some hidden source. 

 

Brace's Rock by Lane

 

On a personal note, Emily and I have been attending Labor Day family clambakes on Eastern Point for many decades. It takes place in Brace’s Cove, so-named for a rock just offshore. Lane painted it and here’s my photograph of it in 2023.

 

Brace's Rock by Me!

 

Because Gloucester is indeed an ocean port, the CAM has lots of maritime objects and paraphernalia. Think everything from lighthouse lenses–see its large Fresnel bulbs–to mastheads, ship models, tools, and so forth. My favorite piece is the Our Lady of Good Voyage carving that once stood near the apex of the city’s Portuguese Church. It has a miracle associated with it. A group of sailors snapped their oars in rough seas, appealed to the Virgin Mary, and she supplied placid waters that allowed them to drift to safety.

 

Our Lady of Good Voyage

 

But back to painting. The Northeast coast has spawned art colonies, including one that hangs on in Gloucester’s Rocky Neck neighborhood. Artists often traveled between them–especially during the summer months–from Cos Cob to Old Lyme, Ogunquit, and Mohegan Island, if you will. With less intention than circumstantial familiarity, a veritable mobile New England school emerged that spanned the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The CAM has outstanding works from Milton Avery, Cecelia Breaux, Stuart Davis, Winslow Homer, Rockwell Kent, John Sloan, and more. 

 

Avery, Front Porch Sitters

Davis, Gloucester Port

Stuart Davis

Rockwell Kent

John Sloan, Gloucester 1918

    

    
 

Alice Beach Winter

 

The lower level has some classic 1930s proletarian mural art from Charles Allan Winter. In the nearby auditorium you’ll find works that celebrated Cape Ann quarry workers.

 

Charles Allan Winter (ironic commentary!)

 

Leon Kroll, Babson Point Quarry Workers

 

 The CAM also maintains historical buildings and homes, including Lane’s, throughout Gloucester. You’ll probably have leftover energy to see some of them, as the CAM is a regional museum that whets your appetite rather than drowning you in gigantic blockbuster shows. I like museums such as the CAM; they invite you to linger and wander rather than fear you’ll miss something you were supposed to see.

 

Rob Weir

Doctor Rat and A Painted House: The Short & the Long

 

When I travel and have connecting flights, I usually download short novels that I can polish off around the time the first leg finishes and a longer ones that can read in spurts and stops no matter what delays and interruptions occur.

 

 

 

My short book for Boston-London-Geneva was Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle (1977, Bantam Books, 215 pages). He’s an unorthodox writer and acquired taste, but this one won a major fantasy award in 1977, though it was dismissed by the New York Times as “zoo-radical-chic.” I love a good controversy and came away understanding both the praise and the mudslinging. It has echoes of 1984 but is usually compared to Animal Farm, though Doctor Rat makes it seem like a petting zoo! Doctor Rat manages to be hair-raising, stomach-churning, and funny at the same time, but it’s definitely not for the squeamish.

 

It is set inside a research test lab in which animals are used for all manner of ghoulish tests. The descriptions describe factory-level animal torture and the lab head, dubbed “Learned Professor” by Doctor Rat, is a veritable Josef Mengele. There are obvious parallels to Nazi deathcamps, yet Doctor Rat supports the lab with Stockholm Syndrome-like fervor. Doctor Rat sees everything as advancing science, “writes” of one gruesome thing after another in his “newsletter,” and carefully “cites” sources. Those  include treatises about his own species such as “How to Roast a Rat.” When a quavering animal is removed from its cage, he shouts “death is freedom,” a distressing echo of “work sets you free,” the slogan above the gates of Auschwitz. Doc literally sings the praises of the lab. As we learn, he is intelligent but was driven mad from endless time in the lab mazes. Thus, Doc’s studies and writings are probably imaginary.

 

When a power struggle erupts between his own compliant species and rebellious dogs, you can guess where his loyalties lie. And Doctor Rat certainly wants nothing to do an interspecies alliance seeking to take over the lab and free its subjects. Brutal experiments and vivisection appear in more detail than most will wish to read–­skimming recommended­–but you can draw lessons about blind followers and discovery-at-any-cost science. Fascist metaphors abound, but back in the 1970s Kotzwinkle also intended critiques of the Vietnam War and unexamined nationalism. This book is horrifying, but the bigger question is whether his points are valid and his implied warnings important.

 

* * * * *

 

 

I wanted something lighter after this, though I only sort of chose my next book wisely. I don’t like John Gresham very much, but a friend suggested trying his non-courtroom novel A Painted House (2001, Dell, 466 pages). I won’t say I loved it, but it has parallels to contemporary American immigration issues.

 

On the surface the novel seems like The Grapes of Wrath: The Next Generation. It takes place in 1952 during a single Arkansas summer when Luke Chandler is seven-years-old. He lives with his family in Black Oak, a backwater cotton country dot on the map. His dream is to one day either play baseball for the Cardinals or become a road grader. That’s a strange combo, but his life his life has been defined by poverty, snakes, tornados, outhouses, family feuds, debt peonage, and disputes between Baptists and Methodists. He is supposed to hate Northerners, though he’s not sure why, and there is no telephone or TV. Luke sees a World Series game at the storeowner’s home, but some worry that “modern America was slowly invading rural Arkansas.” The Chandlers’ unpainted house and barn are symbols of a stuck-in-time existence.

 

Luke’s father is a sharecropper, needs to hire outside help to get the cotton picked, and doesn’t have enough capital to be choosy about whom he hires. He lucks out by securing a hard-working crew of Mexicans that includes “Cowboy,” who loves baseball almost as much as Luke. The Chandlers are unlucky in that they also hire the Spruill family, which includes the brutal Hank, one of the reddest rednecks in the region. The Spruills are down on their luck, but retain a sense of superiority over the Chandlers and especially over Mexicans. Old hatreds, barely hidden secrets, threats, and violence hang in the air like  sharp scythe about to severe hopes of a successful harvest. Not even baseball can resolve hate, but a painted house suggests a frail possibility of redemption. Re: the Spruills’ hatred of Mexicans, it’s like a 19^th century French writer put it, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

 

Rob Weir  

Be Dignified if You Work with the Public

Who gets the meme?

 

We’ve all felt frustration and have dreamt of letting the object of our ire know exactly what we think. If you deal with the public though, check those thoughts at the back of your teeth.  

 

A sad tale.

 

A recent example involved a Northampton police officer’s interaction with a woman whose first language is Spanish. Video coverage from his own body cam shows he was out of control before he left his cruiser. He approached her with a shower of F-bombs, something one should NEVER–mark it in capital letters–do in a job involving the public. He was breathing too much fire to comprehend that the woman he pulled over for a freaking broken taillight had only rudimentary English skills and that his actions–including having her handcuffed–were racist as well as inappropriate. Leave those F-bombs for the locker room, beers with your buddies, or screams in the closet. Do your job with dignity.

 

That’s basic. I once had a job selling appliances. My district manager was an older gentleman who insisted that the old saw that “the customer is always right” is the biggest crock of nonsense ever uttered. Quite a few customers, he averred, were complete idiots, but he added that you can’t say that to their faces.

 

I tried to remember that when I worked with juvenile offenders. Young people often act out and, sad to say, some never grow out of it. I know what the officer felt. It happened rarely, but I been cursed at and called every name I know, plus a few I had to look up. Once a kid threw a punch I deflected. But my job was to defuse, not elevate, bad situations with kids already in legal trouble.

 

As a high school teacher, I sometimes joined colleagues in gripe sessions about those who told us we had easy jobs: six-and-half hours a day with weekends and summers off. (As if!). We all had stories of classroom outbursts and parent-teacher conferences in which we were accused of being personally responsible for their child’s failures and all the ills of society. I remember one involving a math teacher sitting at a table across from me. He was asked by a father, “How’s he doing?” The teacher was flabbergasted, as there had been numerous conferences to address fighting, throwing things, truancy, threats, and non-existent academic achievement. The math teacher calmly reiterated those things. A blank face stared back and asked, “Yeah, but how’s he doing?” WTF! We all thought, “There’s an elevator that never left the basement,” but we said it privately.

 

There’s much that can go wrong in classrooms when you multiply 15-30 students by six periods by 180 days. Once I had a kid try to leap from a second-story window before another student grabbed him. I could tell from his eyes he was higher than a kite, but I made the mistake of saying so to his parents. They threatened to sue me. (The sad ending was that 16-year-old later fatally ODed.) Mostly, I was fortunate, loved my students, and most treated me with respect. But I’d be lying if I said I loved them every day, never threw a kid out of class, or imagined hurling swears at several of them. But no F-bombs. I could have been suspended for that. I could have done so with less fear as a professor instructing students considered adults, but why would I pour oil on a fire? I did have a condescending over-privileged student who deflected all efforts to mollify her. I called her out in clear-but-careful language and kept my real feelings in my head.

 

How about customer service and public relations professionals who get communications from individuals who might be mutant space aliens? Comic Don Novello of Father Guido Sarducci fame once assumed the persona of Lazlo Toth, a crank-letter writer. He published a hysterical book that’s also a textbook on how to write respectful responses to crazy people.   

 

It's hard to keep it together in all circumstances, but there are two hard-and-fast rules. One: Never drop F-bombs like a junior high school boy when approaching a member of the public. Two: Never lay hands on them unless you are physically endangered. The police officer flunked on both accounts. Get thee to anger management training or find another job.  

Ace in the Hole: Old Movie or a Mirror?

 

Ace in the Hole (1951)

Directed by Billy Wilder

Paramount, 111 minutes, Not-rated (but Hollywood Code in place)

★★★

 

 

 Ace in the Hole is on the National Film Registry, though it shows up in some platforms as The Big Carnival. That would “carnival” as in messy sensationalist hype, not lame rides and bad food. The brief title change­ had to with script writer Victor Desny’s lawsuit against director Billy Wilder who likely used insider information to sandbag Desny’s planned Floyd Collins project.

 

The name Floyd Collins might not ring many bells now, but his sad tale was one of the most ballyhooed stories of the 1920s. Collins was trapped in a Kentucky mine and died there while yellow journalists hyped his story to the skies. Ace in the Hole is a thinly veiled Collins tale set in New Mexico. That's where the free-wheeling, high-living Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) lands after being fired from a series of jobs in the newspaper business. In essence, Tatum is an egomaniac who believes he’s better than anyone else, but he is unreliable and too much trouble to keep on staff. He drifts to Albuquerque, where he settles for a paltry $60 a week job and he probably is better than anyone else on the paper, though he commits the unpardonable sin of telling them so. After a year on the job, he is still being handed grunt jobs such as covering a rattlesnake roundup.

 

 He is on his way to the venomous wigglers with photographer Herbie Cooke (Robert Arthur) when fortune seemingly smiles upon him when Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is trapped in a mine. Tatum rushes to the scene and finds that Leo is suffering from pneumonia. He clears enough rubble to get within talking distance from Leo, gains his confidence, and is able to bring in some supplies to buy more time. On the surface, Tatum is hailed a s hero. In truth, he’s an S.O.B. who finds himself in relatively good company. Leo's wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) is a floozy with big dreams of her own that don't include a hick like Leo. She wants to leave him and head for a big city, but that doesn't mesh with Tatum 's plans. He wants her to play the role of grief-stricken spouse and collude with him to delay rescue efforts to keep the story alive so he can milk it for financial gain and sell his talents to either a Chicago or New York publisher. He is even willing to woo Lorraine. You could call this shark versus shark. Given that this is a film noir production, you probably recognize Lorraine a classic femme fatale and won’t need to call Las Vegas for betting odds.

 

The rating system wasn’t in place in 1951, but the infamous Hollywood Code was. Originally the script called for law enforcement officials to be in on the fix of delaying Leo’s rescue. Under the Code however, censors insisted that police should always be on the side of good, so the script was changed. In my estimation, this weakened the film and reduced it to several cynics playing with a working man's life. The Floyd Collins story involved the systemic collusion between disreputable journalism and the public’s yearning for lurid news.

Kirk Douglas was very good in the role of Chuck Tatum, as was Robert Arthur as a photographer whose loyalties were uncertain. Jan Sterling is a largely forgotten actress, but she won an Academy Award in 1954 for her role in a film The High and the Mighty. I suspect though, that modern audiences will find her performance a bit like something from the old racy magazine True Confessions. Not to mention that the floozy role is decidedly problematic today.

 

Nonetheless, Ace in the Hole is another of those old movies that seem strangely familiar when we strip away 70-yar-old backdrops, costumes, and mannerisms and imagine it in modern garb. There are many recent stories that are tabloid-style in content. Perhaps you recall the hype of baby Jessica McClure, who fell down a Texas well, or the 24/7 coverage of the 2006 Sago Mine disaster. Do you remember how people were glued to social media, newspapers, and televisions during the 2018 incident in which a group of scouts was trapped in a cave in Thailand? As I always remind people, look beneath the surface. When we do, t’is often the sad case that we gaze into a mirror.

 

Rob Weir

The Dsecendants: Okay but Overrated

 

The Descendants (2011)

Directed by Alexander Payne

Fox Searchlight, 115 minutes, R (for prolific F-bombs)

★★★

 

 

I keep an eye out for lists of critically regarded films that I’ve not seen. Sometimes I find gems, other times duds best left to molder. Mostly, I find a lot of dead ordinary efforts. The Descendants falls into the third category notwithstanding its five Oscar nominations in 2011, including Best Picture, Best Director (Alexander Payne) and Best Actor. It was bypassed for those, but won for Best Adapted Screenplay and that was a stretch.

 

Overall, The Descendants feels like a weepy destined to be edited for the Hallmark Channel. An opening sequence of a woman recklessly water skiing sets the table; Elizabeth King is about to suffer an accident that will leave her in a coma. Her husband Matthew (George Clooney) hopes that she will awaken, but it doesn't look good and he faces the possibility of becoming a single dad to two daughters, 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and nine-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller). How will a workaholic lawyer in Honolulu who has been only tangentially involved in his daughters’ lives cope?  Alex, in fact, has to be retrieved from a private school where among other things, her drug habit was addressed, though she remains an angry, disrespectful, foul-mouthed enigma. For inexplicable reasons, she wants the seemingly clueless happy-go-lucky Sid (Nick Krause) present at traumatic family events.

 

Matt has a lot on his plate, including serving as the sole trustee for 25,000 acres of undeveloped land on Kauai that his cousins, including good-time Hugh (Beau Bridges) are urging him to sell before the trust dissolves in seven years. (They stand to make a veritable fortune from such a sale.) Matt has other things on his mind, but it’s what escaped his mind that comes back to haunt him. In an angry outburst Alex reveals that her mother had been having an affair, something confirmed by the Kings' best friends Kai and Mark. Now Matt is both angry and scared, as doctors inform him that Elizabeth will not come out of her coma and under her living will, they are obliged to pull the plug.

 

The Kings leave the Big Island for what is ostensibly an escape to Kauai, but it's really a search for Elizabeth’s lover. It leads to Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), but Matt’s revenge fantasy cools when he discovers that Brian is married to the very sweet Julie (Judy Greer) and has two children. Brian insists that he did not love Elizabeth and begs him not to destroy his family. He's a sleazebag, but Matt simply informs him of Elizabeth’s impending death and lets that sink in. But Matt is not about to forget that  Brian is a realtor who would make scads of money if the trust lands go to a particular developer. Cue a tearful deathbed scene and observe how Matt resolves the trust.

 

There is a back story involving how a white family came into the possession of so much land on an island that was once the domain of native Hawaiians. The King surname connects to actual historical events, namely the 19th century relationship between missionaries and sugar barons, though the movie’s King family link is purely a script contrivance.

 

The Descendants has been labeled a tragicomedy or a dramedy, hybrid terms which often indicate a movie is neither fish nor fowl. That is indeed true in this case. The Descendants is often touching, but in predictable ways and it’s hard to determine why Clooney's performance was lauded. He’s actually flat in the film, which is appropriate for earlier sequences, but Clooney seldom sounds a different note. In my view, critics were too enamored of his mystique to see that there wasn't much depth to his performance. Woodley was rail-thin in presence and a brat for much of the movie. It doesn't speak well when you are out acted by a nine-year-old. Nor is there any particular reason why Sid is in the script at all other than providing goofy comic relief and later leading Matt to see that snap judgments are not always reality. Not sure that comes as a great revelation to anyone.

 

We are left with a movie that might make some reach for the tissue box, and is perfectly fine as a diversion. It’s worth watching if nothing better presents itself, but don't buy into the hype; it is indeed very ordinary.

 

Rob Weir

Babel is a Brilliant Novel

Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

By R. (Rebecca) F. Kuang

Harper Voyager, 2023, 549 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

What a fantastic book! And I mean this on several levels. R. F. Kuang is a fantastic writer and scholar. Babel is set at Oxford and there are some gratuitous pokes at Cambridge, but she has degrees from both places and is working on an East Asian language PhD at Yale. Yes, she's that kind of smart and a gifted novelist to boot. Babel is fantastic in that it's a mix of magical realism, imagination, and English society, a veritable alt.history of the 1830s. In such a novel, Kuang departs from what actually happened–parts of the novel feel like a darker adult version of Harry Potter­–but she's also fantastically confident. After noting some of the liberties she has taken, the last line of the forward is one of the best disclaimers ever: “If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.”

 

The Radcliffe Camera of the Bodleian Library the likely model 

 

In the 1830s, robust England is in a throes of a silver industrial revolution. Britannia rules the waves, the global economy, and commands much of the world's wealth because it harnessed the secret of Ag. As you might know, silver has the highest potential for conductivity of any metal. That’s where Oxford comes into play, along with alchemy and abracadabra-like magic. University College–Britain's oldest–contains a domed eight-floor building whose top level is filled with silver bars that run or support everything from trains, carts, machines, sewage systems, bridges, building foundations, clocks, communications, and factories. Think parts of the 21st century transported to the 19th. For the bars to work, though, they must be activated by finding the correct pairings of words and engraving them onto the bars. They must be philologically compatible to work and mistakes can be volatile and dangerous. Hence, this task is left to translators who go to the roots of words, which requires extensive knowledge of ancient and foreign languages. Oxford, not coincidentally, has grown wealthy from its silver work.

 

The novel centers on the education of four students: Robin Swift, a Cantonese lad plucked from China as a boy and raised by Oxford don Robert Lovell; Ramiz “Rami” Mirza, an Indian Muslim; Victoire Desgraves, a black woman of Haitian heritage; and Letitia “Letty” Price,  a wealthy admiral's daughter who was only allowed to enter Oxford because her brother died. To some degree Robin can pass for white, but not Rami or Victoire and the latter, along with Letty, are women. Let’s just say that ethnocentrism,  racism, and sexism were not banished by silver bars! Each was trained from childhood for a stated destiny–success at Oxford–and a hidden one: service to British imperialism. As Kuang writes, most Babel students, “had nowhere in this country to go. They had been chosen for privileges they never could have imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment.”

 

Read “trapped in a gilded cage” in that. Babel follows the four from their early giddy days of bonding as only outcasts can do, through their academic rigors and their awakenings. Their stories take place against a backdrop of what is about to happen: Queen Victoria's coronation, the suppression of worker movements, and the Opium Wars with a silver twist. The plot involves incantations, underground rebellions, personal revelations (especially for Robin), and veritable “which side are you on?” choices. All of those details are richly described and resolved in ways too delicious to reveal.

 

One of the more hackneyed ways to end a review is to say, “I'm sorry that this book had to end.” I mean it, though. This novel is intelligent, engaging, well plotted, thrilling, heartbreaking, and beautifully written. It is also a lesson in the interconnections between megalomania, social class, virulent nationalism, war, slavery, and racism. As its rather lengthy title suggests, it also probes several very old human conundrums, including the alluded logic behind the Biblical Babel and philosophical musings over what (if anything) justifies the use of violence. I would have gleefully read another 549 pages.

 

Rob Weir

Edward Hopper & Cape Ann in Gloucester

 

Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Coming Home

Cape Ann Museum

Gloucester, MA

Through October 16, 2023

 

Edward Hopper is certainly one of the most iconic American painters of the 20^th century. Even if the titles don’t ring immediate bells, Hopper works such as Nighthawks (1940), Chop Suey (1929), Automat (1929), and Early Sunday Morning (1930) are instantly recognizable. Hopper is recognized, with considerable merit, as the preeminent artist of ennui, anomie, and disconnection. He is famed for populating his canvases (if at all) with people who look at anything except each other or you the viewer. His career soared during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when many saw him a quintessential painter of the period’s gloom.

 

Hopper (1882-1967) considered himself a realist painter, a term that has little to do with being photographic or careful depictions of his surroundings. Realism is more a kind of truthfulness, an honest evocation of place, mood, or emotions (or lack thereof). “Eddie” Hopper was born into a strict Baptist family, grew into a rather gangly body, and never entirely cast off his family’s austere Dutch Protestantism. He studied with luminaries such as Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase, but like many budding artists, he struggled for a time. His first trip to Cape Ann–the North Shore in Massachusetts parlance–came in 1912, a veritable search for inspiration. Henri had told him to, “Forget about art and paint what interests you.” That was good advice, but he sold nothing at all until 1913 and his first breakthrough took another ten years. 

 

Josephine Nivison Hopper

 

In 1924, he married Josephine Nivison, also an artist. She proved an adroit booster, manager, and organizer of his career. The two stayed together though their marriage was often stormy and rumors of physical violence swirled. Her career never really took off but before anyone raises gender hackles, the few canvases displayed at the Cape Ann Museum suggest that she was a second-rate talent. When they revisited Cape Ann during the 1920s, his work was noticeably more dynamic than hers.

 

With an artist of such a profile as Hopper’s, it would be pretentious to say I disliked the show at the Cape Ann Museum (CAM). There is much I liked quite a lot, actually, but I was also underwhelmed. Like many artists, Hopper dabbled in various media, such as drawings, etchings, and lithographs. The CAM show is heavy on watercolors and most of them simply lack the poignancy and emotive power of his oils. This is particularly noticeable in its abundance of stand-alone houses. They are fine as documentation of fading styles for the well-heeled, but his oils often took a longer look and included people, dogs, fishermen, and landscape details that invite viewers to write our own narratives. Stripped of them, a grand house of bourgeois dwelling is precisely that and little more. 

 

 

 

 

In many respects, his views of railyards, empty streets, and down-market homes are much more intriguing. In this respect, he followed Henri’s admonition. Henri was a leading light of the Ashcan school of painting, which found more potency and vigor in work, struggle, and grit than in “pretty” things. Hopper as well, which is why his best known works impress more than they please. They are, insofar as Cape Ann is concerned, more “Gloucester,” a fishing town, than the lace, awnings, and graceful porches of elites.

 

Note Hopper's use of verticals and triangles

 

 

 Heres’ an admittedly idiosyncratic critique from a person who literally has trouble drawing a straight line with a ruler. To my eye Edward Hopper simply wasn’t as skilled at watercolors as he was with oils.

 None of this is to say that you should avoid the CAM show. It might be advisable, though, to tamp down your expectations. Another small detail you should know. Since nearly all the works are on loan, no photography of any sort is allowed in the exhibit. I’m sure this is in accordance with stipulations from the various lenders, but I wish the art world would simply stop the striptease. The no-photos horse left the barn a long time ago and you could go to where these paintings reside and photograph most of them in situ. Why not allow patrons small remembrances of their visit? 

 

My favorite. Note how Hopper folded eaves and rooftops into the boat sails!

 

Note: The Hopper images in this piece are taken from internet sources. They are low quality copies of copies, I don’t redistribute them, and I make exactly zero dollars from anything on this blog!