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If you can get down to Boston this week, treat yourself to the Hopper exhibit at the MFA, which ends August 19th. It’s well worth the $23, and if you plan ahead you may be able to save some money by borrowing a pass from the Pollard Memorial Library.

What is it about Edward Hopper? His paintings seem fairly ordinary:  the side of a house, a row of brick buildings in the early morning light, two people staring out at the sea or sitting at a diner counter late at night. For me it became clear when I was looking at one of his early watercolors, ‘Prospect Street’– a perfectly fine painting of a street, a row of houses, a tree or two. Then, right next to it, the same painting redone in oils and renamed ‘Sun on Prospect Street’. Suddenly, the light on the side of a white house is incandescent; the tree at the end of the street takes on a new significance, the contrast of sun and shadow seems ominous, yet thrilling.  Then there is the blue he uses; that ’Hopper blue’.  In ‘A Room in Brooklyn’, one sees the blue rectangles of sky through long windows with green shades, that certain type of old-fashioned green shade that fits the room.  The room is austere, composed, airless – the blue of the sky is heartbreaking.  The same with ‘The Sea Watchers’, depicting a couple in bathing suits, side-by-side, but not looking, never looking, at one another, just staring out to sea.  The view is from the side, and beyond is that pitiless rectangle of blue sky.   

There are close to 100 paintings in the show, including the famous ‘Nighthawks’, and they span his whole career from early watercolors to his final, poignant work, ‘Sunlight in an Empty Room.’  At the beginning of the show there is a quote by the artist that sums it up, “All I wanted to do was to paint the sunlight on the side of a house.”