Edward Hopper and Company: The American Landscape
Posted on March 14, 2009
Too often we look at cultural and physical landscapes of places we visit as tourist brochures: America as the massive architecture of New York City and Chicago, quaint New England villages, the Bridge and Bay in San Francisco and pinkish western landscapes. One of the best examples of cliché America is a propaganda film called Portraits of America produced by Disney for the US State Department and Homeland Security in an effort to boost our damaged image post-9/11. It depicts America as a Magic Kingdom, cleansed of all of the quirks and nasty bits that make us interesting: (you need only watch a minute of it to get the point). A slick video brochure, for sure, but when I previewed it with a group of tourism executives it received a unanimous thumbs down as being ingenuous.
Edward Hopper and Company at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco until May 2, 2009, offers a different sort of travelogue.
Hopper was known as an American Realist and his stark, often lonely views of urban and rural landscapes had an enormous influence on photography. Not that there weren’t other other forces, like the Industrial Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and the German Expressionists who influenced everything from Hitchcock to Tim Burton who dreamed up Batman’s dark landscapes of Gotham City.
Along with ten paintings and drawings by Hopper, the show features works from eight photographers spanning the years 1936 to 1974: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Although most of these photographers were a bit before my time, what they depict was not. In fact, I still see these scenes in rural and urban areas of America: the old railroad workers’ road houses in Northern California, there long after the lumber mills and railroads folded, the neighborhoods of New York City that have yet to become Times Square-ized, the pastures of tract homes across suburbia. Most of these are not marginalized areas inhabited by marginalized people. They are often just slightly off the tourist track, on the side streets and back roads of travelogue America.
I often look to local writers in a place I plan to visit to gain a sense of place. I should be paying more attention to its artists.
Fraenkel Gallery: 49 Geary Street, 4th floor, San Francisco.Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10:30 am – 5:30 pm, & Saturday 11:00 am – 5:00 pm.
» Filed Under California, Culture, Photography
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Edward Hopper is a very talanted person.