BOSTON - You go up the broad steps of the classical temple that is the
Museum of Fine Arts and push through the glass doors into the cool shadows
that house the once turbulent past. In museums, its passions and
preoccupations are stilled.
When you buy your ticket to the Hopper retrospective late on a weekday
morning, the lady behind the counter says you've come at the right time.
There are no pressing crowds here this time of day on this ordinary day of
the week. But even if there were, you think, the stillness of Hopper's work
would absorb them, quiet them, dispel them. His pictures of life all seem
still lifes.
You cross a clean, well-lighted corridor to the entrance of the Hopper
exhibit, which is here till August 19. There's still time to catch it, to
walk out of the summer heat into its shade. Once inside, time slows, then
stops, even reverses.
The exhibit is advertised as "Edward Hopper/the ordinary, made
extraordinary." But no one can make the ordinary, breathtaking beauty of
life extraordinary; it already is. We need only be aware of it to have it
break through the everydayness. But we couldn't bear its light full-on.
That's why we have artists like Edward Hopper: to let us re-see the power of
the past without being blinded by it. They mediate for us, taming the world
the way the passage of time does.
Hopper's art has both power and stillness, which gives it a wordless
poignancy. Words become an intrusion even as I jot them down in front of a
painting like "New York Movie," 1939, with its solitary usherette lost in
her own vision so apart from the cellulose one on the screen. Or the
sovereign, sunlit silence of the early morning light in "Seven A.M.," 1948.
The dark little shops in "Early Sunday Morning," 1930, are gone now, Hopper
once noted. Yet they remain, thanks to his eye.
This is what ritual rightly performed does; it makes the past not new, for
it is more familiar in these paintings than in our own minds, but present
again, evoked by another's talent. The artist is a kind of priest, giving
communion. We see and taste, and we are back where we have been. But thanks
to the artist, we can bear it. Just as we can stare at the sun through dark
glasses. The blinding glare is gone but the beauty is intensified.
Time as measured by the clock does not exist in this small space removed
from the city and the world and the war outside. We walk through this
gallery into our past. Hopper makes us all voyeurs, but not with ill intent.
It is not others whose past we violate but our own, opening up sweet memory
in the safety of art.