By Transcription

Collectors, critics and fellow artists crowded Manhattan's Whitney Museum one night last week to pay homage to a somber, solitary painter who stands among the nation's best. It was the opening of Edward Hopper's first full-scale retrospective show in 17 years. On the walls were 171 drawings, etchings, drypoints, watercolors and oils--enough to dizzy gallerygoers on a first visit and delight them on a second or third.

I nil mate & Exact. Such huge retrospectives are trials by fire for an artist. If he has been repetitious, the exhibition bores the viewer: if he has followed fashion, it dates the artist. If he is too slick, it sickens; if too sour, it disgusts. But Hopper, 67, is none of these things. "My aim in painting," he once wrote, "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature."

That sounded like a 19th Century ideal, and in a sense it was. To the free & easy followers of Matisse and Picasso, Hopper's realism seemed as harshly confining as a celluloid collar, but it had advantages. His devotion to nature kept him from being sour or repetitious, and his determination for "exact transcription" precluded fashionable slickness.

Hopper's chief study was the eastern U.S.--particularly Manhattan, where he spends his winters, and Cape Cod, where he goes each summer. Familiar things held him most: great buildings honeycombed with lonely rooms, stark streets emptied for the night, railway embankments, movie theaters, brightly lighted lunch rooms, waiting figures at the doors of isolated houses, gas stations on darkening highways, overgrown backyards, and beach cottages squatting haunch to haunch in the chill September wind.

Clear Memories. A high-domed, soft-spoken moose of a man, Hopper comes by such subjects hard; he never paints them unless they move him, averages less than three oils a year. The qualities that seem to move him most are loneliness and a bittersweet mixture of beauty with man-made ugliness.

Hopper did not hit his stride until he was past 40, and his matter-of-fact manner of putting paint on canvas still recalls his long apprenticeship as a hack illustrator; it has no dash, humor or surface charm. But a man who has taught himself to transcribe the shapes and weathers of a real world into pictures need not charm; he convinces.

As a painter of the American scene, Hopper has only one peer, Buffalo's Charles Burchfield. Like Burchfield, Hopper can make even eyesores magnificent. Shorn of irrelevant details, stripped of sentimental gloss, dismantled and recast in his canvases, they become monuments to their time.

Some visitors to the Whitney last week felt that they were not seeing pictures so much as remembering places--and that their memories had never been more clear.

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