He was also motivated by his work with Leslie Dektor, a Los Angeles collector for whom he has quietly acquired several Hopper paintings over the last decade. These conversations were part of the impetus for the show, Mr. “Bob has been talking about Hopper as long as I’ve known him.” “In discussions with photographers like Lee Friedlander and Robert Adams I was surprised by how often the name Edward Hopper has come up,” Mr. “It’s so Hopperesque, it’s hard to believe nobody has described the photograph that way before.”Īnd some of the living photographers in the show have been known to talk about Hopper with enthusiasm. Given her work organizing the Whitney’s recent William Eggleston retrospective, she “was especially struck by an Eggleston photograph of a man sitting on a bed in what looks like a motel room,” she said. Fraenkel’s pairings, which she glimpsed in early form before the show opened, compelling. “I’ve looked extensively at Arbus’s notebooks and appointment books,” she said, “and Hopper is just not a name that comes up.”īut Ms. Neither did Elisabeth Sussman, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, when reached by telephone. Fraenkel offered no biographical evidence that Arbus ever paid any attention to Hopper. “But in both of their pictures there is such a quality of loneliness.” “Hopper lived long enough to say, ‘I’m tired of the loneliness business,’ ” Mr. Stephen Shore, courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York ∲nd Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, Stephen Shore Credit. So how do we know with any certainty that Arbus, for one, was influenced by Hopper and not just attracted to some of the same homely subjects? If we believe Harold Bloom on “The Anxiety of Influence,” the most powerful artists take great pains to cover up their debts in the hope of making their own work seem supremely original. It’s as if one of the lone souls who populate Edward Hopper’s most famous diners has finished her coffee and gone home, to be captured by Arbus.īut artistic influence is a notoriously tricky argument to make, presuming for starters that a particular artist had an interest in or even knowledge of his or her predecessor. The sunlight pouring into the room ignores her. In one Diane Arbus photograph from 1963, a woman sits in an upholstered armchair that is slightly too large for her frame. Fraenkel’s selections are startling in their new context. ![]() Fraenkel quotes the British novelist Geoff Dyer as saying that Hopper “could claim to be the most influential American photographer of the 20th century even though he didn’t take any photographs.” ![]() Lady in a Rooming House Parlor, Albion, N.Y., Diane Arbus Credit. (Five of these artists were also in a 1992 show at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, on Hopper and photography.) The exhibition, “Edward Hopper & Company,” which opens on Thursday and runs through May 2, groups seven paintings and three sketches by Hopper with dozens of images by eight photographers, most of whom are represented by the gallery: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore. So for the 30th anniversary of the Fraenkel Gallery, the San Francisco photography dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel has assembled an ambitious show and an accompanying book to explore this terrain. And that’s not counting the generations of painters and advertising image makers who have wrestled with his influence.īut until now little attention has been paid to American photography’s relationship to Hopper. Literary critics have spotted his suspended or suspenseful narratives and themes of alienation and quiet desperation in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley and many others. ![]() ![]() SOMETIMES it seems as if all of American culture is Edward Hopper territory.įilm critics have recognized Hopper’s moody, shadowy visions in the stage sets of film noir and the backdrops of Hitchcock movies.
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