To paraphrase what a friend once told me, the problem of New York is the curse of riches; there is just too much to see and do. In Portland for example, major art exhibitions come to town just once or twice a year. In New York, there are twenty or more going on at any given moment. If you’re only in town for a few days, and can hit just one or two shows at most, how do you choose which are most worthy of your admission fee of 10-20 dollars?

In my case, I weighed my options carefully, and settled on the Whitney. To celebrate their 75th anniversary, they are showing some favorite works from their permanent collection, including a generous helping of works by Edward Hopper. You know Hopper, even if you don’t know you know him. Easily Hopper’s most famous work is Nighthawks from 1942 (Boilerplate: Images on this page are copyrighted and are reproduced below under the fair use provisions of United States copyright law).


Even I forgot the name of the painting until I looked it up yesterday. Unfortunately, Nighthawks is not at the Whitney. What I did see was this:



And this:


The audio commentary told me that Hopper’s works evoke a sense of solitude, which yeah, I get that. Frequently there is a single subject in a detailed setting, or no subject at all. Some pictures seemed to show a person in a private, unguarded moment, Some gave me the feeling I was seeing something I shouldn't, like I was an intruder. At one point, the commentary told me Edward Hopper was 6’4” (1.93m). He was a very large man, and never quite fit into his world. His paintings reflect the sense of awkwardness he must have felt, which again, I hear that.

The rest of the exhibit was divided into three major periods of American art: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism. The Pop Art was cool. With the help of the audio commentary, I “got” Andy Warhol for the first time. The Abstract expressionists bothered me, and as for Minimalism, there wasn’t much to it. It’s funny that last year I saw some very similar works at the SFMOMA and thought they were pretty cool. This time they just left me cold. [shrug] Don’t know why.

After leaving the museum, I found a coffee shop nearby where I had my second ever Reuben sandwich (pastrami, sauerkraut & Swiss on rye), and had just enough time to get down to the Film Forum in the Village for a 3:15 showing of Fratricide, a movie about Kurdish immigrants living in Germany. It’s beautiful but gut-wrenching, in a very literal way at times. This film will never play in Seoul in a million years, and that’s exactly the kind of film I’ve been wanting to see while I’m visiting my home country. I was going to get into a whole thing about screen quotas and the (perhaps) unintended side-effect it has of cutting off the Korean nation from the wealth of international cinema that is available out there. Remind me to say more about that another time.

So it was a good day, I learned a lot, and I think Edward Hopper might be my new favorite artist.