Hopper and The Strokes Of Midnight

Cubism, constructivism, utopian Bauhaus modernism, action painting -- all these passed him by. So did the leftist sympathies of his schoolmate Rockwell Kent, and Evans and Ben Shahn. A scholar asked him once, did his work have "social content?" "None whatsoever," he replied.

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He did respond to movies. Often, when unsure of what he ought to paint, he'd spend the day at a double feature. You can feel this in his pictures, in the brightness of their lighting, their unexpected points of view.

"New York Movie" is a memory retrieved from the Palace Theater in Times Square. It isn't just its subject -- the plush of the decor, the starlet-pretty usherette, the unclear black-and-white image on the screen -- that makes it cinematic. "Its spatial arrangement -- a near view on the right next to deep space on the left," as the gallery's label notes, "echoes a montage effect in film, juxtaposing a close-up and a shot into deep space to establish an association between the two."

Even "Early Sunday Morning" owes something to the movies. Its windows are like sprocket holes; it unrolls before your eyes like a strip of film.

Hollywood, in turn, has been borrowing from Hopper for the last 60 years. (The scary Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" seems to come straight from his art.) Hopper isn't "difficult." His work is representational, insistently American, easily accessible, and hugely popular as well. It's just the sort of art that many modern curators sniffily dismiss. Walt Disney and Rockwell have seldom been admitted to the grandest of museums (hey guys, the 20th century is over; you can't keep stiffing them forever), but Hopper gets a pass. His training was academic. He was never an avant-gardist. All his life, he distrusted pure abstraction and the tastemakers who pushed it. But that distrust was not returned.

Abstraction's champions loved him, as did everybody else. Even critic Clement Greenberg, who dismissed Hopper's methods as "second-hand, shabby, and impersonal," and thought him "simply . . . a bad painter," couldn't help but fall for him. Hopper's "House by the Railroad" was the first oil painting in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Hopper was no rebel. A Republican in politics, he was aesthetically and technically conservative as well. Still, something of his vision was curiously in sync with the abstraction of his time.

Jackson Pollock's skeins and webs, Mark Rothko's floating atmospheres and Agnes Martin's grids all form open fields into which the mind can drift. Hopper, in his plotless narratives, conjured endless spaces, too. Their enigmatic ambiguity opens up your mind. Is that slim, blond usherette remembering in agony, or yearning for a lover or merely bored? Your guess is good as mine.

"He seems in his paintings to be on the verge of telling a story," as John Updike has observed. But Hopper never quite gets there.

"Sun in an Empty Room" (1963), one of his last paintings, ends the exhibition. The soul of Hopper's art haunts that empty picture -- though the only thing we see is a window without glass and sunlight on a wall.

His brush is often clumsy, his portraiture unsure. This doesn't seem to matter. What matters is the stilled, uncanny spell his pictures cast. "Why I select certain subjects and not others," he once said, "I do not exactly know." Hopper had a medium's gift. What marks him as a master is the wondrous way he channeled the spirit of his time.

Edward Hopper is on exhibit in the National Gallery's East Building through Jan. 21. The 110-picture show, which opened in May at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, will then travel to the Art Institute of Chicago. Its Washington showing is supported by a grant from Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. The gallery, at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, is open Monday through Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sundays 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free.