NGA

Mary Ellen and I went down to the National Gallery this morning to see the Edward Hopper and JMW Turner shows. I had been there with Abby early last week (for Hopper, not Turner) and went down again by myself a couple days later (to see both).

Hopper did, basically, two paintings:

• a watercolor of a big old Victorian house with peaks and porches or (almost the same thing) a big old lighthouse, and
• an oil of a lonely, alienated, marginalized person (or two or three).

Two paintings isn't much, but it's two more than most artists are ever able to create.

I don't care much for the watercolors. They're very nice pictures that I would give my soul to be able to paint, but, in the end, they're really just very nice pictures of buildings -- pictures that might look outstanding at the annual Vienna Art Society show, but hardly world class ART! I can't imagine anyone walking past them and being stopped short.

The "only-the-lonely" pictures are a different animal altogether. It's hard to imagine anyone walking past one and not saying "Whoa, there! Let me stop and take a look at this for a minute." I don't have any idea what Against Interpretation says, but I imagine it's this: You don't find a wonderful picture by analyzing it. You find a wonderful picture by walking by and saying 'Whoa, there! Let me stop and take a look at this for a minute.' And then you start analyzing.

It's hard not to be struck by the contrast in many of these paintings between the bright light and sometimes almost lurid colors, which would seem appropriate maybe for a carnival or a parade, and the lonely, alienated, marginalized person(s) in the painting. How does he make it work? I don't pretend to know, but I did notice today that in most of what strike me as his most successful pictures, he pushes the person down and off to the side -- literally marginalizing him (or, more frequently, her). More precisely, the person is below one of the principal diagonals. (In pictures with several people who appear to be estranged, one will be below the diagonal and the other above.)

All that notwithstanding, two of my favorite pictures have no people and the diagonal played no obvious role in their composition. Enjoy.

Click on an image for a larger view.

So much (not nearly enough) for Hopper. Turner, painting around 1800, was very strange. Most of his works were those giant dark oils of Important Events in (usually, military) HISTORY. But he also did some wonderful watercolors that were virtually abstractions -- and this was a good 30 years before Manet and Monet and Sisley and Renoir came along (whose work, by the way, is almost photographic in clarity when compared to late Turner). I'd like to post a few of these watercolors for you, but I've searched the web for at least 30 second without success. I'll leave it at this. If you're near DC, go check out the Turner exhibit. Most of the wonderful watercolors are in the last couple rooms.

Late addition: After the art galleries and before heading home, we drove up North Capitol Street to Rock Creek Cemetery so I could show Mary Ellen one of my favorite pieces of sculpture (brief info here):