Homer, Hopper, and Alternate Realists

I landed at the Palmer House in Chicago a few weeks ago. I stayed over the weekend to catch some things. Rather than stop at the hotel restaurant for another $26.00 veggie egg white omelet after spending I don’t want to know how much on Belvedere on the rocks the night before, I headed out for a real egg and real bacon with real butter on real fake enriched white toast. Maybe some real potatoes too. I stepped out onto Monroe and went left, then went left again on State. I decided I would stop at the first real breakfast place I could find. Many blocks, Starbucks, Subways, MacDonalds, Au Bons later I took another left, discouraged and beaten down. I wandered, Jackson, Van Buren, Wells, and there it was. I finally found it a Chicago Institution of artery clogging breakfasts. I stepped into Billy Goats and ordered. I watched the cook pull the cooked bacon off the grill with the same latex gloved fingers he used to drop the raw stuff down. Puerto Rican girls came in asking if Papino was cooking their egg sandwiches. It went on for a while, a dramatic morning treat. I got what I wanted, stuffed the hash browns and toast into my already full mouth like the men in work getups around me. I still did not fit. They talked shop, baseball, and something about used tires. I headed down to Michigan for Homer meets Hopper at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This treat may have been better than my breakfast. There was a line way on down Michigan. The wait was two hours to get in for nonmembers. I tossed members only out in the late 80s and waited my turn. When noon rolled around and I got in for the real show, the line was like the procession at Lenin’s funeral. I shuffled along in line sandwiched between other viewers. I got a look at Homer’s water color work up close and began to appreciate the dabs of the brush. I saw the cut and paste of the figures he used and reused, but no PhotoShop for this guy, so who is to judge?
Homer was self taught and became so adept at his craft that he was illustrating for the biggest New York publications of his time. In an era where people were reading by candlelight at night, not masturbating on the internet, his use of watercolor was the most advanced of its day. Painterly with precision, fresh, spontaneous, close to impressionistic, but never losing its basic naturalism. Not content to merely illustrate and with his penchant for solitude driving him, he spent the last part of his life, living in and painting the coastal wilderness of Maine. His vast subject matter approached all activities of human existence during the 19th century, but his most powerful works convey man versus nature themes. He is still seen as a dominant influence on the American realist scene and was an artist that mastered the nature of his materials in a way that few artists do even today.
Then over to Hopper. This was another treat. Close up the brush work reveals layers of color, twist of brush hairs, to create the sense of light. And maybe not the sense of it, but actual light from the paint. Everyone around me focused on the images, the rooms, the woman. What does it mean? Who gives a rats ass about what does it mean. It’s art. From behind me a heads up: “Oh my God, the famous one. It’s called Nighthawks! Suzie!” Alright already. And at the end of the show, speculation about the empty room, the simplicity. Maybe the guy just got old and tired of people, the figures, the painting. Who knows? And who cares? The real action in Hopper’s work is close up, in the density of paint, the density of colors mixed extraordinarily on the canvas.
Hopper was a truly American painter whose incredibly individualistic works are benchmarks of American realism. His paintings embody a unique American 20th-century sensibility that is portrayed by isolation, melancholy, and loneliness. Perfectly characterized by vacant rooms and solitary buildings...
He made three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 (the year Homer died) but remained unaffected by the French and Spanish experiments in cubism going on at the time. He was influenced mainly by the great European realists— Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Edouard Manet and took from these artists what he needed for himself instead of relying on the hype of coming modernism.
Although one of Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little interest at that show. His paintings were committed to his own form of realism: compositional structure built on basic, large geometric forms; flat masses of color against less controlled paint; and the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals, diagonals as well as their powerful emotive presence. Hopper’s realism is from a dreamscape but not the unconscious surreal. It's a parallel universe where the content is from our space/time dimension but exists in the paintings as an alternate reality. An alternate realism is felt when viewing his work. And I argue a psycho-perceptual mind state that is experienced when viewing the work of artists that have truly come to understand their own reality.
The mob moved through, among them a few impatient buttinskis, noses in the air. I belched for the good of the order. Nose in the air buttinski backed away. Thank you Billy Goat Breakfast.
It was an extraordinary show. Keep in mind, my sweets, that Homer and Hopper had beginnings too. Hopper hit the sell out at the Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924—a realist of the inter-war period, I’ve read. This makes me really wonder about the San Diego Alternate Realists of our now endless war period. What is their place in history? Is Hutchison the Homer and Barrett the Hopper? The Klee? The Dali?