Art: GOLD FOR GOLD

A TALL famously reticent old man will stand up this week to receive one of the highest honors possible to U.S. artists: the Gold Medal for Painting presented by the National Institute of Arts and Letters.* Edward Hopper, 72, has been informed, to his great relief, that all he has to say on that great occasion is one word: “Thanks.” That, doubtless, is just what he will say. But “You’re welcome” would be more appropriate, for the award itself is a kind of thanks for something that could never be paid for in coin of the realm: a 24-carat contribution to American art. In an age when the younger generation of artists is plunging headlong into the fashionable mists of abstractionism, Hopper is a spearhead of the opposite tradition, that art should reflect the contemporary scene.

Ugliness & Grandeur. Hopper had the initial good luck to study with Robert Henri, the No. 1 professor of the “Ash Can School” (TIME, May 16), who inspired him to paint the world he saw as he saw it. At first, his vision of his world was too dour to please art .collectors, and in the course of 23 long years he sold only two paintings. But with the Depression, Hopper’s harsh, lonely ancbhard-bitter view-of America became-understandable to millions. Through the man-made ugliness he most often chose to paint, a raw but very human grandeur began to be felt, and his fame was made.

If Hopper’s street scenes, hotel lobbies, lunch counters, gas stations and movie houses never seem temples of the human spirit, they do look very much like what they are: expressions of human striving in all its disarray. The disarray, the occasional sordidness, are only pointed up by the pristine order and clarity of his composition. Hopper’s subject matter is almost invariably common, his art contrastingly austere. He presents common denominators in a monumental way.

Paint & Passion. Hopper first sketched Early Sunday Morning (opposite) on “Seventh Avenue, or maybe Eighth. They’ve torn the shops down since.” He did the oil in the small, tidy Washington Square studio where he has lived for 42 years. His wife, also an artist, poses for most of his figures, as she did for the woman in the window in Cape Cod Morning. “It’s a woman looking out to see if the weather’s good enough to hang out her wash,” she explains. “Did I say that?” Hopper rumbles in contradiction. “You’re making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she’s just looking out the window, just looking out the window.”

Hopper’s reference to Rockwell, one of the best living magazine illustrators, points up a side of his own work which draws sneers from younger, advance-guard painters. Illustration is anecdotal, as Hopper’s art is not; he avoids cute touches and tells no story. Yet because his sober realism is as different from the abstractionism now in fashion as it is from straight illustration, some abstractionists dismiss him as a mere illustrator. His pictures lack “paint quality,” they say, and indeed he does lay paint on canvas as dryly and flatly as any calendar painter. But Hopper’s purpose is not to seduce the eye with dribbles or explosions of paint-for-paint’s-sake; he makes paint subservient to vision. Showing, not showing off, is to him the important thing.

Together with a handful of contemporaries, notably Charles Sheeler and Charles Burchfield, Hopper maintains a tradition which fashion can slight yet never sink. It sometimes disguises a deeply poetic view of the world in deliberately prosy realism. Still, the poetry and the passion are there to sustain it.

-* Among the five previous recipients since 1909: John Singer Sargent and John Sloan.