Widely seen to display a sort of inherent “American character,” the work of Edward Hopper seems damn close (perhaps damningly close) to earning him a title along the lines of America’s Painter. He’s popular enough now to give Norman Rockwell a run for his money.

The retrospective now showing in the MFA, Boston, amounts to a sort of “greatest hits” show. The placards explaining his art and career to museum-goers evoke the quality “American-ness,” and the usual nods are made to the pictures’ stillness, quietude, and laconic character—which apparently reflect that of their painter.

All of this can be easily tossed aside and the pictures allowed to speak for themselves. This is not just as it should be; it may be how it must be. That is, despite the information posted with the pictures and the 250-page exhibition catalog, Hopper seems to be less discussed than any major painter I can think of. An informal review of the art books I have on hand, including such common texts as H.H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art, include almost no serious mention of Hopper. He appears briefly, usually represented by one reproduction of a painting, and is merely name-checked along with other representational American painters — Grant Wood, say. (The exception is Robert Hughes’ American Visions in which Hopper is discussed at some length but, again, with the emphasis on the character of the painter as much as the paintings.)

And the choice of which painting to represent Hopper is instructive. While I expected most books to reproduce for the umpteenth time his most famous painting, Nighthawks (1942), the overwhelming choice was, instead, Gas (1940). (This painting is, unfortunately, not included in Boston though it will appear in both Washington and Chicago.)

Gas is especially important, I think, because it shows the art historical attempt to locate Hopper somewhere in the continuum of American art. This seems entirely retrospective to me, a kind of 20/20 art hindsight. Because Hopper’s most important images were painted at a time when abstraction was becoming the major mode of expression, his work might be seen as out of step. (It would be unfair, though, to state that Hopper’s work is not modern.) The choice of Gas to define Hopper is an after-the-fact link to the return of representational art via Pop Art, the gas station being a favorite subject of Pop and a typical American locale. And so we come full circle to the idea of a completely American art and a possible slide into kitsch: the Hopper vs Rockwell idea.

I find Hopper’s paintings, even those I thought I knew well, far more ambiguous in content than usually assumed. I did not experience these works as testaments to loneliness or alienation. The benefit of seeing his paintings in situ is to appreciate their scale (several canvases are larger than expected) and the painterly work that went into them. Hopper’s concerns—especially in his masterful watercolors—seem to me aesthetic, not psychological. While Hopper’s pictures have qualities that, the catalog informs us on the very first page, John Updike described as “calm, silent, stoic, luminous, classic,” these are not—despite the interpretive push in this direction—the only qualities in the works.

One can simply enjoy the pictures as pictures: architectural studies, ocean views, quiet streets. Hopper’s brazen use of blue—something that doesn’t come through in reproductions—is itself a “quality” just as important as any perceived psychological trait. While not exactly revelatory, there’s plenty of interest in this retrospective, if one leaves aside all the baggage and engages the work directly.

Hopper made some excellent etchings before moving full-time to painting, as this show reminded me. His most famous works, here presented in a room labeled “Icons,” may be less imposing than expected, the famous Nighthawks, in my view, especially so. Others, particularly later canvases, may be more impressive than expected. A favorite was the final work in the show, Sun In an Empty Room, painted in 1963. And Hopper could also produce the occasional clunker: Ground Swell (1939) seems a return to illustration, Hopper’s occupation before his success as a painter and a job we are told he “loathed.”

Hopper was a great American artist. Perhaps that is reason enough to think he exemplified the best of a particular “American-ness.”

Edward Hopper
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
through August 19

at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago
February 16–May 11, 2008

The story of Fletcher Hanks is one of those revisionist tales that historians of the arts have fallen in love with over the past 30-40 years or so.

As the academy was opened up to blacks and women, the standard story of the “history of art” had to be rewritten to allow their work to be assessed alongside typical “Western” art (even if they were making Western art). And as this revisionism took hold, anyone who was an “outsider” or “the other” could stake a claim (or more typically, have claims made on their behalf by historians and students of the arts) in art history. Henry Darger comes to mind, though I wish he didn’t.

In fact, entire bodies of work came under serious review for the first time, including comic books. (This coincided with the rise in comic book collecting as well as the appropriation of comic imagery by Pop artists.) Comic books themselves were an outsider arena: a disreputable hybrid of newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines, often published by fly-by-night operators. They’d been around 30 years before real work was done on the subject of “funny books.”

The process of revision has been ongoing and continues today. Case in point: the rescue from obscurity of Fletcher Hanks, most visibly in a new book edited by Paul Karasik.

First unearthed for contemporary audiences by Art Spegilman and Françoise Mouly for RAW magazine, Hanks is now celebrated in Karasik’s collection of 15 his stories.

Here’s an abbreviated example of Hanks’ rudimentary style:

Hanks worked only from around 1939-41, when comic books were still new and superheroes, as epitomized by Superman, had only just taken hold of the industry. Hanks fascinates because, in this early period when rival publishers struggled to fill pages with anything that might attract a reader and the superhero genre was not yet codified and solidified, his imagination was allowed to run amok.

Hence, crude but distintive art combined with a bizarre fixation on retributive justice meted out by weird superheroes became Hanks’ stock in trade.

One heroine, Fatomah, resembles a movie goddess — she’s actually goddess of the jungle, a real pulp throwback — until she calls upon her powers to stop and, indeed, destroy those who would harm the jungle and its inhabitants. At that point, her face becomes that of a skull, for no apparent reason.

His other major hero, Stardust (seen in the excerpt above), is more typically “superhero-ish” in appearance, with a nasty habit of showing up after the story’s criminals have caused destruction and death (quite gleefully depicted by Hanks) at which point he uses his almost unlimited powers — he can do whatever is needed to tell and then conclude a story, it seems — to punish the criminals in sometimes, um, unusual ways.

The appeal here is to the strange, the unfamiliar; to work that was created by an individual not by committee; to entertainment that has not been heavily edited or even well thought out; to small pleasures that pre-date present day product from multinational conglomerates. You can almost experience the illicit thrill kids may have felt reading this junk in 1940.

One can get a little carried away with this sort of thing, though. Fletcher’s Hanks’ work was also included in the recent anthology of obscure comics, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969. This collection, edited by Dan Nadel, includes artists who are not unknown at all, even if their creations are now forgotten by the general public. (By contrast, Hanks seems to have never had a public until recently.) For example, Garrett Price, brother of longtime New Yorker cartoonist George Price, is represented by his lyrical Sunday newspaper strip White Boy — which is justly celebrated at least in comics circles, and was featured in The Comics Journal a few years back. The book is also an example of a troubling trend toward making comics reprints into objects of art — and expensive. It was published by Abrams.

Though Art Out of Time is full of gems, not every unknown comic is a work of neglected genius. It’s too easy to fall into that trap, trying to one-up everybody else by finding the next great once-known unknown.

But unearthing the comics of Fletcher Hanks has been a service to fans of pure, unadulterated comic books.

Note: Follow the first link above for Fletcher Hanks resources, including stories to read online.

Purchase I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks at Amazon.

Originating at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and traveling later this year to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the show has been curated by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, chief curator of the PEM and a Jospeh Cornell expert. The works on display cover Cornell’s efforts in film, collage, and his famous box constructions.

With the exception of the films projected on a gallery wall, the scale of these works is very small, sometimes in the extreme. (The work pictured above is typical in appearance and size.) They are displayed behind glass in two types of cases spread over a number of rooms: tall cases in which the boxes and collages are lined up at about eye level, and lower displays allowing us to look down on — and sometimes into — a selection of Cornell artifacts.

Throughout the galleries the light is extremely low; a museum employee told me that was to protect the work from fading. Indeed, one construction had been lined in blue silk (seen in a digital reconstruction) now faded nearly white. With the preponderance of paper in all of the work, and odd techniques such as ink washes on glass, the precaution is certainly warranted, even as it creates a hushed atmosphere in contrast to the often playful and even humorous content of Cornell’s work.

And despite the Cracker Jacks prize elements of the show, the exhibit overall feels huge. As described by Dan L. Monroe, director of the PEM, it “includes 180 of Cornell’s finest box constructions, collages, films, dossiers, and graphic designs. More than 30 works are being shown for the first time.”

Therein lies the problem. It’s a big show of small objects. It is examples of craft at the scale of the artist’s hands that are now sealed off and preserved behind glass, untouchable. It’s work obsessed with stage lights, stars in the sky as well as movie stars, and birds in flight that has been unfortunately shrouded in gloom. It’s 180 instances of contradiction.

And, no offense to the artist, but it’s repetitious. It’s too much of a good thing. I began to think that Cornell’s work would be far, far better served if a few of his pieces were included in a group show or thematic overview. I think I’d enjoy the work more coming across it as one might find treasure in a junk shop.

There are pleasures to be had here, certainly. One box is full of little toy lobsters in tutus (Cornell sending up his own love of ballet). A box entitled An Image for Two Emil(y)ies from 1954 has an austere, formal beauty. (It’s a box broken into an array of slots, three up and four across, each filled with the same objects: a blue glass marble and, over that, a miniature globe for a hurricane lamp.) One wall is devoted to recreating what might be a table or bench from Cornell’s studio, strewn with his tools and raw materials. (The objects displayed did indeed come from the studio in his longtime home on Utopia Parkway in Queens, NY.)

I learned a few things: that Cornell was a Christian Scientist; that he was caretaker to a disabled brother; that he did commercial work as well, mostly for magazines like Harper’s Bazaar; that he knew and collaborated with Marcel Duchamp (though it is not a surprise to see his affiliation with the surrealists).

Yet, the exhibit cannot overcome the problems inherent in showing this work. Perhaps the “dossiers” illustrate this best. These are collections of related materials Cornell would place into specially constructed boxes, as in the dossier devoted to Victorian-era ballerinas, or even just pile into manila file folders, as in his files from time spent volunteering at a bird sanctuary. These are almost impossible to appreciate, especially the latter. It’s useless trying to make sense of what you’re seeing.

An irony, which I imagine Cornell might find amusing, is that his work is better explored in a DVD-ROM that comes with the book Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday. Here, one can open virtual Cornell boxes, pick up and move around tiny bottles from tiny Cornell apothecaries, and shuffle through even more Cornell items than are displayed at the PEM.

Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination
At the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Mass, through August 19

Note: There’s a stop-gap “catalog” of sorts available for the show but the full exhibition catalog will not appear until late this year as the show makes its way to San Francisco.