KEY POINTS:
Modern art in the United States has everything from humanistic realism to bleak abstraction. Both extremes are on display in two impressive exhibitions. The National Gallery in Washington is hosting a huge retrospective of the work of Edward Hopper, the outstanding artist to emerge from the strongly realistic style that was one of the mainstreams of American art in the 1930s.
His work is very American and rare in European galleries. Hopper's concern was to show urban landscapes in their most commonplace manifestations. His buildings were often empty and lonely and the few people in them isolated. He painted with special attention to light effects that conferred a bleak atmosphere but it was gradually accepted that there was a highly individual view of truth in his work.
One of his paintings called Nighthawks has become almost iconic. It shows a lonely diner on an empty street corner late at night. There is vivid light in the bar where three customers sit: two men in suits and fedora hats, and a woman in a thin red dress. Outside, the streets are dark. Careful attention is given to the coffee machines and the little box on the bar that holds paper serviettes. It is selective realism. There is sparse detail of the street opposite the bar but lots of threatening shadows.
Hopper was far from being a one-painting artist as the exhibition makes abundantly clear. It also shows that the path to such paintings that sum up an urban way of life was a long one. Hopper studied in the US and Paris and absorbed much of the achievement of the Impressionist painting of light. He spent years as a commercial illustrator.
His first successes were as an etcher and watercolourist. The exhibition has many of his early watercolours, mostly done in Gloucester, Massachusetts. With these, he brings to life elaborate Victorian houses by conveying the light flickering over their verandahs, balconies and gables. But he also begins to paint lighthouses and isolated buildings on the coast. He becomes expert in using light and colour to convey a mood, especially of eeriness.
Back in New York, where he lived in the same apartment from 1913 until his death in 1967, he drew upon his pessimistic moodiness to paint empty streets and shops at night, offices and movie theatres. In these ordinary settings, he placed isolated figures lost in thought. If he pictured a movie house, the concentration was on a pensive usher who ignores the big screen. If he painted an automat - a fast food restaurant - it was with a woman solitary at a table, heavy-eyed and contemplative all of a piece with a radiator and reflected lights.
Paintings such as these catch the post-Depression mood of the late 30s. The harsh contrasts of light make a disquieting atmosphere that suggests life is often uncomfortable. One of the things the exhibition shows is that when Hopper moves to the edge of the city, painting such things as a gas station at night, there is often a dark grove of trees in the background, enigmatic and uninviting. Life in the urban light may be difficult but beyond it there is an even greater threat.
Nothing could be further from Hopper's melancholy realism than the geometric abstraction that peaked at the end of the 20th century. In the post-modern world, such work is often on a huge scale and needs an immense space to accommodate it. Most older galleries would be overwhelmed. A gallery near New York can cope.
An hour's train trip up the shores of the Hudson River brings you to a space called Dia: Beacon in the little town of Beacon. The art museum occupies a former box-printing factory built in 1929. Its huge galleries cover more than 73,000 sq m.
Typical of the artists on display is Dan Flavin who made his art from fluorescent tubes. A long gallery has dozens of his variants on a tower of vertical lights. Then there is Blinky Palermo with a roomful of paintings that explore the possibilities of rectangles of black and orange and red.
The artist whose work is most spectacular of all is Richard Serra. His work is made up of rolled plates of rusty brown steel conveying a sense of immense immovable weight. At Dia, the thick plates of steel are folded in on each other so they provide passageways leading to an inner core of absolute isolation.
The works are 6m high and encountering them from the outside is to be confronted with a monumental mass. Inside, as the steel walls close round, is a quite different experience of isolation and imprisonment. Curiously, the colour of the rusty steel provides some sort of comfort.
To see one such work would be impressive; to see three giant variations on the theme is overwhelming. The weight of their presence is powerful and in Dia they seem to belong in the space.
They are not the only monster work. There are large pieces by Donald Judd and Imi Knoebel and great stacks of felt by Joseph Beuys that would warm and comfort an army.
The work of Michael Heizer is, like Serra's, particularly suited to the vast floor areas. He is given a long hall and has made circular and rectangular pits. The immediate impression is fearful. You do not ponder the formal qualities of the work but the thought that if anything or anybody were to slip into them there would be no possibility of escape.
Seldom has abstract art shifted so decisively from relationships of shapes and material to the evocation of intense emotion. The shift is only possible because of the size of the work and its site in the immense spaces of Dia: Beacon.
