MUSEUM BINGE, pt2, THE HOPPER

The Hopper at the Hirshhorn. Image via DG Studios

You can find the Hopper, but it’s a hard find.

The information guy at the National Gallery said he had a Hopper laying around,  but “it’s in storage until renovations are finished.

There’s one in the Hirshhorn.”

The what?

It’s a round building near the Air and Space, so after following a tour of Wright Bros to the moon shot, why not head over?

After a walk through The Final Frontier I’d forgotten about the Hopper, besides modern art and the Hopper don’t to match.

Since the Hirshhorn’s a round building we took a lap, walked past a huge sculpture of a naked guy, then to another linked gallery and there it was:

The Hopper.

No Nighthawks at the Diner, the one that looks like the inspiration for The Sting starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, but I’m not complaining.

It had all the hallmarks from loneliness to depression, all wrapped up in a naked lady sitting on an upholstered chair looking out a window.

It looked like the room across the way from my hotel in Foggy Bottom.

Now my life is complete, as soon as I text my kids a picture of their mom next to the naked guy statue, sculpture.

To sharp readers, art is fun if you make it fun, and what’s more fun than haunting adult children with a sense of humor in art galleries?

The Hopper and I had a moment, then I reminded her she’s in front of an open window.

She said mind my own business and get out of the frame.

Fine.

“American realist painter Edward Hopper transformed mundane scenes of the city and its inhabitants into haunting visions of the existential isolation of modern life. “Eleven A.M.” (1926) introduced the themes of personal anonymity and detachment that would recur in many of Hopper’s later paintings. Such images may be regarded as expressions of loneliness, but Hopper welcomed solitude and intended his figures to embody complex emotional symbolism.      

On view in Masterworks from the Hirshhorn Collection!”