Icons of the West: Frederic Remington's Sculpture. - book reviews

Substantiating the artist's conviction that "the germ of the later work is always found in the earlier," Levin builds a strong argument for the interrelated qualities of his oeuvre by connecting his later works to tendencies evident in his early ones in the last two sections of the introductory essay: "Artistic Development" (restricted to the years 1893 to 1925 because "previous critical attention has been devoted to the works he produced after 1924") and "Themes." Throughout the text she relates individual works to broader issues. For example, she observes that Hopper's lifelong habit of attending theatrical performances, his signature depictions of lone figures in social places, the veiling of his female subjects in darkness, and the mate artist as voyeur of unsuspecting women are visible in Solitary Figure in a Theater, a small oil painting of c. 1902-04 (vol. 1, 83; vol. 3, 19, O-37). Levin's interpretation of Soir Bleu (O-191), an early, six-foot-wide masterwork of 1914, is particularly strong. She fully documents the work's connections to two hundred years of French painting, Symbolist poetry, and the xenophobic biases of Hopper's critics in the United States. She decodes the identity of its mysterious figures and also illuminates the themes of twilight, alienation, unobtainable love, voyeurism, and Hopper's nostalgia for his youthful sojourns to Paris.(10)

In order to gain fullest access to the depth and profound insights of Levin's scholarship, the reader must use the catalogue raisonne in conjunction with the biography. For example, in the biography, two pages based on Jo Hopper's diaries detail the creation of Rooms for Tourists (0-330) and also discuss her struggle to paint when Edward Hopper was energetically creating (379-81). These passages are not quoted in the catalogue raisonne.

In the twenty-five years since the Hopper Collection arrived at the Whitney, many in-depth, scholarly treatments on the artist have been published. In future Hopper publications, I urge both Levin and the Whitney to include condition reports for each entry and an essay on conservation, perhaps modeled after Susan Lake's and Judith Zilczer's essay on Willem de Kooning's works.(11) To enable owners and conservators of Hopper's works to implement optimal care, a record of recent conservation treatments is critically important. Curators and conservators in particular need condition reports, images of magnified cross-sections, infrared photographs and reflectograms, results of Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy of paint and resin samples, and image-digitizing records. Even the average reader would be interested in a summary of supports, pigments, solvents, varnishes, frames, technical methodology, studio practice, creative process, and the condition of Hopper's works in general.

I congratulate the author and publishers of the catalogue raisonne for creating the first such publication in CD-ROM format. As a reference tool in its present form, however, it is more difficult to use than a book. The reader may access the scholarly information - provenance, publication, and exhibition history through 1986, as well as relevant pages from the Record Books (reproduced for the first time) - and digitized images of the reproductions in the first three volumes.(12) Each frame of this CD-ROM is an electronic copy of a printed page, but the software has not fully utilized the interactive potential of electronic publication, and the pages are not easily searchable. For example, one can access data by a single field only and cannot "take notes" by cutting and pasting data to a personal file or rearrange data by various designations. And would it not be wonderful to hear Hopper's voice or the music to which he listened? Why can't we "walk" the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts to understand better how their geography informed his paintings? I would also like to escape, as Hopper did, to some of his favorite movies or theaters, even if only virtually. Nevertheless, because this CD-ROM is a prototype for electronic catalogues raisonnes and because technology that appears outmoded in 1997 was cutting-edge in 1993, when the software was originally written, these problems are understandable.