I'm a big fan of the 'Exhibition on Screen' series of art films. Since 2012 it has given me the opportunity to visit many of the most important art exhibitions or collections of the great museums of the world without having to travel further than the hall of the cinematheque (which also has the role of an art cinema) in the city where I live. Many of these films were directed and/or produced by Phil Grabsky. The COVID-19 pandemic has led, among its many consequences, to the closing of art museums almost all over the world and the suspension or cancellation of exhibitions scheduled in 2020 and 2021. The joy of the return of museums and major exhibitions in our lives has been amplified by the resumption of the series 'Exhibition on Screen '. 'Hopper - An American Love Story' (2022) was, I believe, the first film in this series produced and released after the pandemic. For me, the joy was all the greater as the director is Grabsky and the film is dedicated to an American artist that I love, learn about and look for wherever I travel the world: Edward Hopper.
The documentary coincided with a major exhibition dedicated to 'Edward Hopper's New York' which took place at the Whitney Museum of Art in Manhattan between October 2022 and March 2023. Unlike other episodes of the 'Exhibition on Screen' series, however, this documentary doesn't take us to halls of the exhibition, which is not mentioned at all before the final credits. The subject of the exhibition on the screen is this time the person and the work as a whole of the painter. 'Hopper - An American Love Story' is closer to a classic biographical documentary film, following in chronological order the main stages of the painter's life and creation, filming in the places where he lived and traveled, using as visual material (also) works which were not exhibited at the Whitney and that documentary material exhibits from the memorial museum in Nyack (the place of his birth and childhood) and archival materials, including his wife's personal diaries. I enjoyed the commentary, belonging - as always in the 'Exhibition on Screen' episodes - to some of the most reputable and relevant experts on the topic. I learned many new things about the artist's biography, especially details related to the periods spent in Paris. Although he was there (on and off) for quite some time in the years after 1905, Hopper led a rather ascetic life in the company and hosting of religious female friends of his mother, and had no contact with either bohemian life or artistic revolutions of Fauvism, Cubism and abstract art that was happening at the other end of Paris in Montmartre (he lived in Montparnasse). Also new to me was an unhappy love story from the Parisian period, which seems to have influenced the rest of his romantic life. The connection with his wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, also occupied the important place in the film, as she had in the painter's life and work. I visited the memorial house in Nyack, where there is no Hopper painting, but some of his wife's work is on display. My estimation is that she was an artist of no inferior talent to him. Perhaps - being a woman - she would not have been able to reach the same level of celebrity, but he also would not have become what he became as an artist without the dedication and sacrifice of Josephine, who practically abandoned her career to support him.
The artistic commentaries on the various later phases of Hopper's work are solid without being very original. At just one moment we are invited to look from a new perspective at the famous loneliness of the characters in Hopper's paintings. Some comments about the artist's apparent political and social disengagement seemed a bit forced. Hopper was an artist who said what he had to say about the time he lived in through his mysterious work, which refused manifest art and explicit statements. His paintings, drawings and watercolors are an integral part of the image of 20th century America as it is imprinted in the collective historical and cultural memory. 'Exhibition on Screen' gives us yet another landmark documentary about a great artist.
