• A large-scale retrospective of the paintings and works on paper of Edward Hopper is currently making the rounds of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (where it is up through August 19), Washington’s National Gallery of Art (Sept. 16-Jan. 21, 2008), and the Art Institute of Chicago (Feb. 16-May 11, 2008). Like all Hopper shows, it will be very, very popular. Hopper has long been one of America’s best-loved artists, a painter whose appeal is so broad-based that PBS is actually airing a documentary about his life and work narrated by the comedian-filmmaker Steve Martin—who is, sure enough, a Hopper collector. This popularity has always fascinated me, since Hopper is “accessible” only in the sense that his paintings are unambiguously representational. They are also bleak, private, and unsettling, all to a degree one would scarcely expect in so well-liked an artist.
Walter Wells’s Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper (Phaidon, 264 pp., $69.95) is a coffee-table monograph that has been published just in time to coincide with the new Hopper show. Lavishly illustrated and handsomely printed, it would be pleasing to behold even if Wells had nothing of interest to say about his subject. In fact, he writes observantly and well, which makes Silent Theater a useful pendant to Gail Levin’s detailed but hectoring 1995 biography of Hopper and his long-suffering wife-model. Among other things, Wells goes out of his way to point out that Hopper’s paintings aren’t always quite so grim as advertised: “While it is hard to miss the persistent silence, or the tensions, or the lonely melancholy in Hopper’s pictures, what remains underappreciated, it seems to me, is their occasional drollness.”
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A Failing UNIFIL
Noah Pollak of Azure has an informative summary of the problems with UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, whose ostensible mission is the disarmament of Hizballah and the pacification of southern Lebanon. UNIFIL was expanded to 14,000 troops last summer, but, as Pollak writes:
UNIFIL is but one of many of the United Nations’ failed efforts around the world—which do not need to be elaborated upon for readers of COMMENTARY. But the gravest failure among the U.N.’s initiatives in the Middle East has to be UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which for over five decades has kept the Palestinians in perpetual refugeehood when the vast majority of those Palestinians deemed “refugees” (the children and grandchildren of those who were displaced by the 1948 war) would not actually classify as such by the United Nations’ very own definition. I explored the problem of UNRWA—and suggested another source for its hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid money—several months ago here.