Submitted For Your Perusal

“There are few American artists, or even artists period, whose work is as psychologically haunting as Hopper’s. In paintings such as Automat (1927) or Nighthawks (1942) one see quite clearly the results of American individualism: an isolation and pervasive melancholy that lurks underneath the surface bombast. Americans, I remember thinking, must be the loneliest people on earth; they just don’t know it. Certainly, no one managed to capture the soullessness of a life devoted to power and ‘success’ as well as Hopper did; and if, on an unconscious level, life in the United States was this bleak in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, what would his paintings look like, I wondered, if he were alive today?” —Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire