CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/4/2013

Urgent Light: Hopper's 'Rooms by the Sea' Featured in the New York Times

In today's New York Times, staff critics select artworks from nearby museum collections that capture light, refer to it, or generate it, and can 'spark interest and brighten eyes' during the darkest days of winter. Ken Johnson chose Edward Hopper's 1951 painting, "Rooms by the Sea," reproduced here from D.A.P.'s stunning survey, Edward Hopper. Johnson writes, "The light in many of Hopper's paintings appears overdetermined, as much psychological as natural. In "Rooms by the Sea" (1951), one of his strangest paintings, it is especially urgent and borderline surrealistic… Like the proximity of the water, something is alarming about how the light penetrates the room. You might imagine yourself seeing through the eyes of someone in a state of crisis, caught between the ordinariness of the sitting room to the left and the yawning, implacably inhuman space to the right, from which comes a frightening inrush of glaring, transpersonal energy. If that seems an overly dramatic reading, consider this: Hopper’s record book from the time refers to the painting as 'Rooms by the Sea. Alias the Jumping Off Place.' He was advised that the second title had 'malignant overtones.'"