Edward Hopper - Tate Modern, London, 27 May - 5 Sept. (From 9 Oct. at Museum Ludwig, Cologne)

Certain artists create worlds. One of them is Edward Hopper. For sixty years he painted what we have come to regard as American modernism—with gasoline stations, gangster suits, railroads and highways. At the Tate Modern's new Hopper exhibition, I can see that he always grouped a few figures in rooms that resemble film and theater sets. Sometimes the men pose as Mafia bosses, sometimes as philosophers. The women are either naked or wearing short skirts and hats. But regardless of whether we stand in front of bars in New York, hotels or motels in little places in the Midwest, or white summer-houses at Cape Cod, the rooms represent the world before us. Hopper is usually described as the 'true American painter'. But his artistry is about something much greater: the world as theater.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) made his first breakthrough at the age of sixty when American pop culture hailed him as the pioneer of that style which moulded banality and commercialism into high art. In advertisements and films by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, the gray and withdrawn Hopper was transformed into a cult figure. But the exhibition at the Tate Modern (seventy works—and all of the finest quality!) now problemizes the notion of Hopper as the super-American road movie artist. And this is in eleven traditionally mounted rooms! When I went through them, Hopper actually felt just as related to the German 19th-century Romantic Caspar David Friedrich as to David Lynch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Dick Bengtsson or the later Jan Håfström.

The people in Friedrich's paintings form connecting links between heaven and earth. They are often painted from a darkened rear perspective, illuminated by a light that streams in from outside the painting. An admirer of Friedrich, Edward Hopper also painted his figures between a room and a view. But in spite of the light, Hopper's figures only escape from the emptiness. They do not succeed in connecting interior with exterior, in a metaphorical sense. For them, it seems that meaning itself has been lost, and sometimes their eyes are painted as holes and their faces as masks.

Caspar David Friedrich's 19th-century models stand motionless. The stillness, however, is not hopeless but imbued with wonder (the German Romantics saw nature as divine). Hopper's models, on the other hand, are a sort of mannequin. Their lifelessness is presented not with Dadaist machine metaphors, however, but as an inner death under a realistically rendered skin. They are mute and turned away, and are shown in rooms that resemble cages. They are missing an 'exterior'. The views are closed in or artificial, a sort of natural wallpaper. The windows are often shuttered, and the weak breeze that sometimes flutters a curtain feels more unsettling than fresh.