I go through the memories of these people: no one laughs, no one makes a grimace. It is the same with the furnishings. There is scarcely a wrinkle, and even the curbside grass lacks character. No, in spite of his Paris studies at the start of the 20th century, Edward Hopper is no Impressionist. He is an intellectual constructor, and his models constitute figures in a drama of ideas, where they are perpetually bared and clothed and moved around.

Quite simply, they are included as stage props together with the typical armchairs, beds, gasoline pumps and bar-lamps. This is not, however, delineated in a dry manner as with Magritte (both had beginnings as illustrators), but with surprisingly atmospheric painting. And in glowing colors! When the artist placed light on canvas - peculiarly glaring, even phosphorescent, and with abstract shadow effects - he succeeded in making the existential drama reappear on canvas after canvas.

In 1996, a Hopper debate broke out at Dagens Nyheter. It centered on what had actually happened between the man and the woman in the painting 'Room in New York'. The spontaneous viewpoints poured in and showed that Hopper's art excites all manner of people. I do not think that it depends on Hopper observers being made into voyeurs, as art criticism usually maintains. We are, rather, fellow actors in Hopper's scenes; we put on the masks, crawl into the bodies of men and women and test the lack of contact in those deserted hotel rooms lit at a slant by the sickly yellow streets. The impersonal sense gives the observer leeway, which is created precisely because the artist leaves his figures so undefined and in such strange situations. The suggestion is that we should believe and understand. But we understand nothing. In actuality, Hopper's oil paintings are steeped in small peculiarities. His watercolours are outdoor studies, but the oil paintings are strained and have a whiff of surrealism. The landscape stands empty, things are sucked toward the periphery, and the walls could be stage backdrops. The men handle gasoline pumps as though they were performing religious rites. The offices are painted into cult places, house facades resemble faces and faces look like facades. People read as though obsessed (Hopper himself studied Plato, Baudelaire and Freud) but no one touches or talks with each other. And all of the places seem temporary: always these knapsacks and travelers' rooms.

Edward Hopper himself traveled out onto the American highways as he painted from his Dodge. He traveled not alone, however, but with his wife, who was his permanent model and reminds one of Vilhelm Hammershøi's Ida. Jo Hopper was also an artist but was made to age, thicken, or diminish, all according to the man's painterly requirements. She remains a thing among other things- preferably painted from behind.

Hopper's successors are often men, and his art is certainly not feminist. That makes it no less magical. On the contrary: it is fascinating to see the veins of time constraints in this lifework, which, during the Depression, pre-war, and post-war periods, concerned something so eternal as the world as theater and the inability to find one's place in the culture. The key to Edward Hopper's art should indeed be looked for in the depicted tension between the progress-obsessed American modernism, the light of the theater, and the medieval English morality play 'Everyman'.

Translated by Steven Hahn

Ingela Lind is an art historian and critic, as well as a cultural news editor for Stockholm's influential daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. She has written and spoken extensively about painting, sculpture and film, including essays, articles, television presentations and public forums. Most recently, she served as one of the nominators for the 2004 Carnegie Art Awards for contemporary painting in the Nordic countries.