The exhibition has only been open for months, yet it’s only tonight that I finally made it to the Hopper exhibition at Tate Modern, and it closes on Sunday
Outside Blackfriars station I overtook someone who looked suspiciously like TV’s Kate Humble (Gia’s bête noir) as I headed towards the Millennium Bridge.
Of course I had ignored all the adverts that implored me to book in advance, so despite arriving at 7.30pm my timed ticket was not until 9.00pm. I found myself a sofa to sit on and read, since despite the Hopper exhibition being open until 10.00pm, nothing else was.
I’m not quite sure what it is that makes interesting people wander up to me to quite the extent that they do, but this evening I had an elderly gent showing me the lid of a box that his father had fashioned from a 600 year-old piece of oak taken from a building at the turn of the last century.
As I waited for the clock to tick around to 9.00pm I was annoyed to see Kate Humble (for it was indeed her) and her companion troop past me, evidently with 8.00pm tickets!
Fortunately, they’re not too strict about their timed tickets at the Tate, and I got in fifteen minutes early. And it was certainly worth it.
Nighthawks is one of my all-time favourite pictures and it’s certainly the centrepiece of this exhibition, getting a room to itself with sketches to boot. There are loads of other pieces that I know well from various Hopper calendars that I’ve owned and a cheap Taschen book that I deliberately bought two copies of so that I could cut up one copy and still have the other. I think I can say that this is easily the art exhibition that I’ve recognised most pictures from before going.
Strangely I’d been having an argument with a colleague about how useless Steve Martin films have been of late. I say ‘argument’ but in fact we were in near agreement that he’s not really made a decent film since Roxanne (I mean who’s looking forward to the Pink Panther remake?). I mention this in passing since I have to take much of my antagonism towards the man back as he owns two Hoppers that found their way into this exhibition.
The most thanks for this exhibition must surely go to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York who seem to have lent the lion’s share of the paintings on display here. Now’s not the time to go and see their Hopper collection. Particularly since after the exhibition closes on Sunday (told you I was leaving it until the last minute), it moves to Cologne until January.
The biggest disappointment was the fact that so stupendously successful has this exhibition been, that they’ve sold out of nearly all their better merchandise. They’ve sold 200,000 catalogues and they’re not being reprinted, when it’s the norm for something like this for the catalogue to be available long after the exhibition’s gone – usually at a knockdown price. There were not even any postcards of Nighthawks available, let alone prints or posters. And no reprints are planned. I find this especially surprising since if they’ve sold out, they’ll surely go on selling, and I’m sure that the museum that owns the painting as well as the Tate could do with the profits.
As for the catalogue, I guess it’ll either have to be a German one or via Amazon.
Wonderful exhibition. Wish I’d gone sooner!