Hopper's concentration on a fact has the effect of lifting it out of context, clipping it from a continuum of past and future like a weighty time-exposure. Meaning is made inaccessable--as in some old uncaptioned newsphoto-- but it is still implied. His pictures deny meaning while they provoke it, pretend to a fimiliarity of recognition that they eventually frustrate. Mr. Hopper has made boredom epic, consecrated our moments of random inattention, baptized the raw scene with light, measured it with a grave, spatial geometry. His almost cruelly detached viewpoint, which has been compared to a lens, the eye of the voyeur, and the eye of God, hints at a moral bias one would not suspect unless one knew that his pessimism if often highly critical, and that his realism, like Zola's, is a sort of moral force. Brian O'Doherty, "Portrait: Edward Hopper," Art in America 52 (December 1964). Hopper's paintings are short, isolated moments of figuration that suggest the tone of what will follow just as they carry forward the tone of what preceded them. The tone but not the content. The implication but not the evidence. They are saturated with suggestion. The more theatrical or staged they are, the more they urge us to wonder what will happen next; the more lifelike, the more they urge us to construct a narrative of what became before. Mark Strand Hopper (New York: Ecco, 1994).