Edward Hopper and the American Hotel

“Maybe I am not very human—what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house,” Edward Hopper once said. The American artist had a knack of imbuing the most mundane scenes with a surrealism (those walls of angled sunlight!) that took the form of lingering melancholy. Though Hopper painted both public and private spaces, this is the first show to concentrate on his paintings of hospitality settings. Leave it to Hopper to locate the isolating element in travel—hotel rooms, the rotation of tenants, the loneliness in mobility. —E.C.