The Essential Edward Hopper

Here's a series of quick, savvy, entertaining books on artists and pop culture at a popular price. It's for readers who want easy access to information and who are turned off by art-world jargon.

With cutting-edge tone and text, these innovative, richly illustrated, compact books (6" x 6" gift size) are targeted at busy people who've heard of these much-discussed artists -- and who know that many people, for some reason, think these artists are important -- but honestly don't get what the big fuss is all about.

Abrams produces fine illustrated books with such major art institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre.

"Eerie silence, desolate houses, and blank-eyed individuals with frozen faces, stunned and fixed in time. Cold sunlight from some mysterious, otherworldly source. Unmoving bodies drained of passion and lonely people staring nowhere," writes author Justin Spring on the first page of this pocket-sized guide to one of America's favorite realist painters. "Welcome to Hopper's world."

Hopper's landscapes and interiors have affected everyone from noir film directors to the abstract expressionists. His paintings conveying the loneliness of contemporary life were painfully apt in the 1930s during the Great Depression--and they are still meaningful today. This book, one of the Essentials series of art books that offer the reader a quick and easy grounding in the work of a single artist, is also a surprisingly deep work thanks to the author. Spring can take a marriage like Edward and Jo Hopper's, which other writers have viewed as monumentally dysfunctional, and find what was good and enduring in it. He has a perfect grasp of Hopper's beauty as well as his strangeness, his voyeurism and his insistence on privacy, his asceticism, his love of culture, and his wanderlust. Spring also gives readers telling glimpses of scores of famous paintings, such as Nighthawks and A Woman in the Sun. Quoting Jo's note about the latter: "Cigarette and sad face of woman unlit." This is an excellent introduction to the art and the artist. --Peggy Moorman