Born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, Edward Hopper developed a style of realist painting that art critic Rolf Günter Renner suggests revealed the limits that humanity and nature impose on each other. This tension is put into sharp relief in one of Hopper's best known paintings, Gas, 1940, which shows a lone attendant checking the pumps at a Mobil gas station bordered by woods. Hopper is perhaps most widely recognized for his Nighthawks (1942), a painting of two men and a woman late at night in a diner, which entered the popular realm as a poster, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," with the men transformed to James Dean and Humphrey Bogart, the counterman to Elvis Presley, and the woman to Marilyn Monroe. Hopper's figures in this and other paintings displayed an edginess and detachment from the moment, possibly in search of something grander. The poster commodified...