Hopper’s extraordinary 1929 canvas Chop Suey seems to catch two women in cloche hats during a pause in their conversation over tea in a second-floor Chinese restaurant. Gold late-day light slants in past the flashing “SUEY” sign outside. All the dynamic opposing angles give the composition a jazzy fractured Cubist vibe. And, wow, the colors — reds, oranges, and yellows punctuated by one woman’s form-fitting green sweater.

He returns to this red-green combo again and again, and that includes his 1942 masterpiece Nighthawks, the famous scene of four alienated people trapped in a No Exit diner. The restaurant is an oasis of acid artificial light on a deserted midnight Manhattan corner. A couple sit together at one end of the counter ignoring each other. Around the corner a guy sits alone, with his back to us. The counter man keeps himself busy at the right. Any conversation seems to have gone dead. The air is thick with dread, like the moment before everything goes wrong in a film noir.

At the height of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, Hopper seemed an anachronism, but today he’s clearly part of the American Scene realism that includes documentary photography by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. And he comes into focus as godfather to the staged photos of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Gregory Crewdson.

He was always fighting with what he called the “unwilling medium” of oil painting. At his best, his awkwardness embodies the emotional discomfort that powers his work. But not infrequently he’s simply ham-handed. His people often look like waxworks. He seems bored by foliage, scrubbing it in like a bad impression of Impressionism. His dramas can seem forced and campy. His technique went totally to shit somewhere around the end of World War II, when he was in his early 60s. The exhibit’s last room has late paintings that feel like “Hopper Paintings,” almost self-parodies.

But when he’s on, he gets us to put ourselves in his dramas, to identify with the isolation of his characters, the existential distance that buzzes between any two persons. It’s a wonderfully dark trap, with the hope for human connection forever frustrated because paintings never change.