The pictures from Abu Ghraib are fated to join a peculiar class of objects and images for which someone coined the useful term Americana: the quintessential, familiar and recognisable stuff of US identity. Americans have a unique capacity for creating unforgettable visual icons, and here are another set, to join Marilyn, Elvis, the stars and stripes and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

Hopper was the first great painter of Americana, of the idiosyncratic rituals and customs of his country. A white lighthouse in dead sunlight, a forgotten mansion by the railroad tracks, a shirtsleeved figure at a tenement window - his America is shocking, perplexing and surreal.

Hopper's America is a cartoon country, caricatured, exaggerated, impossible, and real. He can paint the most banal moment in a Manhattan lunch room, where a waitress works in numbed solitude while the saddest collection of fruit in the history of art sits unwanted on a side counter, and say as much as TS Eliot in The Wasteland.

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