Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Edward Hopper

Notes Towards a Definition of Edward Hopper

1. In December 1946 Edward Hopper showed a picture in the Whitney Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. The show was reviewed by Clement Greenberg — champion of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism — and he had this to say: “A special category of art should be devised for the kind of thing Hopper does. He is not a painter in the full sense; his means are second hand, shabby and impersonal … Hopper’s painting is essentially photography and it is literary in the way the best photography is … Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.” Greenberg’s facile nonsense is almost entertaining here — a fine example, as Chekhov saw it, of the critic as horse-fly bothering the quietly labouring artist—“buzzing,” Chekhov called the irritating noise, as if the critic were saying: “See, I can buzz too, buzz about anything.” But in the midst of Greenberg’s self-satisfied buzzing he is actually on to something. Hopper is, as anybody can see who has looked closely at the body of his work, a superb painter. He was also an excellent draughtsman, a dramatically innovative etcher and a watercolourist of fantastic ability. Compared to Jackson Pollock, for example — whose draughtsmanship is awesomely inept — Hopper’s talent is out of sight. Hopper was such a good painter that he deliberately decided to make his paintings look as if he were a bad painter.

2. There is a Hopper chalk drawing of his wife, Jo Nevinson Hopper, sitting on a bed, her knees raised with her arms loosely folded around them. It is a study for the painting Morning Sun (1952). The figure is surrounded by little scribbled notes that Hopper has written to himself. “Legs cooler than arms,” “cool reflections from sheets,” “cool blue-gray shadows,” “very light reflected light,” “warm shadows in ear,” “thighs cooler,” “light against wall shadow,” “brownish warm against cool,” “cool half-tone,” and so on. Light, cool, shadow: conceivably the absolute verbal reduction of a Hopper painting. But on this small drawing there are over twenty such memoranda: powerful evidence of the acuteness of his eye, his awareness of minute nuance. The painting itself is of a woman in a pink peignoir sitting on a sheeted bed staring out of a window on to a truncated cityscape. Only the top of a small terraced row of brownstones is visible and above them is a large expanse of washed-out blue sky. Through the open window morning sunlight streams, casting a wide panel of light on the featureless wall to the side of the bed and illuminating the pensive woman. Yet the finished painting is virtually without detail, its illusionary three-dimensionality (its depth-of-field) more notional than precise, giving the picture its trademark Hopperian stage-scenery feel.

3. A few random facts. Edward Hopper was an avid reader: according to his wife he “drank print.” He suffered from “chronic boredom” which often prevented him from working. He was also six feet five inches tall. Hopper was born in 1882 so by the time he left art school in 1905 he would have been fully grown. In the early twentieth century a man who was six foot five would be regarded as freakishly tall. For a self-conscious, shy individual such marked loftiness would have a significant effect on one’s comportment, on one’s self-consciousness and one’s attitude to fellow human beings. Some of Hopper’s reclusive, taciturn nature must be due to this fact: nobody likes to be stared at in the street, after all. Few artists have spoken less about their work but it’s significant, I think, that Hopper painted a picture of an isolated multi-storeyed apartment building and entitled it for a while as a “self-portrait.” He also strongly identified himself with the lighthouses he painted so often.

4. As a young man Hopper made three trips to Europe. In 1906/7 he spent some time in Paris (from October to August) and also visited London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. In 1909 he spent another four months in Paris (April-July). In 1910 he went to Paris, Madrid and Toledo during a short trip that began in May and ended on 1 July. When he returned to New York in 1910 it marked the end of his transatlantic voyages and he never left the USA (apart from the odd trip to Mexico) again. All in all he spent just over a year in Europe, most of it in Paris, but he was also drawn to Spain. Paris is a beautiful and memorable city and while he was there Hopper painted in what might be termed a recognizable post-Impressionist style. Yet his most remarkable painting of this early period is Soir Bleu (1914). A painted clown, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, sits on a cafe terrace attracting no curious stares from the other recognizably French drinkers around him. An American in Paris? A portrait of the artist? Whether it is or not, this painting is linked to the mature style both in mood and method. Hopper was a late developer: he sold his first painting at the age of thirty-one. His name was made with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. He developed his visual style and manner in his early forties and for the next four decades nothing really changed.

Hopper died in 1967 when he was two months short of his eighty-fifth birthday. He was born in a small town called Nyack some forty miles up the Hudson River from New York and almost all his life was lived in Manhattan (in Greenwich Village) or in Truro in Cape Cod. In his eighty-five years he spent approximately fifteen months in Europe, showing, after 1910, no serious inclination to return there. In these circumstances, to try to position him as somehow European in spirit takes tendentious effort. It would be more appropriate to reconfigure Augie March’s proud boast: “I am American, Nyack-born.” It seems the natural claim for Edward Hopper.

5. Hopper liked to paint buildings. The more angled the sunlight, at the beginning or the end of the day, the more obvious the building’s form and decoration — entablatures, friezes and architraves were picked out and defined by the longer shadows. His many watercolours of houses and Cape Cod street scenes are testimony to this straightforward aesthetic delight. In the composition it is the blockiness and mass of the houses that attract him and he uses the pigment as if it is poster paint, with a bold impasto effect that almost seems to fight against the medium. In his oils, however, buildings take on vaguer, more symbolic freight — their isolation in the landscape being the resonating feature. Unlike the water-colours, these buildings are not rendered with an architect’s knowing eye: they become simpler, cruder and sometimes the perspective of their walls and roof planes is deliberately slightly skewed.

6. Hopper was a realist, squarely positioned in the capacious and all-embracing tradition of figuration. But to claim, as Clement Greenberg does, that his work is “photographic” in some way is absurd. In his poem “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” Philip Larkin precisely describes what a photograph does:

But o, photography! As no art is,

Faithful and disappointing! That records

Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,

And will not censor blemishes …

“As no art is,/Faithful and disappointing” (my emphasis). Gail Levin, Hopper’s exemplary biographer, first wrote about him in a small book called Hopper’s Places (1985) where she juxtaposes, with as much exactitude as possible, photographs of the houses, landscapes and buildings with Hopper’s finished paintings. The book is a brilliant elucidation of Hopper’s working practice: it tells you so much about his purpose and ambition for his paintings and at the same time provides the most succinct and telling refutation of the photographic comparison. Hopper’s discerning, transforming eye — his stern aesthetic of simplification and reduction (Levin calls it: “his relentless parsimony of exclusions”) — is everywhere in evidence. Being “faithful” to what he sees is the last thing on his mind.

7. Our intellect is hard-wired to seek explanations and understanding. As the critic Frank Kermode commented, “We are programmed to prefer fulfilment to disappointment; the closed to the open.” When you look at a Hopper painting, particularly his peopled paintings, the urge to supply a narrative, to link a causal chain together, to place the image into a context — to “close” the picture — is very powerful. But all serious artists know that in reality life isn’t like that: at best we can interpret, not explain, and our interpretation will be subjective, not final. The plots in our lives never thin, they relentlessly thicken. There are any number of possible interpretations of Nighthawks for example, each one of them perfectly valid. Hopper knew that because he was painting realistic people in realistic settings — hotel lobbies, motel rooms, apartment buildings — the viewer would instinctively and inevitably attempt an interpretation of what they were doing there and what was going on. But to signal the impossibility of arriving at a true explanation he chose the blandest of titles: Office at Night, Office in a Small City, Automat. A rare exception to this rule is the late painting Excursion into Philosophy (1959) — a very un-Hopperian title. This painting, soused in sexual conflict, repression and disappointment prompted Jo Hopper to write to a friend: “It may be that Edward won’t stand for naming the new picture ‘Excursion into Philosophy.’ You know E. Hopper. He’ll call it ‘Sunlight on the Floor’ or something equally non-committal. But ‘Excursion into Philosophy’ is its true name, that’s how he referred to it himself & I grabbed right on to it as perfect.” Hopper knew exactly what he was doing with his scenes of isolated and alienated people and what emotions and feelings would be aroused by them but his titles were deliberately chosen to defeat the idea of any final interpretation. His great paintings remain fully “open.”

8. In 1948 during one of Hopper’s artistic blocks he and his wife went driving around Cape Cod looking for subjects to paint — in vain, as it turned out. “Nothing seemed to crystallize into a picture,” Jo Hopper wrote in her diary. Looking back over previous canvasses searching for inspiration, she added, “Only a few of them had been done from the fact. The fact is so much easier — than digging it out of one’s inner consciousness. It’s such a struggle.”

9. For the last six years I have probably looked more closely at actual Edward Hopper paintings than the work of any other artist. In New York, the Whitney Museum regularly displays about half a dozen of its large Hopper holding in its permanent collection. When I’m in New York, about three to four times a year, I walk past the Whitney at least twice a day: on several of those days I pop in and look at the Hoppers. Their allure never dulls and their integrity shines with iconic force in that institution.

What you immediately notice when you look at a Hopper oil up close (say six inches) is how laboriously the paint is applied and worked. There is nothing free-flowing, no agile brushstroking. There is a doggedness and flatness about the painted surface, a patient air of covering the canvas diligently. The effect, as I’ve mentioned above, is to make the paintings look almost amateurish in technique. If you look at how the grass is painted in Four-Lane Road no effort is made to render the blades of grass, to convey any tuftiness or differentiation in light and shade. He might as well be painting Astroturf. Similarly the trees in Gas are an amorphous lumpy mass with a lot of black mixed with the near uniform green. Time and again the great paintings illustrate this homogenizing, low-rent effect — the bleached grass in South Carolina Morning, the slab buildings in Approaching a City, the cow-pat hills in Western Motel. The technique looks clumsy, heavy-handed and homespun. It’s not quite paint-by-numbers but there is something automatic about the look: “grass is green,” “paint walls beige,” “shadows are purply-blue.” Hopper used a great deal of turpentine when he painted in oil. This simple parsimonious texture of his actual canvases explains why they reproduce so exceptionally well — nothing is really lost in the process apart from the evidence of how it is achieved.

The same qualities apply to his figures. His wife posed for all the women in his paintings but there is no sense that a portrait of Jo is ever being attempted. The raddled stripper in Girlie-Show, the buxom secretary in Office at Night, the woman reading in Chair Car barely register as individuals — they are more mannequins than people.

Why did Hopper subdue his manifest skills in this way? A glance at his preparatory sketches shows his tremendous facility, his confidence, his natural sense of composition. But everything in the finished painting seems designed to remove any indication of talent and ability. Faces are cartoonishly hybrid, poses are awkward, hands are badly rendered. It’s as if he wanted to be seen as a very average, not particularly gifted painter (he certainly convinced Clement Greenberg). He did not want his virtuosity to get in the way of the picture’s effect.

10. The late painting Rooms by the Sea (1951) exhibits this tendency at its most emphatic. The sea looks like it’s bad trompe l’oeil. The door of the room seems to open directly and impossibly on to the water. There is no sense of receding distance in the sky or of the horizon. Through another door we glimpse some furniture as featureless as a dentist’s waiting room. A wedge-shaped block of sunlight lights the floor and wall, and in the room beyond another lucent parallelogram mimics the first. The plaster wall is roughly, almost carelessly painted, short brush-strokes clearly visible. Such mundanity, such absence of brio. Sun, sea and shadow are all we have to go on. So how do we explain this painting’s enduring power to move and affect us? What abstract nouns brew in this refulgent atmosphere? Eternity? Solitude? Bliss? Transience? Emptiness? I suspect the answer lies in the individual viewer, but nothing in the painting, or its title, makes any overt effort to provoke portentousness.

11. One of the few remarks Hopper made about his work is very telling. Asked what made him choose a particular subject — a hotel lobby, a house in the dunes, a cinema usherette — Hopper said: “I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience.” This is another way of saying that his paintings are all about mood.

12. Wallace Stevens is a great American poet. He is “American” in the same sense that Hopper is “American”: they are both in their own way unique and uniquely a product of their country. No European poet is like Stevens even though Stevens’s work is replete with references to European civilization. Stevens, a deeply educated man who loved European culture, was even more stay-at-home than Hopper. He never left the USA at all.

Stevens wrote an essay entitled: “The Relations between Poetry and Painting.” In it, he states, “No poet can fail to recognize how often a detail, a propos or remark, in respect to painting, applies also to poetry.” A few pages further on he says, “The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.” This, it seems to me, is what is going on when we look at a Hopper painting. The “world about us” of the subject matter — the couple in a hotel room, a group of people in a night-time diner, the secretary in the office — is pervaded and invaded by the “world within us.” Hopper’s simple paintings encourage that interchange, what Stevens calls the “migratory passings to and fro, quickenings, Promethean liberations and discoveries.” Strong stuff with powerful after-effects. To provoke such Promethean liberations and discoveries with such studious, careful artlessness makes Hopper the great American painter of the twentieth century. Perhaps it makes him the Great American Painter, full stop.

2004