Edward Hopper

by Kirk Woodward 

[I commenced my art report on Edward Hopper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2007 by confessing, “I’m not really a fan of . . . Hopper.”  In his article on the artist and his work, my friend Kirk Woodward quotes my reasons for that feeling, then goes on to explain why his response differs from mine.

[Curious ROTters will find it interesting to look at my reports on Hopper’s art after reading Kirk’s “Edward Hopper” below.  Meanwhile, I’ll quote something else I wrote in “Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960.”  (Cross-references and links to these posts are provided in the afterword below.)

[These are comments I made regarding art and the responses I report when I write about what I’ve seen.  “Art—whether music, poetry, drama, or painting—means to me whatever I take from it, not what someone else tells me I should take from it,” I wrote.  I describe how I felt when I looked at a painting, say one of Hopper’s; I’m not making a definitive pronouncement about the art.

[That means I can’t tell someone else how to respond to a piece of art, either.  My responses are just that: my responses.  As I also said in “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA” (16 May 2019): “[M]y response to art isn’t analytical—I don’t know [the] rules in any case, since I’ve never studied art.  It’s purely emotional or psychological: I respond to a piece of art according to how it makes me feel.”

[As far as different responses to the same stimuli is concerned, this reminds me of something that happened on my 1980 trip to China (subject of my travel journal posted 24 December 2021-5 January 2022).  I explained that our meals in the People’s Republic were served “family style” (bowls of food for each table of 10-12 rather than individual plates).

[At one meal, after we’d begun to serve ourselves from the common bowls, one woman remarked that a particular dish was very spicy.  Another diner, a man traveling with his wife, didn’t think the dish was spicy at all.  I piped up that it was certainly spicy, but not heavily spiced.

[So three of us, eating from the same bowl, each had variant responses to the same stimulus.  Well, that’s what I see going on with Kirk’s and my responses to Hopper’s art.]

Visiting a friend in Norwich, New York, in a rented apartment one night with nothing to do, I picked up and started to glance through a book of reproductions of paintings by the American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967).

I had been cursorily familiar with a few of his paintings, particularly the famous Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois), a view of a coffeeshop in an empty urban street with four people inside, illuminated against the darkness. I knew Hopper as a painter of isolation and loneliness.

This is also how Rick sees Hopper. He has written about him three times in this blog (see the list in the afterword below). In “Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney,” he writes:

Hopper (1882-1967) doesn’t move me; I find his work cold and emotionless.  His lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and vacant.  Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.  I know that this is what Hopper’s fans find intriguing in his work, and it’s surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience. 

Our responses to works of art are subjective. As we will see, Rick is accurate about Hopper. We see the same paintings, and the same things in them.

What’s more, Rick has a great deal of familiarity with painting, and I don’t know much more about it than I learned in a college survey course, plus the usual exposure through museums and reproductions. My favorite painter, I may add, is El Greco – when I would go through Washington, DC, I would often go into the National Gallery, look at the El Grecos, and leave.

But up in New York State, looking at the book of Hopper reproductions one night, I suddenly found that they spoke to me in a remarkable way, and I want to try to indicate why that is so. It’s possible that his paintings are a bit like those drawings which if looked at one way show a duck and looked at another way show an old woman. Which do you see?

Absent illustrations, I will try to describe the paintings and their features as best I can, also indicating where they can be seen. Of course there are also a number of books of reproductions of his work, for example Edward Hopper: Masterpieces of Art (Rosalind Ormiston, 2016, Flame Tree Publishing). Seeing the paintings in person, of course, might give a different impression from seeing them in reproductions.

My thesis is that the view that Hopper’s subject is loneliness of the human condition is insufficient – that in fact the opposite may almost be true. However, I admit that a look at Hopper’s biography may seem to endorse rather than contradict Rick’s point of view.

Hopper, according to every description I’ve read, was the opposite of an outgoing sort of person. His life is easily summarized. He was born in Nyack, New York, by the Hudson River above New York City. His mother was an artist, his father ran a store, and both encouraged his interest in art.

He signed up for a correspondence school course in illustration when he was seventeen; his parents felt that being an illustrator offered a career he could fall back on if necessary. As we will see, I consider this early training very important. In any case, the following year he enrolled in the New York School of Art and Design, the forerunner of Parsons School of Design, where he did well and actually taught some in his later student years.

Graduating, he traveled to Europe, where he would go three times over the course of his career. He did not claim to be particularly influenced by the Impressionists, but he was clearly influenced by the work of Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and even more by Edgar Degas (1834-1917).

He learned etching, and for some years he made a living on illustration work and etchings, before his paintings began to sell. His career as a painter began slowly; he did not become a major success until he was forty-two. After that his paintings sold well and widely.

Hopper does not appear to have been an unpleasant person, but he was a man of few words, and like some other taciturn artists – Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) comes to mind – he married someone, in Hopper’s case an artist named Josephine (Jo) Nivison (1883-1968), who was as lively and outspoken (and funny) as he was not. She once said, “Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.”

They lived for the rest of their lives in an apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan, and when they could afford it they built a second home on Cape Cod, at South Truro. He painted to an advanced age, when his health became precarious.

An outwardly uneventful life, then – but one that produced quite eventful paintings. But of what kind? I want to point out several things that impress me, starting with the fact that he worked for years as an illustrator.

He disliked the work, but did it well, winning a prize for a recruiting poster he designed in World War I. It was titled “Smash the Hun” and showed a muscular worker swinging an enormous sledgehammer. Confronting him are three enemy soldiers, except that all we see of them, on the lower plane of the picture, are three bayonets pointing toward him, the tips of their blades – surprisingly – colored orange.

The lower part of the background is solid blue; then come a varied set of triangles representing heavy machinery, possibly for boat construction; and above them, out of a factory smokestack and into the sky, a vivid, solid, dynamic swirl of smoke.

An illustrator, if talented, learns to make a clear point in a striking way. Hopper disliked his years in the trade, but it served him well in his painting. What’s more, many of the important aspects of his later painting are represented in the poster – the geometric foundation of shapes, the unexpected angle of vision, the dynamic presentation of objects other than human beings (although in this illustration the human figure is also vividly presented).

Hopper’s training as an illustrator gives a special quality to many of his paintings, a kind of dry humor that one wouldn’t expect of him. For example, Gas (1940, Museum of Modern Art) at first glance is a picture of a solitary moment: a gas station at night, with a man – perhaps the owner? – wearing a suit vest but no jacket, doing something with one of three gas pumps lined up in a row.

We can’t see what the man is doing - his hands are hidden behind the closest of the pumps. Why is he there? Impossible to know, but much is going on around him. The windows of the gas station building are brightly lit, and their glow spills out onto the pavement. The three gas pumps are lined up in a row, the closest appearing the largest. Between the pumps and the building is a sign that reads “Mobil Gas.” The sign is more than twice as tall as the pumps.

But look at the painting slightly differently, the same way you might study a multiple image drawing. The three pumps, their tops, like heads, round, with tiny symbols where the eyes would be – and you might easily see three soldiers following a flag. I did, when I looked casually at a reproduction of the picture. The three gas tanks appear to be – sorry – “Mobil-ized.” They look like a little army, following a flag marching ahead of them.

Remembering that Hopper had extensive experience as an illustrator, I do not believe this secondary impression is an accident. Hopper seldom just sat down and painted; he spent a lot of time thinking about the angle of vision of each painting, as well as about its subject and style. Few of his paintings show the “obvious” view of their subjects. There’s always something particular in Hopper’s mind, and often it’s something just out of reach.

A famous example of this is House by the Railroad (1925, Museum of Modern Art). Many will recognize it immediately as the inspiration for the design of the Bates’ house in the movie Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). If you’re familiar with the film, you will recognize the house in the painting at once. To put it mildly, the houses in the film and in the painting both make an impression.

But what, exactly, made the house seem appropriate for such a terrifying movie? There’s nothing odd happening – certainly no people in the picture. But the more you look at the painting, the odder it seems.

The front door is both in shadow and indistinct, and its first floor columns might vaguely make one think of a row of insect feet. The windows seem to have personalities; the panes could be eyes, mostly empty, sometimes dark. Much of the front of the house is in shadow.

Most strikingly, the entire bottom of the picture is completely at odds with the rest – a three layer horizontal swath of dark brown, lighter brown, and red, representing a train track that seems remarkably close to the house. Since the painting appears to look at the house from a slightly lower vantage point, the bottom of the first floor is blocked by the track bed. The effect of the contrast is surprising – one might almost say violent.

My experience is that there’s always something going on in a Hopper painting, something I’d call “dramatic” in the sense that there’s a mystery about it, but a mystery embodied in the painting itself, not particularly in a narrative about people included in it. He has plenty of opportunities to show “human drama;” he just doesn’t want to.

A few examples: in Hotel Room (1931, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) a minimally dressed woman sits on a bed, holding a piece of paper in her hand. A goodbye note? A poem? A map? We can’t tell, and it’s not even clear that she’s reading the paper, which she holds horizontally rather than vertically. What stands out in the painting are about a dozen four-sided blocks of color, the largest two white and yellow, filling the frame; the entire background for the woman’s head is a brilliant white.

Similarly in New York Movie (1939, Museum of Modern Art) a blonde usherette leans against a wall, lit by a three-bulb lamp, biting her fingernail. Visually she is almost entirely overwhelmed , however, by the ornateness of the movie theater.

An indistinguishable movie is on the screen – what is it? Many of Hopper’s paintings have one element in them that raises a question that can’t be answered. But the usherette is not really the center of the “drama” – the movie theater is.

One more example: in High Noon (1949, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio) a slim woman in perhaps an open dressing gown stands in a doorway of a house, which we see straight on from the front. She is looking out the doorway, her head at a slight angle. The house is gleaming white.

However, the sky does not seem particularly bright; in fact, it looks cloudy, although the sun, out of the picture at the left although we can’t see it, is casting a strong shadow. Once we take in the elements of the painting, the effect is one of opposites. But why? The painting maintains its mystery.

My contention then is that there is plenty of drama in Hopper’s paintings, but it is “painterly” drama, arising from the elements of the picture itself and not from a human story of the kind one might write a scene or a short play about.

Some of his paintings illustrate this point easily. One of my favorites, The Mansard Roof (1923, Brooklyn Museum, New York), shows a many-surfaced three floor house framed by trees on the right and left. In the picture it’s a windy day, and curtains are flapping from the second (main) floor balcony.

By the time one has studied the picture from left to right, it has almost become an essay in pure depiction of motion, with a swirl of tree branches that is almost abstract. The painting seems alive. And in one third-floor window is (perhaps) a window shade that, in contrast to everything else in view, is bright yellow. A small mystery.

I used the words “almost abstract.” Hopper claimed not to be interested in Abstract Art, which Wikipedia describes as using “visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.” Nevertheless his work has strong affinities both with Impressionism, as I noted above, and also with Abstraction.

His “abstractions” tend to be firm, not vague, in outline. In Room in Brooklyn (1932, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), for example, we see a woman in a rocking chair, and on a table a vase of flowers. But what attracts – practically overwhelms – the eye are the many geometric forms that make up the window, the floor, the table, the buildings on the other side of the street.

Particularly interesting is a rectangular piece of “sunlight” on the floor in the painting, which stands out and comes as a surprise. Rick writes:                                                                        

He was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation. 

I agree with his observation, but obviously not with his conclusion. True, Hopper is greatly interested in light, in its sources and in how it falls, and he makes this a subject (I wouldn’t say a “study”) in his work. Light after all is central to sight, to appearance, even, in physics, to the nature of matter itself. He is particularly interested in the sources of light – where it comes from.

He is also meticulous in his placement of shadows. In fact, in many of his paintings they almost become presences in themselves, as significant as anything else in the painting. He may not emphasize the presence of human figures, although there are exceptions, but he demonstrates that there are other kinds of presences, shadows being one of them.

But Hopper doesn’t as a rule present light in the way the Impressionists would. He gives light not so much texture as shape. Shadows and areas of light in his paintings have structure, solidity, of a remarkable sturdiness. They have presence.

More than anything they remind me of the paintings of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who famously said, “I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums.” I have not found any reference where Hopper acknowledged Cezanne as an inspiration.

But physical objects in Hopper’s paintings are unmistakably there, as they are in Cezanne’s works, and a principal reason is his use of geometrical shapes to a degree close to abstraction. Much in his paintings is a collection of squares, triangles, circles, and so on.

Obviously he is not alone in this. But my point is that in Hopper’s paintings, things are as significant as people. Hopper has a story to tell – not a literal story, a pictorial one – and he tells it through objects. It’s a story told through his chosen medium of painting. His story doesn’t rely on human interrelationships as they present themselves as drama. It’s a story told in and through paint itself.

So my disagreement with Rick is really only with the idea that Hopper’s work is “cold.” It doesn’t seem cold to me – it seems to me to be vibrant in observation, dynamic in construction, deeply appreciative in observation, and alert to the possibilities of human communication, waiting for us to use.

And speaking of communication, one of the features of Hopper’s paintings that is so obvious as to be almost invisible, is the many ways he depicts means of communication. He seldom shows them as alive with drama – he simply reminds us that they exist.

In that sense, his paintings, far from devoid of human communication, are alive with it. In the pictures discussed in this article, we have seen references to coffee shops and stores – places where people gather; automobiles; railroad trains; letters; movies; the Mobil sign.

A quick glance through a book of reproductions of his paintings also shows electric signs; pictures; plays; clocks; window lettering; newspapers; books; telephone poles; antennae . . . in addition to scenes of human interaction, of which of course there are a number.

But, again, the drama is in the painting, not a situation the artist has painted. The colors and shapes that Hopper has put on canvas are integral to his meaning. An artist – in any of the arts – is constantly saying, “Look at that! Look at that!” Through Hopper’s eyes I “see” things I otherwise would not have seen.

In that apartment in Norwich, on the morning we were going to leave, I woke up while it was still dark. The window shade was up, and through the window I saw – a “Hopper painting!” Geometric shapes, a light casting shadows, a street not yet busy with cars, a phone pole with wires stretching out of the “frame,” an unlit sign on a factory wall, not yet readable. There it was, a Hopper. Thank you, sir.

My appreciation of Hopper changed when my perception of his work "clicked” and I saw it for the first time as a depiction not of isolated people so much as of a world waiting for relationships and stories. The result for me has been a greater appreciation of Hopper’s work, and even more, of the world around me.

[This is a perfect example of what I used to tell my writing students was how writing works.  In “Why Write” (4 March 2013), I said:

I used to explain to my students that writing is a kind of conversation in print.  One writer says something and another picks up the idea, or a part of it, and says something else, and so on.  That’s how new knowledge is created, I told them. 

[In this case, I wrote something about Hopper’s paintings, and Kirk took what I said and wrote something back.  Now I could take what he said and say something more--or someone else could.

[There are several mentions of comments I’ve written about Edward Hopper and his art on Rick On Theater.  Below are the cross-references to those posts.  First, here are the reports I posted on art exhibits that featured Hopper:

⠂ "Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery & Color Painting at the Whitney," 23 April 2019 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/04/hopper-and-turner-at-national-gallery.html)

⠂ "Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960," 12 June 2018 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/06/where-we-are-selections-from-whitneys.html)

⠂ "Short Takes: Some Art Shows," 17 June 2018 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/06/short-takes-some-art-shows.html); see the section on Edward Hopper 

[Kirk specifically discusses two of Hopper’s canvases about which I also wrote.  The first is Nighthawks, which I discuss in "Where We Are.”  With respect to the dramatic implications of the paintings, I wrote: “[Y]ou wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street.”

[(Curiously, Nighthawks also comes in for a pertinent mention in my report on Three Sisters on 29 April 2012.  In fact, there are occasional references to Hopper’s paintings in a number of my play reports on ROT.)

[In “Hopper and Turner at the National Gallery” (in the section of that report on the two NGA exhibits) I make similar remarks about New York Movie: “The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)—what’s she thinking about while the movie’s unreeling on the screen just out of her vision?”

[(In my report on Where We Are at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I relate the “stories” of some other Hopper works that are in that show.)

[Kirk also writes about Hopper’s relationship to Abstract art.  I also discuss this in "Hopper and Turner.”  (In the round-up of reviews of NGA’s Edward Hopper, following my report on the show itself, there are further observations by various reviewers and commentators on this subject.)

[Finally, Kirk writes extensively about Hopper’s use of shadow.  I hadn’t recalled this until I skimmed my old posts while prepping this post, but I did, too.  The discussions of Hopper’s paintings that include consideration of his emphasis on shadow are principally in “Hopper and Turner” (including, again, the review survey) and “Where We Are.”]