The ease with which he invaded our imaginations suggests that he was visually articulating the alienation and anomie already on everybody’s mind. But as familiar as we are with his images, Hopper is one of the most enigmatic figures in American culture. That is about to change. In September, art historian Gail Levin will publish her long-awaited Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (659 pages. Knopf. $35), the first biography, astonishingly, we have of this towering figure and a book crammed with telling revelations about its subject. Later this summer Levin will also publish her complete catalog of Hopper’s oils, watercolors and graphic work (Norton, $600), including an invaluable volume devoted to the commercial illustration work that Hopper churned out to pay the bills for almost half his life. New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art has mounted an exhibition of 59 major works by Hopper, accompanied by a mixed-media show, “Edward Hopper and the American Imagination.” On display through Oct. 15, the show is the first to try to give Hopper a context in the culture. It examines how he was influenced by the mass media of his time, particularly the movies, and how his sensibility in turn shaped the fiction and visual art of subsequent generations.
Taken together, the show, the biography and the compendious catalog constitute our most complete look yet at man who was never easy to know. The tall, dourly handsome Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, N.Y., a few miles up the Hudson River from New York City. By his 20s, he had become a creature of the New York art world, living and working in the same walk-up apartment on Washington Square from 1913 until his death at 85 in 1967. His art-school classmates included the painters George Bellows and Rockwell Kent, and all his life he hobnobbed with other artists, dealers, curators and patrons. But though there was nothing unsophisticated about Hopper intellectually– his taste in literature ran from Emerson to Gide– the rube in him ran deep. A big part of him never left the small-town life of Nyack. All his life, he ate in diners, wouldn’t take a taxi and voted Republican. He was an inveterate moviegoer and theater fan, but even after he made it financially, he always sat in the cheap seats. And figuratively speaking, that’s where he set up his easel. His paintings of apartment interiors seen from the street and offices and restaurants at night are the work of a perpetual outsider trying to make sense of an urban world.
Hopper was probably born glum, but his lack of success until he was middle-aged didn’t give him much reason to be otherwise. Until he was 40, he sold only one painting, at of all places the 1913 Armory Show that introduced America to European modernism. A long, sour, childless marriage to Jo Nivison only deepened his dyspeptic opinion of human relations. On this score, Levin’s biography greatly expands our understanding. The man that emerges from these pages is cold, manipulative and often cruel. According to the copious diaries kept by his wife, he belittled her own artistic efforts, and he bullied her, often physically. After two decades of marriage, she wrote, “It is congenitally impossible for him to recognize the existence & needs of any one but himself.”
The only problem with this portrait is that it depends almost exclusively on an unreliable witness. Hopper’s record keeper, his sole model and virtually his domestic slave, Jo Hopper was herself a working artist before their marriage. But as her career dwindled and Hopper’s accelerated, she grew bitter and vengeful. Through her extensive diaries, Levin lets her have the last word, but it’s unfortunate that Hopper left nothing of his own point of view.
Hopper’s reticence makes problems for the curators at the Whitney, too, when they try to place him in a cultural context. A lot of painters admired Hopper, including abstractionists like Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn, but not many painted like he did. Filmmakers adore him–his pictures look like film stills–but movies, especially film noir of the ’40s, influenced him a lot more than he influenced movies. Standing apart from every major movement, from cubism to pop, Hopper belongs to that oddball gang of great American artists who refused to join a club: figures such as Melville, Faulkner and the composer Charles Ives, loners who left gigantic artistic legacies but no legitimate heirs.
In Hopper’s world, no one embraces and no one laughs. There are no children-unless you count the baby carriage pushed by a nun in “New York Pavements”–and the legendary silence of his paintings is broken only once, by the woman yelling at the man in “Four Lane Road.” The chronic unhappiness of his life bleeds through every canvas. But the facts fail to fully explain what compelled Hopper to paint. (It didn’t come easily; he finished only three or four canvases a year.) When he declared, “What I wanted to do was only to paint sunlight on the side of a house,” he could be accused of disingenuousness–his work is more complicated than that–but it is a revealing comment.
If his pessimism dictated his chilly approach, his love of the light literally transforms the darkness. The dreariest objects and the saddest scenes glow with a fiercely theatrical light. Hopper’s people turn toward the sun as though it were the redeeming force in their lives. Baptizing his people with light was his way of saying that in looking there is a kind of grace. To look hard, the paintings argue, is the true task of the artist. Teaching us that lesson, he brought a whole country into focus.
