"Edward Hopper,
the best-known American realist of the inter-war period,
once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come
out of nothing.' This offers a clue to interpreting the
work of an artist who was not only intensely private,
but who made solitude and introspection important themes
in his painting.
"He was born in the small Hudson River town of Nyack,
New York State, on 22 July 1882. His family were solidly
middle-class: his father owned a dry goods store where
the young Hopper sometimes worked after school. By 1899
he had already decided to become an artist, but his
parents persuaded him to begin by studying commercial
illustration because this seemed to offer a more secure
future. He first attended the New York School of
Illustrating (more obscure than its title suggests),
then in 1900 transferred to the New York School of Art.
Here the leading figure and chief instructor was William
Merritt Chase (1849-1916), an elegant imitator of
Sargent. He also worked under Robert Henri
(1869-1929), one of the fathers of American Realism - a
man whom he later described as 'the most influential
teacher I had', adding 'men didn't get much from Chase;
there were mostly women in the class.' Hopper was a slow
developer - he remained at the School of Art for seven
years, latterly undertaking some teaching work himself.
However, like the majority of the young American artists
of the time, he longed to study in France. With his
parents' help he finally left for Paris in October 1906.
This was an exciting moment in the history of the Modern
movement, but Hopper was to claim that its effect on him
was minimal:
Whom did I meet? Nobody. I'd heard of Gertrude
Stein, but I don't remember having heard of
Picasso at all. I used to go to the cafés at
night and sit and watch. I went to the theatre a
little. Paris had no great or immediate impact on
me.
"In addition to spending some months in Paris, he
visited London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. The
picture that seems to have impressed him most was
Rembrandt's
The Night Watch (in the Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam). Hopper was able to repeat his trip to Europe
in 1909 and 1910. On the second occasion he visited
Spain as well as France. After this, though he was to
remain a restless traveller, he never set foot in Europe
again. Yet its influence was to remain with him for a
long time: he was well read in French literature, and
could quote Verlaine in the original, as his future wife
discovered (he was surprised when she finished the
quotation for him). He said later: '[America] seemed
awfully crude and raw when I got back. It took me ten
years to get over Europe.' For some time his painting
was full of reminiscences of what he had seen abroad.
This tendency culminates in Soir Bleu of 1914,
a recollection of the Mi-Caréme carnival in Paris, and
one of the largest pictures Hopper ever painted. It
failed to attract any attention when he showed it in a
mixed exhibition in the following year, and it was this
failure which threw him back to working on the American
subjects with which his reputation is now associated. In
1913 Hopper made his first sale - a picture exhibited at
the Armory Show in New York which brought together
American artists and all the leading European
modernists. In 1920 he had his first solo exhibition, at
the Whitney Studio Club, but on this occasion none of
the paintings sold. He was already thirty-seven and
beginning to doubt if he would achieve any success as an
artist - he was still forced to earn a living as a
commercial illustrator. One way round this dilemma was
to make prints, for which at that time there was a
rising new market. These sold more readily than his
paintings, and Hopper then moved to making watercolours,
which sold more readily still.
"Hopper had settled in Greenwich Village, which was
to be his base for the rest of his life, and in 1923 he
renewed his friendship with a neighbour, Jo Nivison,
whom he had known when they were fellow students under
Chase and Henri. She was now forty; Hopper was
forty-two. In the following year they married. Their
long and complex relationship was to be the most
important of the artist's life. Fiercely loyal to her
husband, Jo felt in many respects oppressed by him. In
particular, she felt that he did nothing to encourage
her own development as a painter, but on the contrary
did everything to frustrate it. 'Ed,' she confided to
her diary, 'is the very centre of my universe... If I'm
on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I'm
not.' The couple often quarrelled fiercely (an early
subject of contention was Jo's devotion to her cat
Arthur, whom Hopper regarded as a rival for her
attention). Sometimes their rows exploded into physical
violence, and on one occasion, just before a trip to
Mexico, Jo bit Hopper's hand to the bone. On the other
hand, her presence was essential to his work, sometimes
literally so, since she now modelled for all the female
figures in his paintings, and was adept at enacting the
various roles he required.
"From the time of his marriage, Hopper's professional
fortunes changed. His second solo show, at the Rehn
Gallery in New York in 1924, was a sell-out. The
following year, he painted what is now generally
acknowledged to be his first fully mature picture,
The House by the Railroad. With its deliberate,
disciplined spareness, this is typical of what he was to
create thereafter. His paintings combine apparently
incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and
simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the
puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of
quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to
paint, for instance, could not have been more out of
fashion than it was in the mid-192OS, when he first
began to look at it seriously. Though his compositions
are supposedly realist they also make frequent use of
covert symbolism. Hopper's paintings have, in this
respect, been rather aptly compared to the realist plays
of Ibsen, a writer whom he admired.
"One of the themes of The House by the Railroad
is the loneliness of travel, and the Hoppers now began
to travel widely within the United States, as well as
going on trips to Mexico. Their mobility was made
possible by the fact that they were now sufficiently
prosperous to buy a car. This became another subject of
contention between the artist and his wife, since
Hopper, not a good driver himself, resisted Jo's wish to
learn to drive too. She did not acquire a driving
licence until 1936, and even then her husband was
extremely reluctant to allow her control of their
automobile.
"By this time Hopper, whose career, once it took off,
was surprisingly little affected by the Depression, had
become extremely well known. In 1929, he was included in
the Museum of Modern Art's second exhibition,
Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, and in 1930
The House by the Railroad entered the museum's
permanent collection, as a gift from the millionaire
collector Stephen Clark. In the same year, the Whitney
Museum bought Hopper's
Early Sunday Morning, its most expensive
purchase up to that time. In 1933 Hopper was given a
retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
This was followed, in 1950, by a fuller retrospective
show at the Whitney.
"Hopper became a pictorial poet who recorded the
starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he
expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for
example, in his pictures of
lighthouses and
harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was
his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing
deserted streets at night. Some paintings, such as
his celebrated image of a gas-station,
Gas (1940), even have elements which anticipate
Pop Art. Hopper once said: 'To me the most important
thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful
things are when you're travelling.'
"He painted
hotels, motels,
trains and highways, and also liked to paint the
public and semi-public places where people gathered:
restaurants,
theatres, cinemas and
offices wrote: 'With Hopper the whole
fabric of his art seems to be interwoven with his
personal character and manner of living.' When the link
between the outer world he observed and the inner world
of feeling and fantasy broke, Hopper found he was unable
to create.
"In particular, the rise of
Abstract Expressionism
- Text from
"Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists", by Edward
Lucie-Smith