I thought a lot about Edward Hopper. So there are other people in the household, I notice online. The visual cantor of American solitude – and not loneliness, a tearful projection – speaks today to our isolated states with fortuitous emotion. But he still does this, pandemic or no pandemic. Loneliness is its great theme, symbolizing America: precarious identities in a country that is only abstractly a nation. “E pluribus unum”, a magnificent ideal, resonates every day throughout the country. Only the law – we are a group of lawyers – confers unity on the United States, which could reasonably be a Balkan of regional sovereignties if the civil war had not been so terrible as to remove this option, although ‘he is coming. Hopper’s region stretches from the Northeast, from New York to parts of New England, but his perceptions apply from coast to coast. Born in Nyack in 1882 and died in 1967 after living for half a century in an apartment on Washington Square, he could not have developed as he did in another culture. His subjects – atomized people, inauspicious places – are specific to his time. But his mature art, which took two decades to develop before solidifying in the 1920s, is timeless, or perhaps timeless: a series of freeze-dried, strangely revelatory moments.
Although described as a realist, Hopper is more properly a symbolist, investing the objective appearance with a tense and melancholy subjectivity. He was a competent draftsman and a masterful painter of light and shadow, but he ruthlessly subordinated aesthetic pleasure to the compact description – as dense as uranium – of things that responded to his feelings without exposing them. Almost all the houses he painted seem to me to be self-portraits, with moody windows and almost never a visible or, one should say, inviting door. If his photos sometimes seem clumsily forced, this is not a fault; it is the guarantee that he pushed the communicative capacities of painting to their limits, then a little beyond. It leaves us alone with our own loneliness, taking our breath away and not giving it back. Considering his human subjects as “lonely” escapes their truth. We might panic if we were to be those people, but – look! – they are doing well, however bleak their fate may be. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous slogan: “I can’t go on.” I will continue. Now delete the first sentence. With Hopper, continuing is not a choice.
I haven’t seen “Edward Hopper: A New Look at Landscape,” a major exhibition at the recently reopened Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland’s first modern art museum, outside Basel. I take his beautiful catalog, edited by the exhibition’s curator, Ulf Küster, as sufficient opportunity to reflect anew on the artist’s stubborn strength. I also draw on the memories we probably share of meeting “Nighthawks” (1942) and “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), but also, really, on anything that comes out of his hand. Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it remains visible, lodged in your mind. Reason, beyond demanding observation and authentic feeling, is an exceptional stylistic skill. Hopper was explicit about this, stating, in 1933: “I have tried to present my sensations in the most pleasant and impressive form possible for me. » Exasperated by questions about the meaning of his works, he rebuked an interviewer by exclaiming, “I’m after ME.” This remark reflects his debts to European romanticism and symbolism, which he absorbed in depth while eliminating any stylistic resemblance. Very well read, he read and reread German and French poetry of the 19th century all his life. His poetic liberties in a realistic mode refer to one of his favorite predecessors, Gustave Courbet. And a certain latent vehemence in Hopper reminds me of Théodore Géricault, except that it is attenuated by static views of dull realities. Hopper imported or smuggled certain emotional powers from European traditions to unforgiving American soil.
“Nightjars”, from 1942.
After studying in New York with Robert Henri and other tutors from the Ashcan School, who approached modernity with vernacular realism, he made three stays in Paris. There he imitated the minor Post-Impressionists with restless variations of tonal contrasts and offbeat compositions. Returning home, while supporting himself as a commercial illustrator, he found a path forward through printmaking. Heavily inked cows, railroad tracks and an unremarkable house in “American Landscape” (1920) presage a direction unlike any of his contemporaries. The closest he came was his mystical acquaintance, Charles Burchfield, whose ravishing treatments of unattractive Western New York sites have aged very well, informing today a trend among younger painters toward depiction powerful. Less imitable, Hopper never ceased to influence the thinking of, at the very least, later artists. William de Kooning, as Küster recounts in the catalog, praised him to an interviewer in 1959. De Kooning noted a striking effect of the crudely brushed woods in the background of “Cape Cod Morning” (1950), in which a woman is seen from the side, leaning in front of a picture window and looking at something beyond the right edge of the image: “The forest looks real, like a forest, like you turn it on and it’s there , as if you turned around and actually saw it. » This is absolutely true with Hopper: the being who becomes here, in the eye and mind of the viewer.
A catalog essay by David M. Lubin, an esteemed scholar of art history in relation to popular culture, makes a connection that I have often thought about myself: Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock. The Yankee painter and the British filmmaker present remarkable parallels as visual storytellers. Hitchcock, who had learned the American experience from scratch after immigrating to Hollywood in 1939 at the age of thirty-nine, recognized its influence. The Bates house in “Psycho” reproduces, with simplifications, the already suitably eerie Victorian era of Hopper’s “The House by the Railroad” (1925). Lubin focuses on suspenseful narrative tactics, which I would expand to cover methods of composition and aspects of temperament. Hitchcock scripted scenes and shots for his films. Hopper (incidentally an addicted movie buff) did the same for his paintings. I once had the opportunity to inspect a stack of studies he had done on paper. Some sheets only had rectangles drawn: looking for the right proportions for what he had in mind. Then there was a multitude of details with which he auditioned, in fact, particular body parts, architectural elements or other elements that would be integrated into dramatic wholes. He and Hitchcock aimed for the solidity and suddenness of visions that compress time in the service of a pre-imagined vision. Everyone knew the feeling – because they felt it – that the effort would trigger in the spectators.
Hitchcock shares with Hopper a predilection for discordant relationships between backgrounds and foregrounds in pictorial space: perhaps someone or something relatively innocuous is nearby and something less soothing comes along. found there. Lubin gives the example, from “From North to Northwest,” of the distant plane of crop dusting at work “where there are no crops.” In some of Hopper’s images of rural dwellings, woods (like those in “Cape Cod Morning”) or topographical formations subtly threaten human intrusion. But in Hitchcock, and in Hopper in particular, the unsettling relationship between the distant and the near is often reversed, and what is mysterious, even sinister, becomes identical to our point of view. What are we doing here seeing this? Voyeurism, the saddest excitement, can be suggested. The emotional tug of many of Hitchcock’s characters and all of Hopper’s characters requires them to be unaware that they are being watched. To see them is to take on a special responsibility. Hopper often produces unease even in deserted landscapes and views of buildings, as if capturing nature and defenseless habitation exposed to disarray, banality or misery. The New England coasts, lighthouses and sailboats he painted on summer excursions come off relatively easily. He loved them. But they too feel surprised, represented from strange viewing angles. No judgment is made on anyone or anything, one way or another. The mere fact of their existence is provocative enough. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” ask cosmologists. Hopper is all ears for the answer.
Politically, Hopper was “a sort of McKinley conservative,” his friend the novelist John Dos Passos remarked. The artist disdained the New Deal arts programs of the 1930s, seeing them as a cure for mediocrity. Interrupting a vacation on Cape Cod in 1940, he returned to New York to register to vote against Franklin Roosevelt. This orientation leaves no mark in his work that I can detect – Hopper’s artistic passion forbade trivialities of opinion – but it echoes a cautious individualism that might seem to refuse agreement on almost anything with almost anyone, with the exception of his painter wife, Josephine Nivison. Having first met as art students around 1905, they married in 1924 and formed a symbiotic unit. (Their closeness is strikingly reminiscent of Hitchcock’s strained and creative marriage to screenwriter Alma Reville.) Nivison oversaw a detailed record of all of Hopper’s works and served, at his insistence and with his consent, as his sole model when he painted nudes. She was as lively as he was taciturn. (She once joked that talking to him was like dropping a stone into a well and waiting to hear it hit, to no avail.) Hopper’s last painting, “Two Comedians” (1965), represents them both in commedia-dell’arte. costume of Pierrot and Pierrette on stage, saluting.
Nivison aside, or standing guard, Hopper’s independence seems absolute, repelling attempts to associate him with any other artist or social group. In this, it updates and transmits to the future the spirit of a paradigmatically American text, “Self-Reliance”, minus the optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The free and searching citizen has become one or another of the millions of people who wander around a continent without comfort. Can you pledge patriotic allegiance to a void? Hopper shows how, by exploring a condition in which, while apart, we belong together. You don’t have to like the idea, but, once you really experience this painter’s art, it’s as impossible to ignore as a stone in your shoe. ♦