Looking at Hopper: An Art of Subtraction

...The exposition included academic landscapes reminiscent of salon art, idealized images of Russian workers and peasants, brutal icons of the new Aryan nationalism, neoclassical works by major modernists, and social protest paintings emerging from the Depression...

...Working like many modern writers, Hopper removed the story, the motive, the emotion, and the drama in order to suffuse his paintings with a different kind of subjectivity—exhilarating, menacing, or simply numbing, as the mood and subject possessed him...

...Hopper's work exemplifies Hemingway's famous "iceberg" theory of art, by which the little we can see is pregnant with all that remains submerged...

...The house is defined not just by its almost human isolation and its powerful mixture of sun and shadow but also by the painter's low angle of vision and by the railroad embankment that cuts off much of the lower floor, erases the foundation, and hems in the whole house...

...No, even in less puzzling and problematic scenes, Hopper has a way of setting up a barrier between us and the ordinary, as in "Room in New York" (1932), which lets us look in on a couple through the window of their apartment, to see him reading the newspaper and her absentmindedly fingering the piano...

...Never did a hotel room, though not at all shabby, seem more drably anonymous...

...Hopper's elision of narrative and his unusual way of saturating surfaces with light contribute to the sense of vacancy that heightens the ominous atmosphere of his work...

...The elusive subject of the Whitney show, never fully defined, was the archetypal Hopper, the painter whose desolate but strangely distanced images influenced the way we see the world around us...

...Admitting us conditionally, these windows tease us with the limits of what we can know about other people...

...Yet Hopper is also a painter who estranges us from the ordinary, who gives us expressionless people, their features stylized, simplified, or enigmatic, people striking stiff poses in settings over which they have seemingly little control...

...Hopper's blank-faced people are essentially gazing from nothing toward nothing, or at least toward nothing we can easily grasp...

...Compare Whitman's city, thronging with pedestrians jostling each other, with Hopper's city, as in the famous "Early Sunday Morning," a 1930 painting the shape of a widescreen movie still...

...By setting both a stone facade and a visual aperture between us and his scene, Hopper at once invites us in and keeps us at bay...

...the famous "Nighthawks," set in a late-night diner straight out of Hemingway...

...In Hopper we see a single continuous horizontal line of blank windows and darkened store fronts, in which the most distinctive presences are a barber's pole, a fire hydrant, and the long thin shadows they cast in the early morning light...

...Advanced critics, museum curators, art historians, and finally collectors and crowds turned hungry eyes toward the landscape painters of the Hudson River school, the major and minor American impressionists, and above all the craggy, idiosyncratic American realists—such isolated, brooding figures as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Edward Hopper...

...What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house...

...As Lloyd Goodrich, a pioneer Hopper critic, noted long ago, "There are no crowds in his city, no rushing traffic...

...The ultimate Hopper painting, of course, is the one in which the subject is the house itself, stripped of all human presence, or simply the geometrical patterns created by the light, as in the late, great "Sun in an Empty Room" (1963), to which John Hollander devoted an extraordinary poem in the catalogue of the Whitney exhibition, in which he evokes a place that "is full, so full, of vacancy...

...This is an art of closure and fragmentation...

...Instead he preferred the "simple visual honesty" of Winslow Homer and considered Eakins "our greatest American painter," at once objective and profoundly expressive...

...Yet what conveys this grimly is the brilliant light that surrounds them, with windows at both ends of the bed and large patches of sunlight on the wall and floor...

...Ordinarily we think of radiance and color as plenitude, but in Hopper this impersonal lushness highlights the human absence—or, in "Summer in the City," torments the human presence—the way the gorgeous mesh of language, say, of a writer like Nabokov draws attention to the truncated humanity of his characters...

...It's not loneliness and alienation, Hopper's supposed themes, but this inaccessibility that gives Hopper's work its strikingly modern feeling...

...Speaking personally, I can only recall that Hopper was the first painter to show me that modern painting need not be identified with abstraction, and that realism and abstraction 96 • DISSENT Hopper were anything but easy alternatives...

...I'm referring not simply to paintings that are deliberately, even amusingly enigmatic, like the late "Excursion Into Philosophy" (1959), which gives us the figure of a troubled man sitting on the edge of a bed beside an open book and a sleeping woman, cut off above the buttocks, in a room dominated by two rectangular patches of sunlight...

...He has often been acclaimed as the poet of the ordinary, the nondescript—the forerunner of photographers like Walker Evans—conCC) Copyright 1997 Morris Dickstein...

...The show risked turning Hopper into cliché by emphasizing the haunting Hopper "look" and the endless allusions to familiar paintings like "Nighthawks...

...Many of them, like the women in "Western Motel" and "New York Office" look so stiff that—far from softening or humanizing the geometrical severity of the scenes around them—they seem frozen into stone-like attitudes, rarely revealing emotion, interacting with each other, or yielding any narrative of their behavior...

...Like "Route 6, Eastham," the painting, at once desolate and richly pictorial, offers us a remarkable mixture of vacancy and radiance...

...This kind of realism is simply an alternative strategy of modernism...

...We think of Hopper as a realist, a figurative painter who gives us a faithful rendition of the physical world, yet this does little to explain the aura of mystery in his work, the sense of detachment combined with almost spiritual intensity...

...In "Hotel By a Railroad," for example, a man looks out from a sparsely furnished room at a view so cramped—a bright piece of exterior wall, a sliver of window, a tiny segment of railroad track, the gray facade of a building beyond the tracks—that it makes his dim, featureless room seem airy by comparison...

...Around this questionable theme the museum assembled fifty-nine of his greatest and most resonant canvases, paintings I returned to again and again, seeking to fathom mysteries they stubbornly refused to divulge...

...and the late "New York Office" (1962...

...This is the Hopper who expands our field of vision to include the things we see every day...

...Yet the first thing that struck me about the Whitney show was how much richer the colors were than I remembered from 1980...

...A woman sits reading, but she seems scarcely connected to the man at the window...

...In "Summer in the City," a sort of companion piece to "Excursion Into Philosophy," we see a naked man sleeping and a woman, troubled, sitting at the edge of the bed as if to suggest some sexual unhappiness...

...In the television interview he gave to Brian O'Doherty near the end of his life, he fends off the familiar questions about solitude or alienation by emphasizing his goal of capturing the exact effects of light at a given time of day...

...This was Hopper as visual stereotype, a film noir Hopper validated by popular culture and vulgarized by advertising...

...Occasionally Hopper's figures will confront the light almost on equal terms, holding their own against the geometry of sun and shadow, like the women gazing beyond the edge of the canvas in "Morning Sun" (1952) and "A Woman in the Sun" (1961...

...This City now doth, like a garment, wear/ The beauty of the morning, silent, bare...

...The painter may have loved gray-toned, cheaply made urban movies like Marty and The Savage Eye, but only the mental landscape of his work is drab or impoverished, rarely the physical surface, where even the shadows are tonally luxurious...

...These framing effects are typical of Hopper's images of apartments, luncheonettes, storefronts, and offices, including the cartoonish "Night Windows" (1928), which shows us the rear end of a woman behind one of three bay windows...

...The window is wide open, the sun is shining, but the expressionless man might as well be staring into a void...

...Like many modernists, Hopper tried to eliminate the dead hand of Victorian psychology, of facile, conventional explanation...

...Hopper's windows serve not so much as revelations of people as separate, disjunctive planes that set up smaller units within the panel, enclosing and delimiting the scene rather than opening it up...

...This can be compared to the amputated fragments of urban architecture visible from the windows of his offices and hotel rooms, as in "Hotel by a Railroad," "New York Office," or "Office in a Small City...

...Hemingway's greatest stories, like "The Killers," which Hopper strongly admired, or "Big Two-Hearted River," are all aura, all suggestion: the "story" is merely the figurative ground from which all explanation has been subtracted...

...Hopper found many ways of turning depression into art...

...I don't want to paint people posturing and grimacing...

...Hopper reverses his usual procedure by giving us, instead of a pool of light surrounded by darkness, an area of darkness hemmed in by menacing light, in sharp geometrical formations, like an alien force presence intruding on a scene of obscure personal distress...

...To see Hopper's canvases beside work so spiritually dead, so empty of all authentic emotion was to understand both the expressive strength of his own kind of vacancy and his deep affinities with modernism...

...Hopper himself rejected these comparisons with abstract expressionism and detested abstract art...

...his paintings resist the narrative constructions we are tempted to foist upon them...

...The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gcorge A. Hearn Fund, 1953 (53.183) 94 • DISSENT Hopper modernist fashion that this is just a painting...

...Hopper uses such a truncated view to invest the scene with a strong sense of blockage, something we already feel in the room itself...

...Their novels come to us through a subjective prism—as highly accented testimony, not omniscient knowledge...

...An interesting essay could be written simply on truncated buildings in Hopper's work, including the famous "House by the Railroad," a piece of American Gothic said to have inspired Hitchcock's Psycho...

...Thanks to the success of the abstract expressionists after the war, Americans began to realize that they too had a world-class art, not simply a minor native vintage...

...Europeans have since come to understand Hopper far better...

...But the waning of abstraction in the 1960s also lent new prestige to figurative painting...

...More often, they will be dwarfed by the brilliant effects of light on the surfaces that surround them, as the figures in the doorway in "High Noon" (1949) or on the steps in "Summertime" (1943) merely highlight the luminous sun and shadow enveloping them, almost turning them into formal statuary, elements of the architectural pattern...

...The strangest context in which I ever saw Hopper's work was a huge Paris show about fifteen years ago called Les realismes, where his canvases were exhibited alongside specimens of Soviet and fascist art as 1930s reactions against international modernism...

...Despite the formal complexity of these layering effects, a sense of vacancy haunts us about Hopper's world: the country roads without any cars—as in "Route 6, Eastham"—the clumps of trees that appear like an undifferentiated darkness, the faces and personal histories that cannot be read, the city streets and railroad tracks that look like urban pastoral...

...All this seems to suggest that Hopper's work was always tending toward abstraction, something achieved only in the simplified forms, generalized figures, and diminished surfaces of his last phase...

...Unlike the classic painters who feel they can read the soul in the lines of the face, the arch of the back, the folds of the robe, Hopper achieved power by burrowing deep into his own isolation and exploring the limits of what we can know...

...But by placing a window within the picture frame, Hopper is not so much turning us into voyeurs as demonstrating in good Qffice in a Small City, oil on canvas...

...If 1996 was the year of Homer, with a huge retrospective of his work in Washington, Boston, and New York, then 1995 was the moment of Edward Hopper, marked by a major biography by Gail Levin, a fine brief commentary on his work by the poet Mark Strand, and a stunningly misconceived but revealing exhibition on "Edward Hopper and the American Imagination" at the Whitney Museum ofAmericanArt in New York...

...I thought I knew Hopper well from the great 1980 retrospective at the Whitney, but the new exhibit convinced me that many of the paintings—constantly surprising in their formal composition, their wealth of sensory details, and their knotty human enigmas— were virtually inexhaustible as objects of contemplation...

...The painting's stillness reminds me of Wordsworth's view of London from Westminster Bridge, another tranquil Sunday morning scene of rare calm at the heart of urban agitation...

...We know how important light was to Hopper and his paintings...

...A Hopper window is always a smaller panel that frames a scene and reflexively highlights its distant, self-conscious, and painterly qualities...

...the tiny "Stairway," "Office in a Small City," "Western Motel...

...I think I'm not very human," Hopper said...

...Crucially, the scene is framed by the masonry of the building, the square of the window—a rectangular pattern echoed by the paintings on the wall, the panels of the tall interior door, and the stonework to the left of the open window...

...Never did railroad tracks seem lass suggestive of movement...

...WINTER • 1997 • 97...

...Hopper's geometry of light may hint at transcendence, but his realism was a realism of limits...

...Instead of placing us in the scene, Hopper's framing, like Marlow's or Nick Carraway's storytelling, preserves the aura of mystery...

...it appears unpopulated—monumental, not dyWINTER • 1997 • 95 Hopper namic...

...Or the hauntingly strange "People in the Sun" (1960), with its group of formally dressed sunbathers arrayed on deck chairs yet staring out at an almost lunar landscape...

...But by grouping his paintings iconically—paintings of isolated buildings, for example, of people in offices and apartments, or of people staring eerily into bright sunlight— and trying to link them to too many American movies, poems, stories, and photographs, the Whitney show made him look narrower, more repetitive than he was...

...Hopper is one of the great lonely American originals, like the misunderstood Eakins and the even more reclusive Homer, who deliberately left us so little record of his life and opinions...

...In fact, it was partly inspired by the urban set for Elmer Rice's Street Scene...

...The visual openness of Hopper's paintings is often limited by the panels within them, the windows and walls that conceal as much as they reveal...

...The show made "realism" so elastic as to render it meaningless...

...Hopper himself loved peering through people's windows (from the elevated train, for example) to catch a fleeting glimpse of their lives...

...In the same way, the enigmatic reserve of Hopper's work, its minimalism and formal purity, contributes to its emotional intensity...

...WINTER • 1997 • 93 Hopper ferring unprecedented attention on gas stations, motel rooms, movie theaters, city streets and buildings, bare offices, late-night diners, clapboard houses, railroad tracks, empty fields, and deserted country roads...

...The architecture of the scene puts scrupulous emphasis on point of view, just as modern writers like James, Conrad, and Fitzgerald use observer-narrators to ground mysterious activities and fabulous characters...

...Hopper reportedly commented that the man "has been reading Plato rather late in life...

...Hopper's painting, like so many of the writers with whom his work reveals a strong kinship, is a realism of subtraction rather than abstraction, a leavingout business, a realism of diminishment, in much the way Hemingway and Kafka suggested more by the aura of what they left out than by the sharply etched details they put in...

...His is a uniquely accented realism, indebted to both Vermeer and Degas, never to be confused with photographic reproduction or genre painting...

...In these generically titled canvases, Hopper takes the point of view of the perennial outsider looking in, while his figures seem to be vacantly gazing out at abbreviated fragments of architecture or landscape...