“Edward Hopper”
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
September 16, 2007-January 21, 2008
Edward Hopper’s paintings suffer from the same popular misconception that plagues the poems of Robert Frost: we feel that we know them. Hopper, like Frost, is a wholesome, all-American pastoralist, unfailingly accessible to the point of warm-fuzziness and quick to register pleasing, iconic images. One might think so, but look again. It took Lionel Trilling’s famous birthday toast to uncover the terrifying poet beneath Frost’s New England farmer façade. The National Gallery’s Hopper retrospective—which ranges from early etchings and watercolors to Hopper’s famous Chop Suey (1929) and Nighthawks (1942)—shows the painter as something more than a genial realist. His attractive surfaces and inviting use of color notwithstanding, something darker and considerably lonelier, in a word, something more modern, haunts the shadows.
Hopper’s work has a self-assured continuity, from his lamp-lit nudes in stark bedrooms, to the sun-streaked lighthouses of Maine, to New York interiors glimpsed from an elevated train, to couples caught mid-scene in offices and restaurants. All are situated in the (for Hopper) endlessly rewarding dynamic between vestigial and enigmatic narrative and the formal pleasures of form, color, and light as they inch toward abstraction. Perhaps the most striking instance of this is the late interior Sun in an Empty Room (1963), the ultimate extension of Hopper’s career-long ambition “to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” Its angled panels of light and shade recall de Chirico’s surrealist street scenes, in its ability to convey—as Judith A. Barter suggests in her fine catalogue essay—haunting emotion though architectural structure. (André Breton identified Hopper as one of only a few American artists who could approach the dreamlike quality of Surrealism.) Typically for Hopper, narrative tugs at the image, even in this vacant room, with its tenebrous corners and a single window through which we glimpse blown leaves. The spareness insinuates its own questions: Has someone moved? Where have they gone? Ought we to be here?
Hopper’s houses partake of the same impulse toward narrative, though the stories are never anything you can put your finger on. Like Hopper’s nudes, the houses are solitary creatures, always looking out, and the angled light passing over them reminds us that they have been looking (and will continue to keep watch) for some time, lost, as it were, in an endless reverie. Hopper’s figures (largely women for whom his wife, the painter Josephine Nivison, was the model) are similarly frozen, rendered as architectural elements around which Hopper’s wistful compositions take shape. Occasionally, Hopper’s melancholy tone is leavened by a welcome hint of comedy: Office at Night (1940) bursts with desolate sexuality much as its callipygian secretary threatens to burst from her tight blue dress, while Night Windows (1928) frames a posterior in a pink slip, as, through another window, a sheer curtain bellies in the breeze.
Some of Hopper’s best-loved scenes, such as Chop Suey and the equally famous New York Movie from 1939 (with its pensive usherette and swatch of movie screen), strike me as narrative-heavy. It’s not that there is a greater chance of our discovering what exactly is going on in these suggestive paintings; it’s that the eye-catching and painterly flourishes (the magnificent, brushy column in Movie, or the pale skin of the woman in the Chinese restaurant) are largely overwhelmed as the pictures strain toward, but never arrive at, story. The result is a kind of quiet portentousness that verges on the sentimental. Composition and narrative meld most seamlessly in pictures such as the justly iconic Nighthawks, where the still figures and looming coffee urns harmonize with the empty storefronts outside, all caught in a single indelible moment that feels as if it might go on forever—as, captured by Hopper’s extraordinary, evocative art, of course, it does.
The exhibion, which began at the MFA in Boston, will continue on to the Art Institute of Chicago (February 16–May 11, 2008). A catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Carol Troyen, Judith A. Barter, Janet L. Comey, Elliot Bostwick Davis, and Ellen E. Roberts, has been published by the Museum of Fine Arts.