Light and Loneliness

By A.T. Baker

Like one of the telephone poles in the empty landscapes he used to paint, Edward Hopper looms lonely and somewhat isolated in the terrain of American art.

He was a remote, even a guarded man. An exacting curator of his own future collection, for the 84 years of his life he exhibited nothing that he did not choose to exhibit and showed his few visitors nothing he did not wish them to see. Thirty years ago, well before New York's Whitney Museum mounted its first Hopper retrospective, the show's director, Lloyd Goodrich (who is also Hopper's biographer), was shown meticulously kept logbooks that seemed to record all Hopper's important works, including data on when and where painted or exhibited, when and to whom sold.

A year after his death in 1968, his widow died. To the surprise of the art world, she bequeathed to the Whitney a vast new collection of Hoppers: some 2,000 paintings, watercolors, drawings and etchings that the painter had kept more or less private for years. Some were not dated, a few were not signed. It has taken over a year to sort and catalogue the works. The 157 pieces now on view at the museum are a remarkably complete and interesting study collection of the artist.

Impressionist Ambience. The Whitney show will not add much to Hopper's established reputation. But it does reveal a good deal about Hopper's interests and development, his slow trial-and-error manner of working, his exacting standards for himself and his relationship with the world. The son of a frustrated scholar turned dry-goods merchant, Hopper was born in Nyack, N.Y., in 1882. He read prodigiously in his father's library: English, French and Russian novelists, philosophers from Montaigne to Emerson. He was a loner almost from the start, perhaps because by the age of twelve he had sprouted to an awkward 6 ft. (full-grown, he was 6 ft. 4 in.). When he was 18, he enrolled in the New York School of Art, studying under Robert Henri, then a leader of the Ashcan School.

At 24, Hopper took off for Paris, returning twice in the next several years. Typically, he took no part in the Parisian whirl, where Picasso and Braque were busy trying to revolutionize painting. He remained a light-struck realist to the end of his days. His early work shows, however, that the shapes and, above all, the light of Paris, as well as the Impressionist ambience, did much for his eye and his palette. Back in the U.S., the attractive blur of Impressionism vanishes from his oils. The light flattens, shadows are sharper and more sculptural, forms grow increasingly solid and defined, as in The Dories, Ogunquit, which suggests that Hopper might even have picked up a notion or two from his contemporary, Marsden Hartley. But his paintings did not find customers. He sold one as a result of the 1913 Armory Show, but it took ten more years to sell and he was over 40 before he sold the second. He rubbed along doing magazine illustrations, and at one time had almost given up serious painting when, in 1915, he began to do etchings. An impressive example, presented at the Whitney, is a scene viewed from above, with a man walking a deserted city street, the shadow of a lamppost striking across his own lonely shadow. All fussy detail is suppressed; there is only stark image and a mood.

Such etchings sold, and thus encouraged, Hopper began to paint oils again and experiment with watercolors. He was also drawing from the nude at the Whitney Studio Club in Manhattan. The works of this period show he was a good draftsman who could depict a naked woman with an earthy sensuousness that Renoir might have approved. In the early '20s on a trip back to the New York School of Art, he became interested in Art Student Josephine Verstille Nivison, a small, vivid, thirtyish woman whose volubility and quick wit were the exact opposite of Hopper's quiet slowness. In 1924, when Hopper was 42, they married. From then on, she did nearly all the modeling for his nudes and other feminine figures. Perhaps it says something about their curious yet enduring relationship that his nudes--and indeed all his figures--thereafter became increasingly stiff and generalized.

Hopper's life was doubly isolated after marriage. Jo briskly set herself up as his defense against the world. During the rare interviews that Hopper granted, she did most of the talking. Once, excusing herself to go to the bathroom, she warned Hopper:

"Don't you dare say a thing until I get back--what would you do without me to protect you?"

Hopper bore these goings on with stoic tolerance, only occasionally interjecting in the midst of one of her conversational spasms a resigned "Oh, Jo." Mrs. Hopper had her own complaint. "Sometimes talking with Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn't thump when it hits bottom."

"I'm After Me." What the new show emphasizes again is that Hopper was not just a visual annotator. Though it is full of those notations--either discarded or incorporated and transformed into finished works. These pictures reveal an involved man painting his own condition.

"What are you after here?" Critic Brian O'Doherty once asked him, looking at a particularly austere painting called Sun in an Empty Room. "I'm after me," said Hopper. Hopper had originally placed a female figure in the room and then painted it out. The resulting picture is haunted by a sense of a presence that is not there, of a room that has just been left.

Hopper paintings are not to be taken as quaint studies of Cape Cod dunes or static scenes of raucous city life. No drinkers carouse at Hopper's bars, no oil-skinned fishermen haul Hopper's nets. He is an intense artist of the arrested moment, of the intermission between Act I and Act II of a play still being written. In general, there is no joy in the contemplation; the past seems full but futile, the future bleak but bearable. In the meantime, Hopper proposes the lean, almost unnoticed consolation of street lamplight on brownstone, of sunlight on lonely houses --and he paints the light and the loneliness as well as anyone has.

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