The Realist at the Frontiers

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, a definitive Edward Hopper show

The Edward Hopper retrospective that opened last week at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art may well be the only incontestably great museum exhibition of work by an American artist in the past decade. The word great is crippled by hype these days, and perhaps it merely clouds what it seeks to praise; yet the qualities it suggests--patient, lucid development; the transcendence of mere talent; richness and density of meaning; and a deep sense of moral dignity in the artist's refraction of his own culture--are so evident in Hopper that no other word will really do. The show consists of nearly 400 paintings and drawings assembled by Gail Levin, who is curator of the Whitney's permanent Hopper collection. She has done so well that, without comparing Hopper to Cezanne as an artist, one may say that this exhibition is to the Whitney what the Cezanne show of 1977 was to the Museum of Modern Art: a fulfillment of the museum's very purpose, carried out at an exemplary level of curatorial skill and corporate support.

Hopper was 84 when he died in 1967, and to the end of his life he remained a somewhat misunderstood figure. The problem was not lack of fame or acceptance; he had plenty of both, at least in the U.S., and even the abstract painters (whose work he tended to see as a threat) respected his exceptional formal gifts. Rather, the misunderstanding lay in the nature of Hopper's Americanness.

Hopper belonged to the first generation of artists whose work voted for secession from Paris. In 1927 he stated his belief that "now or in the near future"--the caution was typical of the man--"American art should be weaned from its French mother." But by the end of the '30s, his aching, rigorous vision of American social isolation, the vacant brownstone windows and blowing curtains, the solitary coffee drinkers, the aloof houses robed in chalky light against the sky, had been assimilated, against his will, into something much coarser: the kill-Paris chauvinism of the "American Scene" painters, so that to inattentive critics it seemed all wrapped in the same nationalistic package.

"The thing that makes me so mad is the 'American Scene' business," Hopper told an interviewer in 1964. "I never tried to do the American scene as Benton and Curry and the Midwestern painters did. I think the American Scene painters caricatured America. I always wanted to do myself." Yet the idea that he was a cultural nationalist lingers to this day, and one still reads in current histories of American art such remarks as, "For Hopper, contact with Europe meant little, even though he visited Paris three times between 1906 and 1910."

In fact, contact with Europe was of immense importance to this strictly raised, diffident, beanpole son of a dry-goods storekeeper from Nyack, N.Y. Paris formed his work and gave him the confidence to deal with his specifically American motifs. By no stretch of the imagination could Hopper be called an avant-gardist. Not a canvas in the Whitney's show suggests the influence of cubism, let alone abstract art, although one might be able to detect some remote Fauve echo--perhaps through Albert Marquet, whose work he saw in Paris--in Hopper's fondness for relieving a low-toned background with a sudden distant poke of primary color: a coat, a flag or the red side of a brick chimney.

Yet if the poetic consistency of Hopper's vision now seems far more interesting than the unadventurous vanguardism of most "advanced" American painting in the '20s and '30s, that is partly because it was grounded in 19th century France: especially in Manet, whose work Hopper studied and copied. The sober painterliness of Hopper's style, its reliance on the single brush mark to enunciate form, came ultimately from Manet; so did his passion for meticulous truth of tone; and so, especially, did the "emptiness" of his compositions, with their emphatic blocks of shadow, their wide, flat planes of wall, sky or road, and their unfussy, reverberant light.

There were other influences too: Daumier for the dense, impacted drawing, a touch of caricaturists like Theophile Steinlen for the faces, and symbolist poetry for the emblematic moodiness of some of the scenes. Some of the most powerful aspects of Hopper's work came from outside the history of painting itself: from theater, whose devices of staging and lighting Hopper constantly invoked. Hopper's rooms and landscapes have a constant air of expectancy. When empty, they seem to have been just vacated by actors; when they are peopled, the figures are posed and lit as though by a director, and their casual "ordinariness," their lack of ostentatious drama, is itself a charade. (One of Levin's more interesting suggestions is that one of Hopper's best-known images, the row of empty-windowed shops raked by horizontal light in Early Sunday Morning, 1930, was probably derived from a Broadway theater set by Jo Mielziner.)

But to make an inventory of Hopper's sources does not explain either the quality of his paintings or their grip on the viewer. In part, these come from his sense of place and his unsparing, discreet eye for the truth of a scene. Anyone who has spent time on the sea knows that nothing, in terms of observation, is missing from his images of Truro on Cape Cod, like The Martha McKean of Wellfleet, 1944. From the humping blue of the water to the mild sun on the belly of the gaff-rigged sail, it is all there, immemorial, as permanent as the way the gulls face into the light.

For the same reasons, his great city paintings like Nighthawks, 1942, are by now as solid a fixture of the American imagination as the novels of Raymond Chandler. Hopper's European contemporaries, especially in Weimar, Germany, had also dealt with this theme: the city as condenser of loneliness. But none of them did it with the same etiquette of feeling. Hopper had no expressionist instincts at all. He sensed, but did not agonize over, a profound solitude, a leaning toward Thanatos that lay at the core of American optimism. Although he was the first painter to deal with it, he was not the first American to do so. The natural text for Hopper's city painting had been written by Melville in the first pages of Moby Dick: "Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries ... But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?"

Time and again, Hopper's work insists in its characteristically modest way that these green fields have gone, or, at least, are going; that having run out of external frontiers, Americans were faced by an impassable frontier within the self, so that the man of action had been replaced by the watcher, or voyeur, whose act of watching included the creative functions or "eye" of the artist. One is company, two is a crowd: such is the implied mot to. This, perhaps, is why one senses so in tense a bond between Hopper and his apparently aloof, disconnected human subjects. The distance between the self and the other was bridged by an acute feeling of common predicament--a much more valuable thing than the compassion routinely expected of social-realist painters in the '30s.

Hopper never lost his grasp of the poetic possibilities of such utterances. It stayed with him right to the end and produced some miraculously unsparing images, notably the figure of his wife Jo, A Woman in the Sun, 1961, standing like a middle-aged caryatid on a plinth of golden light in the bare Hopperian room, wearing nothing but a cigarette. In it, the distances between wall and wall, window and sky, or the lit edge of the curtain and the worn radiant torso, take on something of the strangeness of the space in a good De Chirico. The body is enfolded by its own distances from the world, while planted solidly in a real bedroom. By the same token, the realism of the scene is also an appeal--though a subliminal one--to art history: Jo facing the August light of Truro recalls any number of quattrocento Annunciations.

Hopper, one learns from Levin's catalogue, used to carry a worn quotation from Goethe everywhere with him, in his wallet. As well he might have done: for his paintings are (in the words of Goethe's title) Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, the dignified utterances of a near genius whose modest attachment to the commonplace freed him from triviality, though not from doubt.

--By Robert Huges

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