The following article is from the Chronicle of Higher Education , published in print on Nov. 9, 2007. It provides a glimpse into the American psyche.Edward Hopper's Land of the Loner
By MICHAEL DIRDA
People never smile in the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Lonely men in shirt sleeves sit on the curb outside vacant stores, peering down at the cracked pavement ("Sunday," 1926), or they prop themselves upright in lawn chairs, beside deserted highways, and stare into the empty distance ("Four Lane Road," 1956). They show no emotion. Are they at the ends of their tethers? Or are they still looking for something out of life, something that has already passed, unseen? It's impossible to tell, for Hopper paintings tantalize, raise questions, and leave us speculating about the meaning of their mute dramas. Perched on a bed in which a half-nude woman lies asleep, a middle-age man looks simply ashen ("Excursion Into Philosophy," 1959). Is he stricken after what he has just done? Or at what he has failed to do?
In Hopper's world, women, too, are nearly always isolated, cut off from human contact; they often seem to be just waiting. Decked out in what seems her best outfit, a 1920s twentysomething sips coffee at night in a brightly lit diner ("Automat," 1927). She has taken the table closest to the door, kept on her hat and coat, and only removed the glove from the hand that lifts her cup. There is no one else around. Has she been stood up by her date, or is she, in the old phrase, all dressed up with no place to go? In another painting, a woman, her face in shadow, listlessly holds a piece of paper in her limp hands ("Hotel Room," 1931). Near the bed where she hunches in her underwear are suitcases, a dress, her hat. She looks disbelieving and resigned, like Rembrandt's emotion-weary Bathsheba, after learning that the infatuated King David has had her husband killed, or like Watteau's clown Gilles, paraded before us with the saddest face in the world. Perhaps the woman's lover has abandoned her — or is that slip of paper just a hotel bill that she cannot pay, or a schedule that reveals she has missed her bus? We will never know. But she exudes utter defeat. So too does the naked girl in the very early "Summer Interior" (1909), who sprawls like a broken doll on the floor next to a bed in disarray. Even the svelte usherette of "New York Movie" (1939), as beautiful as a caryatid in her sleek buttoned uniform, stands alone, hand against her cheek, solitary and removed from the excitement on the big screen.
"Only connect," said E.M. Forster, but this is just what the figures in Hopper's paintings cannot do. The young husband bends over his newspaper while his wife, elegantly dressed for a night on the town, distractedly looks away, fingering the keys of an upright piano ("Room in New York," 1932). In "Office at Night" (1940), a secretary turns from the filing cabinet, her dramatically tight skirt accenting her curves, but her boss at the nearby desk never glances up from his paperwork. In Hopper even the strutting stripper of "Girlie Show" (1941) — all pasties, G-string, and heavily rouged cheeks — looks into the ether rather than the faces of her unseen clientele. In "11 a.m." (1926), still another woman, naked except for her shoes, studies the street from her open apartment window. She might be a prostitute awaiting a customer, but I think that drained look is one that we all know: She just can't quite force herself to get up and face another day. Why bother? What's the point?
Just as these tableaux of human solitude refuse all histrionics and hyperbole, so Hopper's buildings — like Platonic archetypes — float serenely free of humanity's blight and busyness. Think of his New England barns and lighthouses, stark against the sky. City shops that seem as if they will always be closed for the night ("Drug Store," 1927). Deserted roadways and railroad yards. Entire streets in New York City suddenly bereft of human life ("Early Sunday Morning," 1930). One etching is forthrightly called "The Lonely House" (1923). Certainly no actual car will ever stop at Hopper's service station ("Gas," 1940) — the antiseptic pavement beside its pumps has never been stained with oil drips, and the sign merely lights up that dark road to the twilight zone. Only the seascapes — sailboats breasting the waves on sunny afternoons — seem buoyant with cheerfulness and hope.
Hopper has always seemed deeply, essentially American. For good or ill, cultures often gravitate to favorite themes or return again and again to particular obsessions. French art and literature cannot get enough of love; Russian fiction is haunted by God and the meaning of life and death; English writers value the claims of family and tradition above all. But America is the land of the loner. Ours is a nation of what Melville called "isolatoes," and our heroes are troubled pilgrims, solitaries, lost souls, and broken hearts. The darkness surrounds us. Oh, we may glad-hand at corporate barbecues and grin at family get-togethers, but in the still quiet of the empty hours, we are as anguished as Pascal confronting the silence of the stars. Emily Dickinson speaks of "my letter to the world / That never wrote to me"; F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds us that "in a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning," day after day; even Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt — the very epitome of the crass American businessman — confesses that in his entire life he was never able to do anything he truly wanted. We Americans yearn and yearn and usually for something we cannot even name. Happiness? Fulfillment? Redemption? No matter: Our hearts ache. "The mass of men," said Thoreau in his most famous sentence, "live lives of quiet desperation." Hank Williams sang our anthem: "I'm so lonesome I could cry."
Like all great artists, Hopper depicts not only an image of the world, he also communicates a state of mind — in his case, the sense that each of us is alone in an indifferent universe. Still, middle-class decorum is always preserved; there are no Edvard Munch-like screams of spiritual angst in these paintings and prints. Such control actually makes the despair all the more powerful, as in the contemporary photographs of Walker Evans, poems of Robert Frost, and urban chronicles of Joseph Mitchell. When we look at "Cape Cod Evening" (1939), the collie may romp in the tall timothy grass near the brightly illuminated house, but our eye is still drawn to the ominous, encroaching forest near by: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep." Certainly, Hopper's most famous painting, "Nighthawks" (1942), has become the very icon of film-noir stoicism. The all-night restaurant may be the clean, well-lighted place of Hemingway, a refuge from the deathly quiet of the street outside, but its fluorescent lights show faces that are lean and angular and hard. These are people who have looked steadily at the world, and they haven't seen much to smile about.
To visit the magnificent Edward Hopper show now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington — it originated in Boston and will travel next year to Chicago — is to recognize, all over again, how much this artist's images of isolation and introspection have entered into both our culture and our bloodstream. Alfred Hitchcock claimed that the ominous house in Psycho was inspired by "House by the Railroad" (1925). The famous etching "Night Shadows" (1921) captures the very essence of expressionist cinema in a single frame: the striding dark figure on the empty street, the looming buildings, the sickly light from an unseen street lamp, the unnaturally long and menacing shadows. Hopper doesn't exclude himself from this world of pensive separateness. Nearly every other picture represents what a solitary watcher might see, while gazing from the el into city apartments, while glancing out the side windows of a car on an early Sunday morning. Surely, most of us have at sometime waited in one of those bare-bones Hopper interiors — the cramped hotel lobby where strangers never quite meet ("Hotel Lobby," 1943); the coffee shops, motels, and bedrooms where people sit alone at twilight. Much of the painter's power derives from just this suggestion of temporary stasis, when everything is quiet, too quiet, and almost anything could happen in the next moment. A gunshot might break the silence. A white convertible might suddenly swerve into that gas station, and the driver, a blonde in a low-cut red dress, hurriedly whisper, "Hide me."
Looking at Hopper invites such melodramatic reverie, if only because so much of his work seems itself eerie and dreamlike. In "Rooms by the Sea" (1951), as surreal as a Magritte, a front-room door opens directly onto limitless ocean. In "People in the Sun" (1960), it seems uncanny that folks would sunbathe while dressed in their Sunday suits and formal dresses. Lined up in tightly ordered rows, they resemble robots or aliens who don't quite understand the ways of human beings. "Conference at Night" (1949), which depicts two weaselly men and a rather imperious woman, could easily be a scene from a cold-war spy thriller about the Red menace. The painting's first purchaser actually returned it for that reason: His wife was convinced it depicted the clandestine meeting of a communist cell. In several pictures — such as the sexy etching "Evening Wind" (1921), the stiffly hieratic painting "A Woman in the Sun" (1961), and the similar "Morning in a City" (1944) and "Morning Sun" (1952) — women leave their disheveled beds to present their naked bodies to the wind or the light. One thinks of Io ravished by Jupiter in the form of a cloud, of Mary and the Annunciation.
In American Visions (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), the critic Robert Hughes named Hopper and Jackson Pollock the two most original American painters of the past century. No argument. But Pollock's sublime abstractions will never haunt anyone's imagination. By contrast, Hopper's melancholy images have inspired an entire anthology of poems and stories, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination (Whitney Museum of American Art with W.W. Norton, 1995, edited by Deborah Lyons and Adam D. Weinberg). He is, after all, the most literary of painters, his work inviting extrapolation. So it seems appropriate that a poet, Mark Strand, has written one of the best books about Hopper (Hopper, Ecco Press, 1994), and that John Updike's two essays, in Still Looking (Knopf, 2005), remain the best short introduction to the artist's steely clarity about the human condition.
Even the DVD accompanying the National Gallery show is narrated by the actor Steve Martin, who reminds us at one point that scenes from his artsy movie Pennies from Heaven were modeled after Hopper images. ("Captain Upton's House," 1927, one of the paintings in the exhibition, is lent from the private collection of ... Steve Martin.) So too the modern German director Wim Wenders has testified to the influence of Hopper on his cinematic technique, particularly for the film The End of Violence (1997). Hopper spinoffs — in the form of posters, buttons, cards, T-shirts, screen savers — crop up everywhere in the cultural landscape. This fall the University of Maryland School of Music, in conjunction with the National Gallery, will present Later the Same Evening, an opera based on five of the major paintings. (See Page B17.) As for the parodies and pastiches of "Nighthawks," there is no end, though the most famous remains the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (1987), in which the four figures in the painting bear the faces of James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley.
Is there any doubt, then, that most people who care about serious art would name Edward Hopper as their favorite American painter? He's almost as beloved as Vermeer, another (albeit much warmer) artist of light and shadow.
Nonetheless, as I meandered through the National Gallery's exhibition, I began to wonder whether Hopper's popularity, this pervasive use and abuse of his imagery, might have retroactively corrupted the original paintings and prints. Can we still see "Nighthawks" without thinking of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"? As for those empty restaurants and deserted streets — are they now just hokey period pieces, familiar and all too obvious in their symbolism? Have the pictures lost touch with modern times? After all, our desperation is no longer so quiet. Today that young woman at the diner wouldn't be just sipping coffee — she'd be on her cellphone either calling or text-messaging her girlfriends, and whining: "I've been waiting here for 20 minutes. What a jerk!" The title for that picture of a brightly lit bed and breakfast would no longer be "Rooms for Tourists" (1945), but "Free Wi-Fi." Even the majestic lighthouses now risk calling to mind postcards for Maine tourism.
Still, it doesn't take long before a visitor to this show surrenders to the power of Hopper's vision. In the presence of the numinous originals, we forget the half-baked reproductions and travesties. We peer closely at the thinly applied paint, trying to make out some ambiguous detail, seeking the story behind the still moment. What is the woman in "Nighthawks" holding? A sandwich? A tea bag? A bill? Why does the girl of "Summertime" (1943) wear a dress so translucent one can make out her underwear? For me, though, the most affecting Hoppers are the simplest — those pictures that seem to be of nothing at all: a street of closed shops, a bare room, a road to nowhere. This, the artist seems to imply, is what life finally comes down to. In his penultimate painting, "Sun in an Empty Room" (1963), there is nothing but the geometrical juxtaposition of rectangles made of shadow and light. At the end of his life, Edward Hopper pared away every bit of showiness or drama, achieving a transcendent minimalism, while yet remaining true to his declared aim as an artist: "All I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house."
The National Gallery show deliberately presents the "best" of Hopper, which is also the Hopper that we know best. This is as it should be. Nonetheless, the artist was more than the portraitist of alienated modern man. There are plenty of watercolor landscapes that seem as happy as any by a goodish Sunday painter. In his youth, Hopper cranked out commercial illustrations for pulp adventure stories — and even for advertisements selling garters. (Some of this early work is as elegant as that of the French artist and fashion illustrator Theodore Steinlen, whom Hopper admired). Even a handful of the best-known paintings are comparatively upbeat: "Chop Suey" (1929), for instance, depicts two stylish young women chatting over lunch (a detail is used as the cover of the show's catalog). "Night Windows" (1928) highlights a woman's bottom and was regarded by at least one contemporary critic as vulgar comedy.
Not only have we learned a lot about this varied oeuvre, we now also know a great deal about Hopper the man — his politics (Yankee Republican); his penchant for French fin de siècle poetry and Hollywood movies; and even what he liked to do in bed (and what his wife, Josephine Nivison, his model for virtually all the women in his mature work, didn't much care to do). Much of this knowledge we owe to the pre-eminent Hopper expert of our time, Gail Levin, who has written the artist's biography (reissued last year by Rizzoli in an amplified edition), compiled the four-volume catalogue raisonné of the complete work, and produced individual books about the prints, watercolors, illustrations, and even the places that Hopper painted.
Without detracting from Levin's monumental and essential scholarship, the current exhibition's catalog — by Carol Troyen, Judith A. Barter, Elliot Bostwick Davis, Janet L. Comey, and Ellen E. Roberts (Edward Hopper, MFA Publications) — offers as full a conspectus of Hopper's career as most casual museumgoers will want: It is chockablock with biographical details and photographs of the artist, as well as solid essays on his pictorial work in Gloucester, Cape Cod, Maine, and New York City, and in-depth considerations of "Nighthawks," his depiction of women, and the very late pictures. It is a handsome book and a fine companion volume to this superbly mounted show honoring a very great artist. Over a long career, Edward Hopper depicted again and again — in Wallace Stevens's words — "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" and by so doing quietly revealed the human condition, American style.
In Hopper's world, women, too, are nearly always isolated, cut off from human contact; they often seem to be just waiting. Decked out in what seems her best outfit, a 1920s twentysomething sips coffee at night in a brightly lit diner ("Automat," 1927). She has taken the table closest to the door, kept on her hat and coat, and only removed the glove from the hand that lifts her cup. There is no one else around. Has she been stood up by her date, or is she, in the old phrase, all dressed up with no place to go? In another painting, a woman, her face in shadow, listlessly holds a piece of paper in her limp hands ("Hotel Room," 1931). Near the bed where she hunches in her underwear are suitcases, a dress, her hat. She looks disbelieving and resigned, like Rembrandt's emotion-weary Bathsheba, after learning that the infatuated King David has had her husband killed, or like Watteau's clown Gilles, paraded before us with the saddest face in the world. Perhaps the woman's lover has abandoned her — or is that slip of paper just a hotel bill that she cannot pay, or a schedule that reveals she has missed her bus? We will never know. But she exudes utter defeat. So too does the naked girl in the very early "Summer Interior" (1909), who sprawls like a broken doll on the floor next to a bed in disarray. Even the svelte usherette of "New York Movie" (1939), as beautiful as a caryatid in her sleek buttoned uniform, stands alone, hand against her cheek, solitary and removed from the excitement on the big screen.
"Only connect," said E.M. Forster, but this is just what the figures in Hopper's paintings cannot do. The young husband bends over his newspaper while his wife, elegantly dressed for a night on the town, distractedly looks away, fingering the keys of an upright piano ("Room in New York," 1932). In "Office at Night" (1940), a secretary turns from the filing cabinet, her dramatically tight skirt accenting her curves, but her boss at the nearby desk never glances up from his paperwork. In Hopper even the strutting stripper of "Girlie Show" (1941) — all pasties, G-string, and heavily rouged cheeks — looks into the ether rather than the faces of her unseen clientele. In "11 a.m." (1926), still another woman, naked except for her shoes, studies the street from her open apartment window. She might be a prostitute awaiting a customer, but I think that drained look is one that we all know: She just can't quite force herself to get up and face another day. Why bother? What's the point?
Just as these tableaux of human solitude refuse all histrionics and hyperbole, so Hopper's buildings — like Platonic archetypes — float serenely free of humanity's blight and busyness. Think of his New England barns and lighthouses, stark against the sky. City shops that seem as if they will always be closed for the night ("Drug Store," 1927). Deserted roadways and railroad yards. Entire streets in New York City suddenly bereft of human life ("Early Sunday Morning," 1930). One etching is forthrightly called "The Lonely House" (1923). Certainly no actual car will ever stop at Hopper's service station ("Gas," 1940) — the antiseptic pavement beside its pumps has never been stained with oil drips, and the sign merely lights up that dark road to the twilight zone. Only the seascapes — sailboats breasting the waves on sunny afternoons — seem buoyant with cheerfulness and hope.
Hopper has always seemed deeply, essentially American. For good or ill, cultures often gravitate to favorite themes or return again and again to particular obsessions. French art and literature cannot get enough of love; Russian fiction is haunted by God and the meaning of life and death; English writers value the claims of family and tradition above all. But America is the land of the loner. Ours is a nation of what Melville called "isolatoes," and our heroes are troubled pilgrims, solitaries, lost souls, and broken hearts. The darkness surrounds us. Oh, we may glad-hand at corporate barbecues and grin at family get-togethers, but in the still quiet of the empty hours, we are as anguished as Pascal confronting the silence of the stars. Emily Dickinson speaks of "my letter to the world / That never wrote to me"; F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds us that "in a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning," day after day; even Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt — the very epitome of the crass American businessman — confesses that in his entire life he was never able to do anything he truly wanted. We Americans yearn and yearn and usually for something we cannot even name. Happiness? Fulfillment? Redemption? No matter: Our hearts ache. "The mass of men," said Thoreau in his most famous sentence, "live lives of quiet desperation." Hank Williams sang our anthem: "I'm so lonesome I could cry."
Like all great artists, Hopper depicts not only an image of the world, he also communicates a state of mind — in his case, the sense that each of us is alone in an indifferent universe. Still, middle-class decorum is always preserved; there are no Edvard Munch-like screams of spiritual angst in these paintings and prints. Such control actually makes the despair all the more powerful, as in the contemporary photographs of Walker Evans, poems of Robert Frost, and urban chronicles of Joseph Mitchell. When we look at "Cape Cod Evening" (1939), the collie may romp in the tall timothy grass near the brightly illuminated house, but our eye is still drawn to the ominous, encroaching forest near by: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep." Certainly, Hopper's most famous painting, "Nighthawks" (1942), has become the very icon of film-noir stoicism. The all-night restaurant may be the clean, well-lighted place of Hemingway, a refuge from the deathly quiet of the street outside, but its fluorescent lights show faces that are lean and angular and hard. These are people who have looked steadily at the world, and they haven't seen much to smile about.
To visit the magnificent Edward Hopper show now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington — it originated in Boston and will travel next year to Chicago — is to recognize, all over again, how much this artist's images of isolation and introspection have entered into both our culture and our bloodstream. Alfred Hitchcock claimed that the ominous house in Psycho was inspired by "House by the Railroad" (1925). The famous etching "Night Shadows" (1921) captures the very essence of expressionist cinema in a single frame: the striding dark figure on the empty street, the looming buildings, the sickly light from an unseen street lamp, the unnaturally long and menacing shadows. Hopper doesn't exclude himself from this world of pensive separateness. Nearly every other picture represents what a solitary watcher might see, while gazing from the el into city apartments, while glancing out the side windows of a car on an early Sunday morning. Surely, most of us have at sometime waited in one of those bare-bones Hopper interiors — the cramped hotel lobby where strangers never quite meet ("Hotel Lobby," 1943); the coffee shops, motels, and bedrooms where people sit alone at twilight. Much of the painter's power derives from just this suggestion of temporary stasis, when everything is quiet, too quiet, and almost anything could happen in the next moment. A gunshot might break the silence. A white convertible might suddenly swerve into that gas station, and the driver, a blonde in a low-cut red dress, hurriedly whisper, "Hide me."
Looking at Hopper invites such melodramatic reverie, if only because so much of his work seems itself eerie and dreamlike. In "Rooms by the Sea" (1951), as surreal as a Magritte, a front-room door opens directly onto limitless ocean. In "People in the Sun" (1960), it seems uncanny that folks would sunbathe while dressed in their Sunday suits and formal dresses. Lined up in tightly ordered rows, they resemble robots or aliens who don't quite understand the ways of human beings. "Conference at Night" (1949), which depicts two weaselly men and a rather imperious woman, could easily be a scene from a cold-war spy thriller about the Red menace. The painting's first purchaser actually returned it for that reason: His wife was convinced it depicted the clandestine meeting of a communist cell. In several pictures — such as the sexy etching "Evening Wind" (1921), the stiffly hieratic painting "A Woman in the Sun" (1961), and the similar "Morning in a City" (1944) and "Morning Sun" (1952) — women leave their disheveled beds to present their naked bodies to the wind or the light. One thinks of Io ravished by Jupiter in the form of a cloud, of Mary and the Annunciation.
In American Visions (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), the critic Robert Hughes named Hopper and Jackson Pollock the two most original American painters of the past century. No argument. But Pollock's sublime abstractions will never haunt anyone's imagination. By contrast, Hopper's melancholy images have inspired an entire anthology of poems and stories, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination (Whitney Museum of American Art with W.W. Norton, 1995, edited by Deborah Lyons and Adam D. Weinberg). He is, after all, the most literary of painters, his work inviting extrapolation. So it seems appropriate that a poet, Mark Strand, has written one of the best books about Hopper (Hopper, Ecco Press, 1994), and that John Updike's two essays, in Still Looking (Knopf, 2005), remain the best short introduction to the artist's steely clarity about the human condition.
Even the DVD accompanying the National Gallery show is narrated by the actor Steve Martin, who reminds us at one point that scenes from his artsy movie Pennies from Heaven were modeled after Hopper images. ("Captain Upton's House," 1927, one of the paintings in the exhibition, is lent from the private collection of ... Steve Martin.) So too the modern German director Wim Wenders has testified to the influence of Hopper on his cinematic technique, particularly for the film The End of Violence (1997). Hopper spinoffs — in the form of posters, buttons, cards, T-shirts, screen savers — crop up everywhere in the cultural landscape. This fall the University of Maryland School of Music, in conjunction with the National Gallery, will present Later the Same Evening, an opera based on five of the major paintings. (See Page B17.) As for the parodies and pastiches of "Nighthawks," there is no end, though the most famous remains the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (1987), in which the four figures in the painting bear the faces of James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley.
Is there any doubt, then, that most people who care about serious art would name Edward Hopper as their favorite American painter? He's almost as beloved as Vermeer, another (albeit much warmer) artist of light and shadow.
Nonetheless, as I meandered through the National Gallery's exhibition, I began to wonder whether Hopper's popularity, this pervasive use and abuse of his imagery, might have retroactively corrupted the original paintings and prints. Can we still see "Nighthawks" without thinking of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"? As for those empty restaurants and deserted streets — are they now just hokey period pieces, familiar and all too obvious in their symbolism? Have the pictures lost touch with modern times? After all, our desperation is no longer so quiet. Today that young woman at the diner wouldn't be just sipping coffee — she'd be on her cellphone either calling or text-messaging her girlfriends, and whining: "I've been waiting here for 20 minutes. What a jerk!" The title for that picture of a brightly lit bed and breakfast would no longer be "Rooms for Tourists" (1945), but "Free Wi-Fi." Even the majestic lighthouses now risk calling to mind postcards for Maine tourism.
Still, it doesn't take long before a visitor to this show surrenders to the power of Hopper's vision. In the presence of the numinous originals, we forget the half-baked reproductions and travesties. We peer closely at the thinly applied paint, trying to make out some ambiguous detail, seeking the story behind the still moment. What is the woman in "Nighthawks" holding? A sandwich? A tea bag? A bill? Why does the girl of "Summertime" (1943) wear a dress so translucent one can make out her underwear? For me, though, the most affecting Hoppers are the simplest — those pictures that seem to be of nothing at all: a street of closed shops, a bare room, a road to nowhere. This, the artist seems to imply, is what life finally comes down to. In his penultimate painting, "Sun in an Empty Room" (1963), there is nothing but the geometrical juxtaposition of rectangles made of shadow and light. At the end of his life, Edward Hopper pared away every bit of showiness or drama, achieving a transcendent minimalism, while yet remaining true to his declared aim as an artist: "All I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house."
The National Gallery show deliberately presents the "best" of Hopper, which is also the Hopper that we know best. This is as it should be. Nonetheless, the artist was more than the portraitist of alienated modern man. There are plenty of watercolor landscapes that seem as happy as any by a goodish Sunday painter. In his youth, Hopper cranked out commercial illustrations for pulp adventure stories — and even for advertisements selling garters. (Some of this early work is as elegant as that of the French artist and fashion illustrator Theodore Steinlen, whom Hopper admired). Even a handful of the best-known paintings are comparatively upbeat: "Chop Suey" (1929), for instance, depicts two stylish young women chatting over lunch (a detail is used as the cover of the show's catalog). "Night Windows" (1928) highlights a woman's bottom and was regarded by at least one contemporary critic as vulgar comedy.
Not only have we learned a lot about this varied oeuvre, we now also know a great deal about Hopper the man — his politics (Yankee Republican); his penchant for French fin de siècle poetry and Hollywood movies; and even what he liked to do in bed (and what his wife, Josephine Nivison, his model for virtually all the women in his mature work, didn't much care to do). Much of this knowledge we owe to the pre-eminent Hopper expert of our time, Gail Levin, who has written the artist's biography (reissued last year by Rizzoli in an amplified edition), compiled the four-volume catalogue raisonné of the complete work, and produced individual books about the prints, watercolors, illustrations, and even the places that Hopper painted.
Without detracting from Levin's monumental and essential scholarship, the current exhibition's catalog — by Carol Troyen, Judith A. Barter, Elliot Bostwick Davis, Janet L. Comey, and Ellen E. Roberts (Edward Hopper, MFA Publications) — offers as full a conspectus of Hopper's career as most casual museumgoers will want: It is chockablock with biographical details and photographs of the artist, as well as solid essays on his pictorial work in Gloucester, Cape Cod, Maine, and New York City, and in-depth considerations of "Nighthawks," his depiction of women, and the very late pictures. It is a handsome book and a fine companion volume to this superbly mounted show honoring a very great artist. Over a long career, Edward Hopper depicted again and again — in Wallace Stevens's words — "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" and by so doing quietly revealed the human condition, American style.
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World, is author of the memoir An Open Book (W.W. Norton, 2003) and several collections of essays. His most recent book, Classics for Pleasure, has just been published by Harcourt.
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