Edward Hopper's soul-searching paintings are extraordinarily atmospheric expressions of the urban landscape of America, writes Aidan Dunne
Edward Hopper, the subject of a current Tate Modern retrospective of more than 70 of his works, was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. It's customary to include the word American in that description, because there is something essentially American about his style and imagery. But Hopper's work travels well, and his stark, beautifully painted pictures of isolated figures in desolate city interiors are exceptionally accessible. They encapsulate a thoroughly recognisable world.
Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, where his father ran a dry-goods store. When he displayed early artistic flair his parents, devout Baptists, nudged him towards a career in commercial art, so he took a correspondence course in illustration before attending the New York School of Art.
There he switched to painting - under, among others, Robert Henri. Between 1906 and 1910 he visited Paris three times and London once, lodging and painting but not attending formal classes. But he exhibited little and sold hardly anything, reluctantly making his living as a freelance illustrator until 1923.
At that point he began to get some significant response, finding the dealer who handled his work throughout his lifetime. His pictures started to sell well, to both private buyers and museums, and the demand never slackened. He married another painter, Josephine Nivison, who he had met as a student, and thereafter they lived together in New York City.
She was by all accounts a humourless person and, as her work was gradually sacrificed to his success, they settled into a volatile, combative relationship centred exclusively on his painting. A moody, temperamental man, he was prone to depression and endured long periods of enforced inactivity.
That, and the fact that his working method entailed exhaustive preparations, ensured that in his lifetime he completed only about 370 paintings.
He rightly resented being lumped in with the so-called American Scene painters, because he was not trying for a sense of Americana, but at the same time he did create definitive visual expressions of the urban landscape of vernacular American architecture, and what could be termed the emergent psychology of urban life in the US. Commentators have tended to emphasise his quintessential American-ness, downplaying the importance of his several spells in Paris prior to 1910.
The routine view is that his work was shaped by the example - dour realism - of his teacher Henri, which conveniently ignores Henri's avowed debt to Manet and other Europeans and the fact that he encouraged Hopper to go to Paris. Hopper was an individualist, certainly, but there can hardly be any question that his experience of French painting - Degas, Manet, and others - was decisive in the development of his mature style. The paintings he made in France, several of which are included in the Tate show, are prototypes of subsequent key works. Certainly, he pretty much ignored the Parisian avant garde. Cubism and other trends made no impact, which is probably no harm given that there were, anyway, far too many faint-hearted imitations of Cubism churned out by artists who didn't quite get the point.
Not that it matters one whit, but Hopper's work does look old-fashioned in the same way that it did when it was originally made: as though he were a species of 19th century realist magically transported through time. Somehow it works, but you can see why some "progressive" observers regarded it as being backward-looking, even embarrassingly so in the context of self-conscious modernity. It is surprising to realise that by the time of his death, in New York in 1967, Pop Art was nearly a decade old. But even in the 1920s, Hopper could be viewed as retrograde.
We no longer need to cast him in an adversarial role in relation to, say, the jazzy rhythms in the vibrant compositions of Stuart Davis, who with equal accuracy evoked different aspects of contemporary, urban America. Or, for that matter, much later in his life, Abstract Expressionism. Hopper was wary of abstraction and threatened by its critical success, but its best painters, including Rothko and de Kooning, had no problem in acknowledging their admiration for him. With hindsight, the correspondences between Hopper and Rothko are much easier to see. Several Hoppers, notably the extraordinary Sun in an Empty Room, come across as a representational equivalent of the best of Rothko's abstract paintings.
Chances are that most people are familiar with several of Hopper's paintings. They would instantly recognise others as being Hopperesque, so definite and consistent is his representational style and subject matter. Yet, unless you happen to visit the museums such as the Whitney that boast substantial holdings of his paintings, it's rare that you see them at first hand. You are far more likely to find them in reproduction, in postcards, books or documentaries, something that has the paradoxical effect, famously elaborated by Walter Benjamin, of heightening the fame of the original work while making it increasingly remote and, ultimately, diminishing it.
Apart from anything else, it's rash to treat a painting as no more than an image. Hopper's iconic work lends itself to be read purely in terms of its iconography, but that, rich though it is, sells it short, so the opportunity to see such a substantial body of his paintings is all the more welcome. And they are impressive. Even the best reproductions cannot give you a sense of the original object, with its nuances of tone, colour and texture. These may sound like minor attributes, but in fact they are the very substance of the paintings, and without this physical arrangement of physical constituents there is no image. Often it is as if the image appears miraculously or alchemically from a sparse arrangement of pigment.
An attentive encounter with the paintings themselves makes it clear that Hopper was a terrific, highly sophisticated painter as well as a superb picture-maker. That is, he devised compositional structure with exceptional care and attention to detail, often making dozens of preparatory drawings. But, when it comes to the point, each composition has to convince in a painterly incarnation. Hopper is a careful, judicious painter. He never over-elaborates, knowing when to leave things alone, leave things out, how to give just enough information.
He describes the process very well himself in his Notes on Painting: "I find, in working, always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. The struggle to prevent this decay is, I think, the common lot of all painters to whom the invention of arbitrary forms has lesser interest." It is as if, in negotiating a physical medium, he is trying to preserve as much as he can of a pre-existing vision.
His paintings are like stage or film sets, with an obvious affinity with film noir. More, they are like models of sets. They come across as simplified, blocky constructions, carefully and dramatically lit. He defines and establishes the mood of space with light in the manner of a lighting cameraperson. He doesn't try to tell stories, although the pictures are full of narrative ingredients and invite speculation. He liked going to the movies, and the narrative elements in his pictures are equivalent to those of the isolated film still, excerpted from a before and an after.
They offer us instants, atmospherically amplified, with enhanced existential resonance, but not, on the whole, narrative explanations.
One can appreciate his impatience with commentators who claimed to pin down his thematic concerns - typically loneliness and alienation. He said the loneliness tag had been overdone. What he wanted, he said several times in different ways, was to paint sunlight on the wall of a house: "I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than in any symbolism." In fact, his pictures derive much of their power from their studied impassivity, which could be mistaken for blandness.
Time and again we see individuals lost in their own thoughts and, while we can identify with the state, we don't know what exactly is going on in their lives. There is a widespread compulsion to find out the story behind any painting - witness Girl with a Pearl Earring - but that doesn't necessarily mean there is a story, and that is surely the case with Hopper. Like Hemingway, he prefers to describe surfaces and actions or more usually, in his case, inaction. Motivation can remain inscrutable though we can draw our own inferences.
In terms of the images themselves, it is as if he slows down light and time in a way that strikingly recalls Vermeer, another painter who excelled at conveying a sense of reflective consciousness, depicting people reading, abstracted, in a world of interiors and windows. Hopper was, by comparison, an awkward painter of figures, and especially of flesh. It is surprising that this puritanical man painted so much exposed flesh, relatively speaking. When he paints a naked or semi-naked figure we, the viewers, are slightly uncomfortable with her - generally her - nakedness.
The situation always seems too personal, too private or, as in the case of his harsh view of the dancer in Girlie Show, (not at the Tate), too cruel.
His model, almost exclusively, was his wife. Flesh in his pictures can come across as pasty and lumpy and wooden. The subtle contours of the body are often simplified and stylised.
Yet, perhaps proof that limitations are a good thing, the pictures are extraordinary.
It's difficult to think of any painter who can better capture the way light articulates architectural space and colour its mood, sometimes overwhelmingly. He hunts out buildings that are characters in themselves, like the houses in Two Puritans. He is an acute observer of characteristic urban spaces: the office in Office at Night, the diner in Nighthawks, the theatre, the hotel room, the apartment living room, the city street.
People occupy these rooms uneasily, weighed down by gravity and ennui, either in solitude or, if together, without empathy, at odds. Melancholy dominates, inflected towards complete gloom and resignation or, more positively, with a noirish, romantic tinge. Recurrently, Hopper is drawn to empty spaces infused with feeling: windows, doorways, deserted stages, depopulated streets, the great beyond of ocean or countryside. In his last painting, Two Comedians, a pair of white-clad figures, generally presumed to represent himself and Josephine, loom against the blackness of a stage. It's a strange work, not altogether successful, moving and disturbing at the same time.