Edward Hopper

Painter

• Born: July 22, 1882
• Birthplace: Nyack, New York
• Died: May 15, 1967
• Place of death: New York, New York

American painter

Hopper is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant twentieth century American realist painters. His deceptively simple but striking images of the loneliness and alienation of city life have become icons of American popular culture. He focused on representing everyday objects in his artwork.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Edward Hopper was born in the small seafaring town of Nyack, New York. Hopper’s father, Garrett Henry Hopper, was of English and Dutch descent. His mother, Elizabeth Griffiths Smith, was English and Welsh. Garrett owned and operated a dry-goods store in Nyack. Both Hopper and his sister, Marion, were introduced to the arts during childhood by their mother, who encouraged them to draw. Rather shy and quiet as a child, Hopper developed a penchant for solitude that remained with him for the rest of his life. He also developed a love for the sea and the nautical life later reflected in his work and spent much of his boyhood at the Nyack shipyards.

Hopper attended a local private school for the primary grades. After graduating from Nyack Union High School in 1899, Hopper decided to become a fine artist. His parents, however, persuaded him to study commercial illustration which, they believed, offered a more secure income than did painting at the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City. Dissatisfied with illustration, Hopper transferred the following year to the New York School of Art, where he remained for the next six years studying under William Merritt Chase, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Robert Henri. Henri, Hopper’s most influential teacher at the New York School of Art, was a major proponent of the so-called Ashcan school. This group of radical American artists sought to paint the harsher, more urban qualities of contemporary life, while retaining elements of the impressionist style. Hopper later stated that it took him years to “get over” Henri’s influence.

Between 1906 and 1910, Hopper traveled to Europe, supporting his journeys through illustration, a profession he detested but relied on during his years as a struggling artist. Introduced to the works of the French Impressionists, including Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, Hopper experimented with the Impressionist style during this period. After returning to New York in 1910, however, his palette began to darken, and he painted in a style closer to that of his former teacher, Henri, and other contemporary realists.

Hopper never returned to Europe. He spent the rest of his life in New York and New England. The years immediately following his return home were financially difficult, and Hopper once again supported himself as a commercial illustrator. He also began exhibiting his paintings. Although these early paintings met with little critical success, Hopper experienced much artistic growth as an artist during this period.

In 1915, Hopper was introduced to etching. By the early 1920’s, his etchings contained several key elements characteristic of his more mature work: unusual vantage points, harshly lit scenes of city life at night, themes of alienation and loneliness, and the solitary female figure near a window.

Life’s Work

The year 1924 marked a turning point in Hopper’s professional life: He had his first one-man show. In 1923, Hopper had given up etching and taken up watercolors. What interested him about watercolors was not the creation of textures or the manipulation of the medium but the exploration and recording of light. In an uncharacteristically bold move, Hopper took some of his watercolors to Frank K. M. Rehn, an art dealer in New York, in 1924. Impressed by the works, Rehn not only became Hopper’s first dealer but also arranged a one-man show in his gallery. All eleven watercolors that were shown, as well as five additional pieces, were sold. The show was also a critical success. Aside from illustrations and prints, Hopper had sold only two other paintings up to that point: Sailing (1912 or 1913), an oil, at the Armory Show in New York in 1913; and The Mansard Roof (1923), a watercolor, to the Brooklyn Museum in 1923. After 1924, Hopper had the financial freedom to give up illustrating and devote himself entirely to his art.

Hopper’s personal life also changed in 1924 when he married Josephine Verstile Nivison, a fellow student from the New York School of Art with whom he had kept in touch over the years. Although they never had children, the couple was inseparable for the next forty-three years. “Jo,” as Hopper called her, promoted her husband’s work, managed most of his affairs, and was his only female model after their marriage.

An oil painting called House by the Railroad (1925) marked the period of Hopper’s mature style. In this work, he resolved a number of important influences, from French Impressionism to contemporary American realism, to create a personal style. In this skillfully crafted composition, a mansard-roofed Victorian house stands alone against railroad tracks. The subtle diagonal of the tracks, one of the most enduring symbols of American art, endows the space with depth and power. By 1925, this solitary house recalled America’s more innocent past a simpler time that had been irrevocably engulfed by the complexities of modern urban life and rootlessness. Hopper had finally found his personal vision as well as some recognition. Henceforth, little of significance changed in his art or in his life. He and Jo continued to live at 3 Washington Square North in Manhattan and spent nearly every summer on the New England coast. Also, the subjects that Hopper explored were almost entirely variations on themes that had fascinated him in the past.

Throughout his lengthy career, however, Hopper did often shift his approach to investigating certain subjects. Although Hopper’s art was not overtly political or social, he was profoundly fascinated by mood and human interaction. Many critics have observed a sense of loneliness, sometimes even boredom, in much of Hopper’s work. Hopper’s paintings, which appear to represent ordinary scenes of everyday life, are in fact intensely personal, complex narratives. He infused commonplace subjects with hints of eroticism, feelings of absence, and, late in life, the foreboding sense of loss and death.

In examining Hopper’s figural works, it is significant that Jo not only was his only female model but also joined her husband in naming and fantasizing about the characters in his paintings. Thus she played a crucial role in developing his dramatic imagination and assisted him in transforming her image into one of his fantasy.

In conveying the mood of disenchantment, Hopper turned to dusk and imbued it with melancholy. Cape Cod Evening (1939) depicts a man beckoning to a distracted dog from the doorstep with a pensive-looking woman standing in front of the window. The couple appears disconnected: She is detached and in a world of her own, and he is attempting to communicate with a dog, which ignores him. In the painting Summer Evening (1947), the time of day also plays a symbolic role in the couple’s relationship. The young couple represented in the painting appears absorbed in an unpleasant discussion while they lean against the wall of a porch with a bright electric light glaring above them. The woman’s facial expression and stance are defensive; the man’s left hand is on his chest, as if in protest. As in Cape Cod Evening, dusk symbolizes the melancholy of lost connection and desire, a frequent theme in Hopper’s mature paintings.

Just as Hopper associated erotic despair with the melancholy of dusk, he also associated erotic tension with the night. This mood can be found in works ranging from an early etching, Night on the El Train (1918), to his later oil paintings Night Windows (1928), Office at Night(1940), and his masterpiece, Nighthawks (1942). In Nighthawks, three of Hopper’s most significant themes sexuality, solitude, and death are linked. The man and woman, almost touching hands in the sinister atmosphere of the diner at night, are contrasted to the solitary man seated across the counter, suggesting sexuality as a means of easing the loneliness of night. Critics have pointed out that this painting, in both setting and mood, evokes a short story by Ernest Hemingway entitled “The Killers” (1927), a story Hopper admired. However, it has been noted that the setting of the painting also conveys a certain innocence and vulnerability.

In exploring the theme of solitude, Hopper depicted scenes devoid of human presence in locations where people might be expected to congregate: a street, a park, or a room. In Hotel Room (1931), for example, a tall, slender, pensive woman sits on a bed, her eyes cast downward toward a piece of yellow paper in her hand. The stark vertical and diagonal bands of color and sharp contrast convey an intense nighttime drama with an open interpretation.

In his old age, Hopper, pessimistic by his own admission, increasingly focused on death, the ultimate escape. As his preoccupation with death increased, he made it the theme of some of his last paintings. At the age of eighty-three, he painted Two Comedians (1965), which he intended as a sort of personal farewell. As his wife later confirmed, the painting of the two figures on stage represented Hopper and Jo gracefully bowing out of their earthly existence. Hopper would die less than two years later, and Jo followed one year later.

Significance

Hopper, a pioneer in borrowing subjects from everyday life to make high art, is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century representational American artists. He was a modernist with a distaste for abstraction, the dominant mode of modernism. Instead of following current trends, he used the force of his imagination to find his own psychologically and artistically powerful means of responding to contemporary life. Although the style he chose was traditional, his radical content expressed an alienation from much of modern life, ultimately making his work modern. Hopper’s art continued to resonate for successive generations of artists; his genius and imagination provided deep insight and symbols that both inspired and challenged viewers.

The impact of Hopper’s work has been felt not only in artistic circles but also in popular culture. Although Hopper detested commercial illustration, the artist’s images, particularly Nighthawks, have found their way into advertisements, posters, T-shirts, and greeting cards. The universal appeal of Hopper’s art and its powerful and disturbingly truthful portrayal of the American psyche have raised his works to the status of cultural icons that have remained relevant and accessible to a wide audience.

Bibliography

Berkow, Ita G. Edward Hopper: A Modern Master. New York: Smithmark, 1996. This thoughtful, eighty-page overview of the early development, maturity, and late works of Hopper contains full-color reproductions and an index.

Berman, Avis. Edward Hopper’s New York. San Francisco, Calif.: Pomegranate, 2005. Berman describes Hopper’s life and the work he created when he lived in New York City. Illustrated with reproductions of the paintings, prints, and drawings Hopper made while in New York.

Goodrich, Lloyd. Edward Hopper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976. This informative chronological discussion of the artistic and personal development of Hopper includes statements by Hopper, a biographical note, full-color illustrations, and an index.

Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper. New York: Crown, 1984. A respected authority on Hopper writes that Hopper’s work demonstrates that realism is not merely a literal or photographic copy of what one sees but rather an interpretive rendering. Examples of all aspects of Hopper’s career, including oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, etchings, and commercial illustrations, are reproduced and discussed in this volume. Contains a chronological biography, a list of principal exhibitions, and a list of illustrations.

Lyons, Deborah, and Adam D. Weinberg. Edward Hopper and the American Imagination. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. This volume contains fifty-nine of Hopper’s most important works in full color as well as original works by fiction writers and poets who pay homage to, or make reference to, the ways in which Hopper represented America. The work celebrates the impact of Hopper’s imagery on contemporary culture and is dedicated to a fuller understanding of Hopper’s place in the American psyche.

Strand, Mark. Hopper. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994. Strand, a poet, approaches Hopper’s work with a fresh eye, exploring the aesthetic principles behind twenty-three of Hopper’s most important works. He cites aesthetic reasons for Hopper’s continuing ability to deeply move people in an America that has grown considerably more complex, both politically and socially, since the 1950’s. Includes black-and-white illustrations.

Wagstaff, Sheena, ed. Edward Hopper. London: Tate, 2004. The book, which accompanied an exhibition of Hopper’s art displayed at London’s Tate Museum in 2005, examines Hopper’s work within the context of American and European painting from the early twentieth century to the 1960’s.

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