An Edward Hopper Retrospective: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,

and: Edward Hopper (review)

Karen Wilkin

The Hopkins Review, Volume 1, Number 3, Summer 2008 (New Series),

pp. 498-503 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/thr.0.0000

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/thr/summary/v001/1.3.wilkin.html

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498 Reviews

Reviews

An Edward Hopper Retrospective: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Art Institute of
Chicago.
Carol Troyen, Judith A. Barter, et al., Edward Hopper (MFA Publica-
tions, Boston 2007), 263 pp.

Faced with one of Edward Hopper’s accounts of a nondescript, not-

quite current America, it can be difficult to remember that he belonged
to the generation of the most audacious painters in the entire history of
art. Hopper (1882–1967) was a coeval of Georges Bracque (1882–1963)
and Bracque’s “pard” Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), yet his laconic images
appear unaffected by the startling modernism invented by his colleagues.
Hopper’s sensibility and aesthetic seem less related to his real contempo-
raries’ rebelliousness than to the gritty naturalism of his teacher Robert
Henri, a founding member of the Ashcan School, nearly old enough to
have been his father. Henri’s New York School of Art, where Hopper
studied from 1900–1905, after early training as an illustrator, was admit-
tedly renowned as a progressive institution, but that was only in relation
to other American art schools of the time. Still, according to the precocious
Stuart Davis, who enrolled at sixteen in 1909, Henri taught that art “was
not a matter of rules and techniques, or the search for an absolute ideal of
beauty. It was the expression of ideas and emotions about the life of the
time.” Davis, ten years Hopper’s junior, used these precepts as a point of
departure. Throughout his long career, Davis’s subject remained “ideas
and emotions about the life of the time,” but stimulated by the modernist
art he discovered in the legendary 1913 Armory Show, where he exhib-
ited five Ashcan School-type works in the American section, he eagerly
embraced the innovations of Bracque, Picasso, Matisse, and their fellow
radicals to become this country’s most impressively original, razzle-daz-
zle, homegrown Cubist. For Hopper, who exhibited a rather staid boating
scene in the Armory Show, the exhibition was less of a revelation, since he
had traveled to Europe three times before 1910 and had been introduced
to French vanguard art by his friend, the artist Patrick Henry Bruce. Yet
far from assimilating the revolutionary ideas of the European avant-garde
as Davis (and Bruce) did, Hopper consciously rejected them in order to
emphasize his Americanness, remaining faithful for the rest of his life to
a conception of art as a truthful record of perceptions. Unswayed by the
new possibilities suggested either by the work of his daring European

© 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press

 The Hopkins Review 499

contemporaries or by the experiments those Europeans provoked in his

fellow American artists, Hopper stubbornly followed his own path, bear-
ing witness as he did so to the special character of the Eastern U.S. in the
first half of the twentieth century. Or so the official story goes.
This is the thesis of the retrospective Edward Hopper, jointly organized
by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Wash-
ington, and the Art Institute of Chicago, seen in Boston and Washington
in 2007 and on view in Chicago until early May 2008. It’s a large, ambi-
tious exhibition that clearly aspires to being comprehensive. The show
assembles a notably wide range of Hopper’s work, including paintings,
drawings, watercolors, and prints, spanning most of his career. The large
number of prints and watercolors may come as a surprise to visitors
expecting only a sumptuous assortment of canvases, but they needn’t
worry. A great many of Hopper’s best known, most enthusiastically
admired, and frequently reproduced paintings are on view, including
such favorites as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Early Sunday
Morning (1930), that deadpan view of shop fronts and an empty sidewalk,
inhabited only by a barber pole and a fire hydrant, bathed in slanting
light. There’s the Museum of Modern Art’s enigmatic Gas (1940), with its
row of anthropomorphic red gas pumps, its darkening shadows, and its
spills of light from a white clapboard shed, and the Art Institute of Chi-
cago’s much-loved Nighthawks (1942), the late-night view into a brightly
lit diner, with its three self-absorbed customers, shiny coffee urns, and
white-clad counterman. There are enough scenes of lighthouses loom-
ing above the dunes, against clear skies, and of pared-down, enigmatic
interiors to satisfy the most exacting fans, and a representative group of
Hopper’s strangely problematic nudes, who occupy an uncomfortable
territory between pin-up and hausfrau.
So far so good. But while we expect a retrospective to be a definitive
overview of its subject, one that clarifies our sense of his achievement and
his importance, the present survey of Hopper’s work, for all its evident
ambition and good intentions, falls a little short. There is a major gap
in the selection—more about that later—but the real problem is that the
exhibition simply confirms what we already know; our understanding of
Hopper and his place in the history of recent American art is not altered
in any significant way. Moving through the show is rather like circulating
through a large party where many of the guests are people we know fairly
well; it’s pleasant enough to see them, but we don’t meet anyone new or
unexpected. Yet there may not be many unexpected new guests to invite.
Among the exhibition’s less familiar pictures assembled from far-flung
collections, the University of Arizona’s sturdily constructed arrange-
ment of rooftops, facades, and streetscape, The City (1927), rewards close
attention; the peculiar, illustration-like French Six-Day Bicycle Rider (1937,
private collection), with its mannequin-like figures, does not. It’s plain
from the works included in the current retrospective (as it was in other
Hopper shows over the years) that his best-known works—the moody
500 Reviews

signature canvases of lackluster offices and hotel rooms, New England

roadsides—are usually his best works. In many ways, despite the obvious
importance of first-hand encounters with works of art, we can learn more
from the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, with essays by the show’s
co-curators, Carol Troyen and Judith A. Barter, and others. Hopper’s
formation and his evolving approach to his major themes are discussed,
along with the context in which he worked and the response to his paint-
ings at various times in his career. Barter’s essay, “Nighthawks: Transcend-
ing Reality,” for example, is an exemplary discussion of the development
of this paradigmatic painting, its sources, ancestry, and influences both
explicit and implicit.
The complete absence of any of Hopper’s Paris works from the exhibi-
tion is startling. Whether or not he adopted any of the formal innovations
of the vanguard artists whose work he encountered there, the origins
of Hopper’s mature cityscapes can be found in his economical views of
buildings and bridges along the Seine. He seems to have learned how to
construct images out of urban geometries through his Paris pictures and
to have learned, as well, how to extract the maximum evocative power
from a subdued, close-valued palette. It could even be argued that Hop-
per’s later ability to suggest strangeness by virtue of omission—think of
those empty stretches of New England back road flanked by dark stands
of trees—has its beginning in eccentric Paris pictures in which he flirts
with distortions of scale and logic.
The large number of watercolors included in the current retrospective
is noticeable. The wall texts tell us that Hopper “embraced watercolor”
in the 1920s when he painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a commercial
fishing port cum artists’ center on Cape Ann. We are told, too, that he dis-
tinguished himself by recording the town’s Victorian buildings rather than
the picturesque harbor—an echo, perhaps, of Henri’s teaching. (Hopper’s
fellow alumnus of the Henri school, Stuart Davis, who spent most of his
summers on Cape Ann, painted unlovely backyards, a coal derrick, and a
garage, all by 1917.) The texts further claim that later, in Maine and Cape
Cod, Hopper similarly avoided “predictable tourist scenes,” preferring
the unglamorous areas of coastal communities, although the plethora of
spectacularly sited lighthouses and classic seaside homes he did choose
to paint makes this contention hard to defend.
If the exhibition’s emphasis on watercolors was intended to compen-
sate for the omission of the Paris works, the result is not quite as hoped.
They may have been intended to broaden our understanding of Hopper’s
working methods—assuming that he proceeded from fluently executed
studies of the motif from various points of view to fully realized paint-
ings synthesized from the studies—but the main insight afforded by the
watercolors is that he was an extremely accomplished, technically adroit,
but utterly conventional painter in the medium. Most of the watercolors
are rather slick efforts that remind us that their author first earned his
living as an illustrator. Hopper’s process was more provocatively illu-
 The Hopkins Review 501

minated by a smaller, sharply focused show at the Whitney Museum

of American Art in 2006. The Museum of Modern Art’s New York Movie
(1939), the celebrated painting of a nearly empty theater and a blonde
usherette, lost in thought, leaning against a wall, was exhibited with a
great many related pencil studies. The drawings allowed us to follow
Hopper’s process as he worked out the stance of the weary young woman
and examined the elaborate decorations of several movie palaces—or was
it different parts of a single lavish interior?—recording details expediently
with an illustrator’s skill. We quickly realized that none of the studies
quite matched the movie house in the painting. Despite his on-the-spot
research, Hopper had not simply reproduced something seen but instead
distilled an iconic image from accumulated experience, altering his record
of actuality to meet the demands of picture-making: truing and fairing
angles, weighing intervals and relationships, as much in the interest of
pictorial structure as of storytelling. Whatever the impetus for the paint-
ing—quite possibly a bored attendant encountered by the artist, an avid
movie-goer—the drawings at the Whitney were enough to make attentive
viewers reconsider everything they thought they knew about Hopper.
Here was evidence that a painter consistently praised for reporting truth-
fully on perceptions was really an artificer, someone who used perception
as the basis for invention, not as an end in itself. Nothing so interesting
was suggested by the watercolors in the present retrospective.
In Washington, at the National Gallery, the exhibition was installed
more or less chronologically, but also grouped thematically under such
headings as “The City,” “Maine,” “Truro,” and “Mature Style.” “Early
Work and Gloucester” introduced many of Hopper’s enduring preoccu-
pations. His future cityscapes were announced by an early suite of prints,
essentially illustrations of urban experience of the period—people on el
trains, streetscapes, lonely houses on ragged blocks—that both pointed
to the future and made explicit Hopper’s debt to Ashcan School painters
such as Henri’s colleague John Sloan. The exotic viewpoints that enliven
some of the prints would be replaced over the years by deadpan, frontal
compositions, but motifs such as the facades of undistinguished buildings
or people looking out of windows would persist.
The window and, by extension, the experience of seeing into or seeing
through, can be described as Hopper’s most potent theme. He treats the
windows of buildings in Early Sunday Morning, each with a differently
adjusted shade and curtain, as individually as portraits. He compels us to
stare into shop windows, to accompany brooding women gazing out of
hotel rooms, to peer through the glass of an all-night diner. In some of his
most haunting inventions, we are offered glimpses into inhabited spaces
and left to guess at what the people within are doing. The compositional
success of these paintings often derives from Hopper’s use of architec-
ture, but it’s undeniable the images exert the endless fascination of real
windows with their fragmented revelations of the lives of others. Is that
partly concealed woman undressing? Is the apron-clad woman making
502 Reviews

a bed? Why does the couple in that small room seem so estranged? That
these questions arise attests to the deep-rootedness of Hopper’s illustra-
tor’s sensibility, and just where we, as spectators, are located remains
unclear—in a building opposite or magically levitating?—but there’s no
denying the allure of these paintings. They turn us into voyeurs, per-
mitted snatches of unexplained narratives momentarily presented to a
stranger’s gaze. They allow us to witness private dramas whose plots
remain indecipherable.
When Hopper is at his best, his work can seem to be very much about
a particular moment and also timeless. Like potent documentary photo-
graphs, his paintings can seem wholly specific, yet their firm structure
notwithstanding, they appear to be essentially “artless,” stylistically neu-
tral, even transparent. It is Hopper’s subject matter, not the formal quali-
ties of his work, that situates it in the modern era: his celebration of such
twentieth-century phenomena as gas stations, movie theaters, and diners,
along with the clothes and hairstyles of his protagonists, and above all the
ambiguous situations in which he places them.
If Hopper’s way of painting can seem conservative in relation to that
of his more daring colleagues, his ability to evoke the psychological reali-
ties of modern life can seem absolutely up to the minute. Here, in fact, is
where his real “artfulness” lies. If we wrench ourselves free of the implied
narratives of Hopper’s strongest paintings, we discover how cannily
he has constructed his images, like a brilliant cinematographer, subtly
expanding spaces, and playing with viewpoints and qualities of light in
order to manipulate moods. He suppresses details, except for the most
telling ones—signage and shadows, particulars of clothing, furnishings,
and architecture—yet he convinces us that he is merely recording things
as they are, as directly as possible. How this is achieved is revealed by
one of the latest works in the retrospective, Sun in an Empty Room (1963,
private collection). It’s a picture of nothing: a projecting angle of wall,
a window, some floor. Everything is reduced to clearly bounded tawny
planes and a scribble of dull green signaling foliage outside. Two narrow
rhomboids of pale gold and a large patch on the floor radiate light, at the
same time that their intricate geometry conspires with the window shape
to create space. The painting verges on abstraction, yet it’s as complex
as anything Hopper ever created. The empty, sunlit room suggests end-
less possibilities, like a stage set waiting for the actors to enter—or one
recently vacated. The carefully calculated neutrality of Hopper’s presen-
tation allows viewers to project whatever they wish into his images and
complete his unresolved narratives for themselves. In other works, iso-
lated figures can be interpreted as emblems of loneliness and alienation,
buildings without figures as abandoned, deep shadows as sinister; here,
an empty room becomes an emotionally charged space.
If the attempts to unravel Hopper’s equivocal narratives that I over-
heard at the current retrospective are reliable indicators, this open-end-
edness deeply engages his audience and contributes significantly to his
 The Hopkins Review 503

immense popularity. So, too, may his evocation of a simpler, idealized,

albeit rather melancholy, America. And so, it seems, does the apparent
specificity of much of his work. In Washington, responses to Hopper’s
images of Maine and Cape Cod were tinged with real estate envy:
“Wouldn’t that be the perfect beach house?” and “You could probably
have bought that house for nothing when that picture was painted.” But
are these ideas any more misguided than the pervasive notion that Hop-
per was simply a detached recorder of the American scene? In an informa-
tive catalogue essay, Carol Troyen suggests that the painter’s aims were
very different. She reminds us that Hopper, asked what he was after in the
late, enigmatic Sun in an Empty Room, replied, “I’m after ME!” Discussing
the painting as a revelatory self-portrait, Troyen suggests that it makes
visible Hopper’s avowed desire to achieve what he called “the most exact
transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature.” We’re
back to “the expression of ideas and emotions about the life of the time.”
Henri would have been proud.
—Karen Wilkin

Alicia Borinsky, Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots.

Trans. Cola Franzen with the author. Foreword by Michael Wood. (Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 195 pp.

Alicia Borinsky’s Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots is a tour de

force. First published in Spanish in Argentina in 1999, Low Blows is now
available to English-language readers in a beautiful bilingual edition,
translated by Cola Franzen in collaboration with the author, with a new
Foreword by Michael Wood. Borinsky, an Argentine poet, novelist, and
professor of Latin American literature at Boston University, has already
established a following among readers of English for her novels Mean
Woman (Nebraska, 1993), Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer (Nebraska,
1998), and All Night Movie (Northwestern, 2002).
The translations are the product of a collaboration between the author
and Cambridge-based translator Cola Franzen, who has developed a dis-
tinguished reputation for her translations of Spanish and Latin American
writers such as Claudio Guillén, Saúl Yurkievich, and Juan Cameron.
Franzen, a recipient of PEN’s Gregory Kolovakos Award for her transla-
tions, has long been Borinsky’s co-translator, and since the early 1990s
they have produced English versions of three of Borinsky’s novels.
Franzen’s keen understanding of Borinsky’s styles and themes (already
evident in her highly perceptive introduction to Mean Woman in 1993)
has surely helped make possible her excellent translations of Low Blows—
translations which deliberately oscillate between trying to reproduce the
original and playfully riffing on it.