Edward Hopper
Madrid and Paris
by DAVID ANFAM

THE RESPECTIVE INSTALLATIONS of Edward Hopper, seen by this reviewer at both the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (closed 16th September), and the Grand Palais, Paris (to 28th January), were a study in such contrasts that they almost seemed to treat different artists. In Madrid, the selection numbered approximately seventy works, which were expansively disposed across seven major spaces on the ground floor of the Palacio de Villahermosa itself, rather than in the more cramped modern wing customarily chosen for temporary shows. By comparison, Paris is hosting a blockbuster: 128 works by Hopper arrayed on two floors over a big corner section of the Grand Palais complex. Whereas the Thyssen-Bornemisza contextualised its subject with a neat handful of paintings by Robert Henri, George Bellows, Félix Valloton and a few others, the French version has gone the whole hog with a supporting cast that further includes graphics, photographs, projections and films by, among others, Camille Pissarro, Thomas Eakins, Eugène Atget, Paul Strand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Wim Wenders. So which event reveals the ‘real’ Hopper? The answer, of course, is both and neither. Like Van Gogh, Rothko and Warhol, Hopper has become one of those modern icons who can be all things to all people: painting’s Pierre Menard, so to speak.

Madrid’s Hopper suggested a relatively modest innovator, an introvert content to keep the even tenor of his way over the decades in the face of various avant-garde ‘isms’ – be they Cubism, Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism. The Parisian overkill instead turns Hopper into a bellwether of twentieth-century culture and rather more besides. To be sure, his artistic odyssey straddled a wide span, ranging from the early Parisian scenes touched by Impressionism to Two comedians (1966; cat. no.166), with its weirdly bleak Altersstil that looks beyond influence, notwithstanding a valedictory nod to Watteau. Chameleon-like and alert to changing trends, there is also a sense in which Hopper was ever his own unchanging man.

Then again, if one conceives life as a theatre, with art as its mirror or double – as Hopper surely did1 – all the world’s pageant is free to pass through its proscenium at some point or another. Hopper himself signposted this premise with some of his earliest paintings, such as Solitary figure in a theatre (no.11; Fig.68), in which the voided curtain/stage is a tabula rasa upon which the future might inscribe anything – note the darkly blank Rückenfigur that hints at the mind’s open-ended potential to project itself into the world (and, conversely, retreat from it). Scant wonder that Hopper’s pictorial enterprise has subsequently become such a trafficked interpretative site in the eyes of his critics and the general public.

As the catalogue essays demonstrate, successive generations read into the artist whatever messages they wished to see in his taciturn pictorial planes.2 Thus Hopper as a discursive phenomenon has come to resemble a shifting signifier, akin to the cinematic genre of film noir, to which by no coincidence his art has been yoked. However, film noir is defined, somewhere near its core is the jeopardous relationship between the self and reality, the watchers and the watched. Aptly, Hopper titled a late canvas Excursion into philosophy (1959; no.160), adding that the open book beside the man there is Plato ‘reread too late’. For Plato’s cave, read Hopper’s room(s) and we have the gist of his gloomy, ironic take on the human condition.3 Just as his diverse buildings are inanimate enclosures that observe the life or lifelessness about them, the protagonists throughout Hopper’s œuvre appear to look without seeing, as though blind to distinctions between illusion and substance.

The subtext of Hopper’s entire project might be T.S. Eliot’s oft-cited line that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’. This is why his pictures make surfaces and light, secrecy and darkness, their very subject. These are the flip-sides of a humanity that quests for things it cannot find or else is baffled by the difference between exteriors and what lies within. Part of the perennial popular appeal of such warhorses as House by the railroad (no.108), Early Sunday morning (no.126) and Nighthawks (no.140; Fig.67) is that they conceal as much as they reveal. Significantly, the aforementioned house stands in the middle of nowhere (and hence leaves the viewer puzzled as to its veracity); Hopper overpainted a figure in the window of the second composition (leaving us to be the only players in the scenario); and, in the third canvas, made a clean well-lighted place into a conundrum (as though the evident drama had left its darkling plot behind in the night).

Over and again, Hopper’s images point to a world elsewhere. Why else are so many of the figures lost within themselves, the arrangements judiciously truncated by the paintings’ edges and the signs of transit or transience – among them, hotel rooms, roads, bridges, steps, doors, lobbies, lighthouses, cyclists, boats, petrol stations, sunsets and sunlight – omnipresent? The corollary to this implicit stress upon worlds elsewhere, an aesthetic that links the earlier Hopper to a Symbolist such as Xavier Mellery, is the assumption that we cannot bear a lot of the here-and-now. The artist himself admitted as much when, writing about Charles Burchfield, he noted the ‘sad desolation of our suburban landscape’ and ‘our native architecture with its hideous beauty’. Hopper’s genius and the secret of his enduring box-office success was to turn the American Dream into an ambiguous dystopia – a middle road between the sunny liveliness of Norman Rockwell or Thomas Hart Benton’s brand of realism and the overcast frozen pathos found in Andrew Wyeth’s disquieting variant.

Likewise, fright at the disenchantment of things as they are helps to explain not just Hopper’s curiously bland brushwork – the antithesis of, say, Ivan Albright’s stupefyingly detailed attention to troubled surfaces – which renders its subjects preternaturally smooth and effaced, but also his recourse to theatricality. The carnivalesque is a time-honoured strategy, stretching from the medieval Feast of Fools to Pagliacci’s ‘vesti la giubba’ and beyond, for escaping or sending up the unpalatable rigours of everyday life. Accordingly, Hopper placed a clown near the centre of the seminal Soir bleu (1914; no.63); inserted a scatological joke (a sign for Ex-Lax laxative) into Drug store (1927; no.115); made the twin nipples of the dancer in Girlie show (Fig.69) rhyme with the points of two cymbals in the orchestral pit below; and, in general, often gave his figures the feel of ham actors, sometimes with mask-like faces. In short, the comical or burlesque undercuts a Puritan joylessness at unredeemed existence. Nor are Hopper’s high vantage points solely attributable to Pissarro’s late cityscapes, important as the precedent was. By the time of the etching Night shadows of 1921 (no.83), the viewer has become a sort of private eye on high gazing down at a dodgy nocturnal wanderer. In other scenes, typified by Office at night (1940; no.139), linear perspective goes awry, perhaps in keeping with a human plot skewed by errant ways and carnal desires. In a typical instance of this warped concordance, the sassy Southern belle in South Carolina morning (1955; no.157) stands alongside the diagonals of an exaggerated, plunging van­ishing point. Overall, these and numerous other idiosyncrasies signal the manifold follies witnessed within Hopper’s theatrum mundi.

As mounted in Paris, the retrospective proves something of a theatrical tour de force. In effect, a carefully choreographed museological performance (the press release rightly mentioned scénographie), its scale gradually increasing in a sequence of galleries that are by turns darkened (at the outset for a screening of Paul Strand’s and Charles Sheeler’s short film, Manhatta, 1922) and brightly lit. At moments, the impression is slightly over the top: for example, when Hopper’s small magazine illustrations and some equally modest photographs by Atget and Matthew Brady are projected on the walls at a grandiose scale. Similarly, Hopper might well have disowned some of his progeny, such as diCorcia’s male hustlers plying their trade on the mean LA streets. On the other hand, neon signs announcing two ‘Entr’actes’ – the first a populous gallery devoted to the illustrations, the second the aforementioned sequence by diCorcia – add a welcome Gallic wit to the tour. This was Hopper for both the cognoscenti and the crowds.

Most importantly, the curators have secured a magnificently comprehensive roster of loans for the Grand Palais showing. Hardly a single big gun is missing, while the catalogue reprints a useful anthology of items from the Hopper literature, an insightful essay by Wim Wenders not otherwise widely available, and a solidly detailed chronology. There are only two significant omissions from this impressive panoply.

First, the many connections between Hopper and Caspar David Friedrich have still escaped scholarly notice.4 Both artists depicted spooky edifices (Gothic in the German’s case and vernacular in Hopper’s); exploited high viewpoints, large luminous skies and took dark woods as their theme on several occasions; juxtaposed youth and age as well as the times of day; portrayed figures sunk in deep contemplation; and alike explored an amor vacui that led them to envisage empty space as by turns imminent and alienating. Hopper’s Morning sun (1952; no.155) is uncannily reminiscent of Friedrich’s Woman before the rising sun (1822), just as the former’s Sea watchers (1952) evokes a disillusioned reply to the latter’s Two men contemplating the moon (c.1819–20).5 Secondly, People in the sun (Fig.70) closed the installations in both cities. Its source must be the indelibly memorable news photograph of seated military VIPs watching the eighty-one-kiloton explosion of a nuclear bomb at Enewatak Atoll on 8th April 1951. Both Hopper’s painting and the photograph display extremely similar groups of rightward-facing watchers in the open air, rigid in their chairs and transfixed by some luminous spectacle beyond the frame.6 It would have been quintessential Hopper to have ended his dour human comedy – People in the sun was his last painting to feature a gathering as opposed to lone or isolated figures – on a note of quiet, albeit apocalyptic, annihilation.

1    For the fullest treatment of this idea, see W. Wells: Silent Theatre: The Art of Edward Hopper, London and New York 2007.
2    Catalogue: Edward Hopper. Edited by Didier Ottinger and Tomás Llorens, with a contribution by Caroline Hancock. 368 pp. incl. 345 col. + 80 b. & w. ills. (Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Grand Palais, Paris, and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 2012), €45 (HB). ISBN 978–1–9353–0287–5.
3    See D. Anfam: ‘Rothko’s Hopper: A Strange Wholeness’, in S. Wagstaff, ed.: exh. cat. Edward Hopper, London (Tate Modern) 2004, pp.34–49.
4    Since Hopper (who read German) was in Berlin in 1907, he is unlikely to have missed the ripple effect from Friedrich’s conspicuous national revival when a large number of his works were included in the great Jahrhunder­tausstellung in that city the previous year (there were also substantial reviews of the exhibition in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and in this Magazine); my thanks to William Vaughan for this information.
5    I have already compared Hopper’s Railroad sunset (no.120) with Friedrich’s The cross in the mountains(Tetschen Altar); see Anfam, op. cit. (note 3), pp.42–43.
6    Independently and simultaneously Walter Wells and I reached this same conclusion about Hopper’s source.