Hopper Drawing

New York, Dallas and Minneapolis

by Robert Silberman

‘I don’t care so much for my drawings’, Edward Hopper once remarked. When a publisher proposed a book of them, he responded that it ‘would only very inadequately express what I attempt to do in my paintings’. Now, however, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, recipient of approximately 2,500 Hopper drawings in a bequest from the artist’s widow almost fifty years ago, has organised the first major exhibition focused on this aspect of the artist’s achievement. Having been shown at the Whitney and at the Dallas Museum of Art (where this reviewer saw it), Hopper Drawing is currently at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (to 22nd June).1

It would be difficult to argue that Hopper deserves a place in the pantheon of great draughtsmen. During his mature period the drawings are almost without exception preliminary studies for paintings. They rarely stand as major works in their own right, even if the show’s curator, Carter E. Foster, hangs the ‘masterpiece’ tag on a few early efforts and dresses up the groups of studies for individual paintings by referring to them as ‘suites’ of drawings. The drawings nevertheless possess more than passing interest for an understanding of Hopper’s art, and especially his working method. As a painter, except in his watercolours, Hopper gradually moved from an emphasis on working directly from nature – what he called ‘the fact’ – to a greater reliance on memory and imagination. The drawings served his needs by providing reminders of architectural and other details, enabling him to test different poses for the figures, and in general allowing him to work out compositions as completely as possible before turning to paint and canvas. The changes visible in the drawings reveal how efficient and at times bold he could be in moving towards the psychological depth and visual strength of his greatest paintings.

Hopper’s early drawings do show talent, as in the female nudes from life-drawing classes and a portrait of his friend and fellow artist Guy Pène du Bois. During several sojourns in Paris as a young man Hopper sketched in the streets and cafés, making character studies and caricatures. But as one might suspect from the deliberation and stillness of his mature art, he was no Daumier or Constantin Guys when it came to capturing the livelier aspects of the human comedy. His most ambitious early painting, Soir bleu, a large, low-key café scene included in the exhibition (cat. fig.95), combines observation and imagination in a way that anticipates his mature method, as do a few other paintings based on French scenes executed after his return. Yet these images lack the intense drama of architecture and light and the uncanny sense of mood in classic later paintings such as Early Sunday morning and Nighthawks (figs.164 and 166).

After presenting early work, the exhibition abandons chronology to adopt a thematic approach that partly disguises what might otherwise appear an assembly of case studies of individual paintings. The final gallery, dev­oted to ‘The Bedroom’, demonstrates the benefits of a thematic organisation most successfully. Two major paintings, each of a nude woman facing the sun, and a variety of drawings and early paintings as well as one print provide a rich sense of what did, and did not, change in Hopper’s exploration of the motif.

Any comparison of preparatory studies and the final product runs the risk of becoming a mechanical exercise, a simple tally of additions, subtractions and other modifications. But there is no denying the fascination in following a Hopper painting from the initial sketches through to completion. The exhibition rep­eatedly succeeds in tracing what Foster describes as Hopper’s ‘delicate, complex tinkering’. Eliminating a conversation between two figures in Hotel lobby (figs.75–77) results in a heightened sense of silence and inaction. The Nighthawks drawings (figs.190–201 and 203–29), as Foster notes, mark the stages of development in especially impressive fashion, with one fixing the overall composition in a few quick strokes, another establishing the strong contrast in lighting between inside and outside, and then a series leading to the final arrangement of the figures in the diner (fig.211). In Office at night, Hopper shifts the point of view, alters the pose of the woman and of the man, and removes a picture from a wall, sharpening the focus on the human drama and fine-tuning the play of light. He then adds many subtle touches, such as a breath of wind indicated by the window shade, that contribute to the complexity of the painting (Figs.75–78).

One important side effect of seeing the working drawings, almost all executed in black and white, is an appreciation of Hopper as a colourist. The colours in the paintings are crucial for establishing the formal structure and emotional tone of the scenes – and not only in standout elements such as the woman’s red dress in Nighthawks. Hopper’s annotations when working from ‘the fact’ in a painting of a farmstead next to a highway show how careful he is to record not only relative value (‘white on house darker than sky after sundown’) but whether the colour of a particular element is ‘cool’ or ‘hot’. The play between coldness and warmth in the colours repeatedly supports the distinctive Hopper sense of time of day, light and mood, and the tension between detachment and attraction in a painting such as Nighthawks.

Only in a few instances does the exhibition present a Hopper drawing with an independent existence that uses expressive means for expressive purposes, not merely an accurate record of ‘facts’ or an effective means of working out formal problems en route to the painting. The gallery label rightly describes a view of a road, a rock outcropping and trees as ‘forceful, energetic’ and exceptional in its depiction of ‘movement and flux’. There is, however, no painting based upon that drawing.

For Hopper’s mature paintings there was always the challenge of turning the image developed by the artist in his mind, sometimes after a long period of gestation, into the picture on the canvas. The drawings were essential to that process, and this exhibition does an excellent job of making that clear. Yet mysteries remain. A pleasant drawing of a grand Victorian residence on a wooded street (fig.61) records what seems unmistakably the model for House by the railroad (1925). No intermediate studies suggest why Hopper shifted to a frontal view, eliminated the street and trees, and established a stark juxtaposition of the house and a railroad track added in the foreground. But he did, creating what is arguably his first major work, the first painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, according to Alfred Hitchcock, the inspiration for the Bates residence in Psycho. The drawings reveal much about Hopper’s creative process, but they cannot explain everything.

1 Catalogue: Hopper Drawing. By Carter E. Foster, with contributions by Daniel S. Palmer, Nicholas Robbins, Kimia Shai and Mark W. Turner. 256 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2013), $60 (HB). ISBN 978–0–300–18149–4.