Edward Hopper and the American imagination

Magazine Antiques, August, 1995 by Kate Rubin

Edward Hopper's vision of American vernacular architecture, empty city streets, shop fronts, and lonely highways was embedded in the visual culture of his time. It has inspired countless other artists and made Hopper perhaps the best known painter of twentieth-century American life. He has traditionally been presented as a realist working outside the main artistic currents of the day. In fact the prosaic qualities of his paintings disguise the complexity of his approach and his debt to other artistic sources. A recent re-examination suggests an artist very much immersed in the visual culture of his time. He was an avid fan of the theater and the movies during the emergence of modem American drama and the heyday of Hollywood. He drew on both these arts, as well as commercial illustration and photography, for imagery and inspiration.(1)

When asked in interviews to describe the specific locations of his work, he always responded that his scenes were merely "suggested" by specific places and were never literal transcriptions.(2) The mystery, emptiness, and silence that pervade his work were as much his subjects as the appearance of American life in this century. He looked for subjects in the real world that were the "best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience,"(3) and then distilled elements from a variety of sources to create the final composition.

Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, and in 1899 enrolled in the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City.(4) The following year he transferred to the New York School of Art (formerly the Chase School), where he studied illustration and then painting under Robert Henri (1865-1929) and Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876-1952). On graduating in 1906 he made three trips abroad, spending most of his time in Paris painting. His fascination with city dwellers, architecture, and light are all evident in his early work in Paris. In 1910 he returned to the United States permanently, settling in New York City. "It took me ten years to get over Europe," he later said, for he found New York City "awfully crude and raw" after his return.(5) He earned his living as a commercial illustrator producing cover designs and drawings for a variety of publications, and painted in his spare time. He took up etching in 1915 and watercolors sometime after that. Although he was trained as a plein-air painter, by the mid-1920's he had largely abandoned oil painting outdoors in favor of the studio. Hopper spent the summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts; in Ogunquit and on Morhegan IsLand, both in Maine; and from the 1930's onward, in South Truro, Massachusetts.

In 1924 an exhibition of Hopper's watercolors at the Frank K M. Rehn Gallery in New York City sold out, allowing him to give up illustration for painting full time. By this time he had largely given up painting Parisian scenes and redefined himself in modern American terms. When Lloyd Goodrich (later Hopper's biographer) saw a show of his work in a New York City gallery in 1926, he wrote that he felt as if "a new vision and a new viewpoint on the contemporary world had appeared in American art."(6) In fact, Hopper had been laboring away for years following "the common lot of the painter," as he wrote of John Sloan, "who through necessity starts his career as a draughtsman and illustrator" giving him "a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves."(7) Hopper later said he found illustrating depressing, but as the Hopper scholar Gail Levin has noted, he incorporated much of what he experienced in that world into his later work.(8)

Hopper's wife, Josephine Verstille Nivison (1883-1968), also a painter, was the model for all his female figures. He used no model at all for his men. Although he continued to paint from life in his watercolors, his oils were a synthesis of reality, imagination, and other art forms. Referring to Gas (Pl. IV), for example, he said he had the idea for a long time before beginning the painting.(9) Not finding an actual gas station that resembled the one he imagined, he combined images from a variety of sources.

Hopper was one of the first American artists to consider the world of the office a suitable subject. Among the publications to which he regularly contributed illustrations was System, The Magazine of Business. The forerunner of Business Week, it included articles on display and advertising and useful advice for businessmen. In Hopper's early illustrations for System (see Fig. 2) are the seeds of such later paintings as Office in a Small City (Pl. V), in which he has eliminated the narrative details of the earlier work to focus on the isolated figure sitting at a bare desk high above the city.

Advertising imagery, so pervasive an aspect of modern American life, also found its way into Hopper's paintings. He worked briefly for an advertising firm in New York City in 1907 and later designed occasional trademarks and logos. But it was in the pages of magazines like System that he would have observed firsthand the doctrines of selling and display. In Drug Store (Pl. VI), the main theme is display. The world of advertising and trademarks is here transformed into a mysterious, beckoning vision brightly lit in the dark shadows of the city. In Gas, Pegasus--the trademark of the Mobil Corporation and the symbol of poetic inspiration--hovers over the edge of the forest like a sign marking the boundary between nature and civilization.