EchoVib

Talk was never Edward Hopper’s strong suit. His wife Jo, the chatterbox in the family, once observed: “Conversation with Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.” Hopper’s eloquence was visual. When he died last week at the age of 84, in the Washington Square studio where he had lived for the past 54 years, he left a half-century-long portrait of the workaday face of America. He had captured it with all the homely honesty of a foursquare realist—but in the lambent light of a brooding romantic who saw beauty in the humblest barber pole.

Though not articulate himself, Hopper could quote Emerson: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Hopper was a genius of this kind; he painted not only what Americans have seen from the corners of their eyes, but what they have dimly thought and felt about it. People sitting on porches or by windows, the silent, sun-drenched Cape Cod houses or rows of blank-faced Manhattan store fronts on an early Sunday morning—all are vignettes glimpsed and pondered by a reflective traveler.

From Dark to Light. “You know, when you go by on a train,” Hopper once said, “everything looks beautiful. But if you stop, it becomes drab.” Hopper recaptured the magic of his first fleeting impression by eliminating detail. His canvases are generalized, his faces chastely drawn. But if this spared him the flaws of everyday existence, it also left him detached from the hurly-burly of everyday events. Hopper’s canvases are universally lonely.

The shy, hulking (6 ft. 4 in.) son of a Nyack, N.Y., merchant was always a loner. He devoured Tolstoy and Turgenev in high school, went to New York at 17 to study at the New York School of Art with Robert Henri, a leader of the Ashcan School. Hopper learned there that the proper study of American artists is American daily life, but the dark, flamboyant style that Henri encouraged among Hopper’s fellow students, most notably George Bellows and Rockwell Kent, was not for Hopper. Instead, he went on to Paris, absorbed the lighter palette of the impressionists—and remained totally aloof from the Fauvist and cubist revolutions going on around him.

Something That Suggests. Hopper sold his first painting, a canvas called Sailing, for $250 in the 1913 Armory Show. But popularity was slow in coming. It was not until 1923, after an agonizing decade during which he did commercial illustrations, that he sold his second. By the 1930s he had achieved a measure of success; his oils were being bought by the Metropolitan Museum, and his realism was accepted as the quintessence of the search for American roots and the often angry realism of Depression-era artists. Last March he was named the keystone artist to represent America at the 1967 Sao Paulo Bienal. Said Brandeis University’s William Seitz, who made the selection: “There is no other master who can better represent what is most characteristic of art in the U.S. A pioneer in representing ‘unpaintable’ American subjects, he provides a bridge from the Ashcan School to the decade of pop art.”

In fact, Hopper was no more a new realist than he was a social realist or even an Ashcan realist. Instead, he was an idealist: like a novelist, he reordered the scenes he saw to suit the mood he was trying to convey. Night Hawks, his somnolent 1942 evocation of the graveyard hour in an all-night cafe, was “suggested by a restaurant just at the juncture of Greenwich Avenue and Tenth Street—I think.” Hotel Lobby was the kind of picture that could have been inspired by “no particular hotel lobby, but a lot of little cheesy hotels.” Hopper gave up painting from nature entirely in 1940, explaining that “I look all the time for something that suggests something to me. Then I think about it. Just to paint a representation or a design is not hard. But to express a thought in painting is.”

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