THE DARK BRILLIANCE OF EDWARD HOPPER

^{Early Sunday Morning (1930)}       When a late spring nor’easter clips Manhattan, fat raindrops fall onto the emerging foliage of trees in Greenwich Village. Residents turn up their coat collars against the ice storm and scurry along streets lined with the townhouses of last century, through mews of sanctuary, and across Seventh Avenue.A wind sweeps through the canyonlands of the Hudson, sending the tumbleweed of the urban landscape — subway tickets, greaseproof wrappers and the litter of incidentalism — eddying into the air in a dance of metropolitan confetti .       Celebrated today as the foremost master of American Realism, Edward Hopper did not achieve recognition until his mid-forties.His earlier paintings, inspired when studying art in Paris were Impressionist in style but deemed too slavishly European for the popular American Nationalism art movement of the Progressive Era.When he developed his style into realism, embracing his American cultural inheritance rather than cleaving to his Francophilia and Huguenot heritage, success then began to follow.A reluctant commercial illustrator by profession, Hopper and his partner, Josephine Verstille Nivison, lived on the fourth floor of 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village.They had met in the summer of 1923 at an art colony in Ogunquit, Maine. She was a gifted watercolourist whose work had been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. After they married, Josephine became her husband’s amanuensis and muse, sacrificing her own creative aspirations on the altar of his career. It was an intense and tempestuous union; they were as diametrically opposed in personality as in physical attribute and were often locked in high combat.Hopper was a complex man: taciturn and enigmatic, he fell into long periods of introspection. It is said he suffered bouts of depression; if true it might explain the peripheral shadow of foreboding present in some of his paintings.An example of this is in Gas (1940).       An imaginative composite inspired by a coast-to-coast road trip, we see the artificial illumination of a gas station in a rural setting as dusk approaches.The road is not straight but curved, hemmed in either side by dense trees. The eye is drawn not to the attendant but beyond the Mobil sign, towards the impenetrable greenery at the bend in the road. In Western culture, woods and forests have symbolized the sylvan world of our subconscious, and so it is here. Gas is not a literal representation but rather an interpretation, in the same way that skilful recreation is to imagination.Hopper might sit at his easel for days, paralyzed by an unconquerable inertia, although contemplation is sometimes the preparative process that stirs the wellspring of creativity.Notwithstanding, he was very prolific, producing over two hundred oil paintings together with countless watercolours and etchings during the course of his life.He seldom engaged with the multicultural, teeming streets of the city around him.Hopper’s work, whose motif was often the disconnectedness of modern life, is illustrated by an artist whose own life is one of disjuncture from both his partner and his environment.       His most emblematic and recognizable painting, Nighthawks (1942), is a meditation on isolation.The diner is an island of refuge in the sodium-lit nigrescence of the surrounding street where the characters are detached from the world around them. Painted shortly after the United States entered the Second World War, this might reflect a prevailing mood of uncertainty.Within the diner there appears to be no personal interaction and, significantly, there is no entrance (or exit), suggesting that its occupants are marooned in their own introspection. There are cityscapes and Cape Cod homes where his love of architecture and its interplay with sunlight is expressed, but Hopper’s figurative paintings depict its characters as solitary and pensive amid an ambience of existentialist melancholia. Even where there are two characters, they are engaged in a dual solitude: one might be in contemplation, taking in the view of a window; the other is turned away, engrossed in a book.                                                 A city can feel more isolating than the uninhabited prairie. Moreover, in a city it is less expected. Loneliness, which is not to be confused with solitariness, is not the fact of being physically alone; loneliness is the gulf between your interior life and that of those around you.       The time must come when this coast (Cape Cod) will be a place of resort for those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them.       ^{— Henry David Thoreau}       In 1934, Josephine came into an inheritance which they used to build a summer home in South Truro on Cape Cod. Throughout their lives, they spent four months of the year there.Then, Cape Cod was a wilder landscape of fishing communities, unmade roads and paint-peeled clapboard with little resemblance to the gentrified colony of today. Although, there existed a railroad and a station at South Truro which served the Provincetown to Boston line.New England strongly resonated with Hopper to the extent that he was uninterested in any other region of the country. Historically, it was the land of the Pilgrims whose characteristics, reserved, conservative, puritan and bearing the certitude of being right whilst others are wrong, he strongly identified with. New England was also the cradle of American Impressionism and once the home of Thoreau who Hopper greatly admired. The house was situated on an escarpment above Fisher Beach. From the front elevation, the view was seemingly a drop from the door straight into the vast, elemental, mercurial Atlantic. If the ocean is a metaphor for time, the Hoppers were living on the kerosene illuminated brink of eternity. Hopper painted bucolic Americana: leafy lanes and pioneer homes standing defiantly against the broad vistas of this maritime outpost; rolling hills of verdure and seagrass shores; the telegraph pole leant in yieldingness to gales at landfall. He chased the Cape Cod light.The perfect hour is when there is a certain concord of colour and radiance. The sky is clear apart from wisps of cloud, distant and austere, and the afternoon sun has lowered, toying with its setting and producing a special contrast and vividity. Then he was ready to paint.edwardhopper.netEdward Hopper @ The Whitney Museum of American Art       HOME