Edward Hopper's stories

All his life Edward Hopper maintained a scrupulous respect for fact. He frequently remarked that his pictures recorded scenes he observed while wandering around Manhattan. Early Sunday Morning (Fig. 2) he remembered as "almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue." (1) Room in New York (Figs. 1, 15) was based on "glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night." (2) Office at Night (Fig. 7) was "probably first suggested by many rides on the 'L' train in New York City after dark glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind." He then observed, "Any more than this, the picture will have to tell, but I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended." (3)

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And yet, although rooted in reality and observation, many of Hopper's best-known pictures are in fact compelling fictions. They reveal the dramas simmering beneath the most prosaic situations in American life and invite the viewer's speculation about their causes and outcomes. Hopper's scenes parallel themes addressed in the literature, film, and theater of his day. These themes--among them the futility of action, the difficulty of meaningful connection, and the solace in being alone--reflect the mood of Hopper's era and resonate with our own.

Despite their dramatic potency, the stories implied in Hopper's pictures seem to lack motive or resolution. They are strange, unyielding. The protagonists in Room in New York are clearly at cross-purposes--she is dressed to go out for the evening, while he appears to have just taken off his suit coat after a day at the office--and they do not engage with one another, but Hopper declines to reveal what brought them to this point. Office at Night, in which boss and secretary stay after hours to complete some unspecified assignment, is similarly about missed connections. The secretary's emphatically sexualized persona is presented in tense contrast to the buttoned-up indifference of her boss; the frisson of their intimate overtime is undermined by a sense that the scene's erotic expectations are not likely to be met. Critic Brian O'Doherty, in a celebrated profile of the artist, noted that Hopper's "pictures show no action. The people do nothing. They are passing time." (4) And they pass the time not companionably, but at a distance from one another.

There is little in Hopper's background to explain this world view. Born to middle-class parents in Nyack, New York, he enjoyed both financial and emotional support from his family during his years in art school. He trained in New York City first at the New York School of Illustrating and then at the New York School of Art, where he came under the spell of the charismatic Robert Henri (1865-1929). Henri advocated spontaneous, energetic paint handling; and he pressed his students to find their subjects in everyday occurrences in the neighborhoods of New York City. Among Henri's students and associates during Hopper's years at the school were a number--John Sloan and George Luks among them--with backgrounds in newspaper illustration. After art school Hopper also worked as an illustrator and became adept at designing pictures that told a story clearly and unambiguously. Yet he hated the work for its lack of subtlety; his distaste is reflected in his blunt reminiscence, "I was always interested in [painting] architecture, but the editors wanted people waving their arms." (5)

Despite Hopper's aversion to melodrama, in his own best work of this period, the prints he made between 1915 and 1923, there is a strong story-telling quality. Critics were quick to recognize Hopper's talent for evocative narrative, and applauded the prints for being "composed with a sense of the dramatic possibilities of ordinary [experiences]." (6) Perceiving the sympathy for the working classes in etchings such as East Side Interior (1922) and the suggestiveness of such prints as Night on the El Train (Fig. 10), one reviewer admiringly dubbed Hopper "an O. Henry of the Needle." (7)

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Although his prints were favorably received, Hopper's career as a painter was slow in developing. There were no significant sales or recognition until 1923, when a watercolor--The Mansard Roof--made during a summer trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts, was accepted for a group show at the Brooklyn Museum and then purchased by the museum. The next year, Hopper showed a group of watercolors at the Fifth Avenue gallery of Frank K. M. Rehn (1886-1956), who would represent the artist for the rest of his life. The inaugural show with Rehn featured images of Victorian houses that demonstrated Hopper's love of painting architecture. A few also reveal his instinct for the power of evocative detail: for example, by introducing a single figure looking out a window or trudging up an otherwise unpopulated street, as in Haskell's House (Fig. 6), he brings to mind all the other inhabitants of the town, who are unnaturally, eerily absent from the scene.