The New York Times > New York Region > The City > Unblinking Witness to a Moody Town - Edward Hopper
The New York Times > New York Region > The City > Unblinking Witness to a Moody Town
Unblinking Witness to a Moody Town
ALMOST anyone who lived in Greenwich Village between the 1920's and the 1960's remembered him well - the tall, lanky figure making his unhurried way across Washington Square, deep in concentration. Stiff-necked and silent, his impassive face crinkled in the sunlight.
This familiar figure was Edward Hopper, as solitary and immersed in thought as the people he painted. One day the artist Paul Resika, his neighbor for many years, saw him in the park, and stopped. "Mr. Hopper," he asked, "What are you doing?" Hopper replied, "I'm thinking out my picture."
Most of the time, this meant he was thinking of how to clarify the immediate world around him, the metropolis that he made his own. Hopper once described New York as "the American city that I know best and like most," and its physical face inspired seven decades' worth of paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints. Hopper, who lived in Manhattan from about 1905 until his death in 1967, roamed the city with a passion and had a well-worn familiarity with the byways and corners off the tourist's map.
Few other painters have portrayed New York so authentically that we can no longer see the city without being reminded of his imaginative distillations of it. Hopper has long been a member of that small club of artists - George Gershwin, Weegee and Woody Allen are other names that come to mind - who construct their own cosmos, self-contained yet instantly recognizable. Through a mysterious alchemy, their city becomes our city.
Nearly four decades after his death, and many decades after he created some of his most evocative works, Hopper sites and Hopper moments can still be found everywhere in this city of steel bridges, concrete walls, asphalt roadways, old warehouses, empty roofs, brick buildings and small rooms. Wherever an empty street shimmers on a sweltering August day, whenever someone takes a seat in a darkened theater and waits for a performance to begin, we can see a Hopper in the making. Wherever a solitary gazer is framed by a window or a diagonal shadow engulfs a sidewalk, Hopper is there.
Ever the contrarian, Hopper offered an alternative to the New York that most other American artists of his day seized on - the city of the new, the gigantic, the technologically thrilling depicted, for example, in the paintings of Joseph Stella. Hopper developed his version of the urban landscape without turning to the structure that symbolized New York to the world: the skyscraper. Neither the Empire State nor the Chrysler Buildings appear in his work; never do we see the prow of the Flatiron Building, cresting up Fifth Avenue in the afternoon light.
And although he painted a number of New York's bridges, he never chose as a subject its most iconic, the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, he focused on the far less celebrated Manhattan Bridge, most notably in his 1928 painting "Manhattan Bridge Loop," in which a blast of sunlight is offset by the deep shadows cast by the trolley loop. In Hopper's work, Manhattan's glamorous structures take a back seat to homely items like the chimney pots atop nondescript houses and industrial lofts. In "City Roofs," the 1932 oil that records what Hopper saw from the roof of his Greenwich Village studio, the spectacular Art Deco apartment house at One Fifth Avenue has been stripped of its flourishes while the skylights and chimneys on his own roof are transformed into an eccentric jigsaw of squares and rectangles.
If Hopper's New York is an unglamorous city, it is also purposefully empty and quiet. Even his theaters are dark or nearly vacant; the few people he has placed in the seats seem to be early arrivals or late departures, just as his deserted streets seem to be captured during the dawning hours or late at night.
Because Hopper lived mainly in Greenwich Village, most of his work reflects the influence of his home neighborhood and Lower Manhattan. He occasionally ventured elsewhere - to Upper West Side brownstones, East Side bridges, Bronx apartment houses, Central Park and the elevated trains connecting the boroughs - but when he explored unfamiliar settings, Hopper tended to be more reportorial and less inventive, as can be seen in paintings like "Macomb's Dam Bridge" and "Bridle Path." On home ground - in the Washington Square area or downtown, places he knew well - he felt freer to interpret.
For all his obsession with the city, Hopper was not a native. He was born in 1882 in Nyack, 25 miles north of the city, and came to New York in 1899 to study illustration. Later, he enrolled in the New York School of Art to learn painting and took a studio on 14th Street.
Though New York remained his home base, he made several trips to Europe, living mainly in Paris, and he was struck by the differences between Manhattan and the City of Light. The Parisians, he wrote to his mother, "seem to live in the streets, which are alive from morning until night, not as they are in New York with that never-ending determination for the long-green - but with a pleasure-loving crowd that doesn't care what it does or where it goes, so that it has a good time."
As Hopper saw it, the grim business of living in New York encased people in themselves. He understood that New York was essentially a city of people intent on commerce, and this understanding expresses itself in the way he portrays relationships between men and women.
People become hardened by materialistic pressures, he concluded, and to survive, they grow indifferent or estranged from one another. Hopper probed this idea in his representations of white-collar workers inhabiting the drab, impersonal offices in paintings like "Office at Night" and "Conference at Night," both done in the 1940's. Even before he had established himself as a delineator of New York places, the artist had already pinpointed a New York state of mind. That state is not so much "loneliness," as the maudlin cliché about him would have it, but a tougher and more unsparing isolation that touches on the traps of modern urban existence, one in which individuals must become inured to life's insults and injuries.
In 1913, after living for three years on East 59th Street, Hopper moved to Greenwich Village, and rented a sunny, high-ceilinged studio in 3 Washington Square North, directly on the park. It was not the most luxurious of settings - the studio was heated by a potbellied stove, and Hopper had to climb up and down four steep flights of stairs whenever he needed to get coal or run an errand. But the place suited him perfectly, and he stayed in the building, now owned by New York University, for the rest of his life.
Hopper was a typical New Yorker in his pastimes. One of his great pleasures was walking and, evidently, discreet gawking into brightly lighted rooms at night. He rode the city's buses, trolleys and els, savoring swift and fleeting glimpses into other lives. He was a regular at coffee shops, a lounger in parks and an ardent theatergoer, and whenever he was blocked artistically, he binged on movies.
Thanks in part to these interests, plays and films were natural themes for Hopper. But it wasn't simply that he transcribed images of movie palaces and Broadway stages; his approach to this subject matter was far subtler and more complex. Hopper had been freeze-framing dramas for years in his glimpses of private scenarios played out between individuals.
Like the film-noir sensibility in which it is rooted, the 1942 painting "Nighthawks," arguably Hopper's most famous work, defines the vanished city of our imagination. Its source was a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, a street that runs at a sharp Hopperesque angle to several Village streets. The figures inside the diner are like specimens preserved in a jar glowing with an eerie green light. The huge plate-glass window is seamless, and there is no visible entrance. How did that hard-faced couple, the single man and the counterman find their way in? How will they get out? Like characters in a crime movie or existential fiction, Hopper's people are trapped in a world that offers no escape.
posted by eConsultant at 1:26 PM
|
0 comments
