As a life-long New Yorker, I take pride in knowing out-of-the-way corners and glittering avenues, as well as the art that takes my city as its subject. And yet I wasn’t aware that Edward Hopper spent decades roaming the boroughs from his base in Greenwich Village. I had always assumed that the unpeopled, dawn-lit places he portrayed must belong to a struggling upstate or New England burgh. But as a startling and immaculate show at the Whitney Museum of American Art makes clear, some of Hopper’s most gothic allegories of disconnection and loneliness were set in the perpetually raucous metropolis.
He took his sketchbooks on elevated trains and subways, plied the throngs and frequented the theatre. He could watch the crowds’ tidal rhythms in Washington Square Park from his studio window. Yet he methodically stripped away the New Yorkiness from his New York to reveal a vision of quietude and universality.
Born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, a suburb across the Hudson and 25 miles north, Hopper commuted into Manhattan for art school and then bounced from studio to studio. In 1913, he settled in a cold-water flat with a communal bathroom at 3 Washington Square North, part of a row of 19th-century houses. He remained at the same address for the rest of his life, though in 1932 he and his wife Jo moved to a larger apartment across the hall.
He took his teacher Robert Henri’s advice to immerse himself in his surroundings, but unlike his buddies in the Ashcan School, Hopper aimed to distil the eternal from the ephemeral, to freeze the surface jamboree into formally complex, psychologically knotty vignettes.
All around him, the metropolis experienced spasms of manic change. Skyscrapers shot up, whole neighbourhoods vanished, the elevated train line (the El) disappeared and motor cars overwhelmed the streets. In the Village, a hive of sweatshops coexisted with artist studios and bohemian pubs; just two blocks from Hopper’s home, two years before he moved there, 146 workers were killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. The city that Hopper painted registers none of that grind or excitement or misery. Instead, it exudes an atmosphere of timeless antiquity, its streets and windows often populated by a single statuesque figure: his wife Jo.
The Whitney show, ingeniously curated by Kim Conaty with Melinda Lang, reveals the way he treated New York as his muse and his efforts to disguise that passion. A cornucopia of sketches, studies and watercolours betray Hopper’s keen observation of architectural detail that he then edited out. Recognisable places became ever more generic and surreal. The urban energy he must have absorbed in his ramblings slowed to a sullen stillness. Already as a young man, he painted the new Queensboro Bridge in impressionistic strokes and moody hues, making it loom and glower. The great span’s footings threaten to crush the old farmhouse that cowers in its shadow on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Years later, in a different view, he relegated the bridge to a corner of the frame, a sign both of the island’s isolation and its tenuous connection to the city. The bridge had gone from protagonist to rune.
Hopper’s New York was partly real and partly invented, its wildness and variety filtered through his saturnine state of mind. Journeys on the El provided him with glimpses of domestic dramas playing out in third-floor living rooms, and he used that point of view to frame imaginary scenes. In “Room in New York” (1932), he levitates outside a window where a man in shirtsleeves and tie hunches over an open newspaper, while a woman in a red dress idly touches a key on an upright piano. We hear that solitary note in the evening shadows, not the clangour of the train.
The celebrated “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) looks like some small-town Main Street, a theatre set waiting for an actor’s entrance. Instead, it’s a block of Seventh Avenue, though which one is impossible to pin down because Hopper is less interested in location than in the mystery of shadowed doorways, fluttering curtains, and window shades lowered in a syncopated rhythm that nobody is around to hear. He has transcribed a specific somewhere and transformed it into anywhere.
Hopper’s form of realism was highly idiosyncratic. His aim, he wrote, was “to project upon canvas my most intimate reaction to the subject as it appears when I like it most; when the facts are given unity by my interest and prejudices”.
A painstaking process of subtraction and elision yielded that effect. Like him, I have regularly passed by the spot on upper Park Avenue where trains dip into a tunnel towards Grand Central Terminal. Though that block still looks much as it does in one of his preparatory sketches, I didn’t recognise it from “Approaching a City” (1946), partly because he replaced a tenement with a large — and nonexistent — industrial edifice. Below, the black void of the tunnel sucks in all light and emits existential dread. The title (“a” not “the” city) punctuates Hopper’s intention to generalise: dread is universal, Park Avenue at 97th Street is not.
Hopper painted New York with a chilly, backward-looking love that resisted change. A staunch conservative, he loathed FDR and disdained the blandishments of progress. “Through that hysterical period of American art when the first rush to be modern took place . . . Edward Hopper stalked, a quiet, slightly sneering, silently honest figure of obstinacy,” Vanity Fair noted in 1929.
As skyscrapers stretched ever higher, Hopper kept his gaze low, lopping off towers and hewing to horizontal lines. In the same contrarian spirit, he fought the remaking of his own neighbourhood. A vitrine displays some of his correspondence with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, building tsar Robert Moses and anyone else who might listen to his irascible views on the skyline. “I am opposed to any further desecration of Washington Square,” he declared. “No more tall buildings should be built here.”
His position mixed architectural preservation with self-preservation. New York University bought his building and in 1947 tried unsuccessfully to evict him and other artists who lived there. Hopper and his wife managed to hang on, but NYU eventually opened a trio of 30-storey towers by IM Pei a few blocks away. Today, 3 Washington Square North still stands, but his studio houses the offices of the university’s School of Social Work. Long before his death in 1967, the city he fought and resisted and adored had drastically changed around him, resembling his enduring version of it a little less with each passing year.
To March 5, whitney.org