Edward Hopper. Gerry Souter
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is probably what he meant. His was an art of suggestions rendered so deftly as to seem to be actually there. In addition, the emotion coming from the canvas regardless of subject matter seemed diaphanous, just out of reach, implied just as three swipes with the brush created a ship’s hull and a scribble of zinc white and dabs of carmine created a French town with red roofs in the distance. It was as if Hopper himself was an implied suggestion:
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skilful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
Changing Times
It must have been with a sigh of resignation that he once again took up his portfolio and plunged into the faceless crowds rushing along the pavements, dodging horse manure in the streets, being startled by the beep of horseless carriages’ horns and the hissing pop valves on steam cars. He endured the press of bodies on the electric trolley-cars that groaned and clanked towards yet another illustration job that he hated yet needed.
There were plenty of jobs open to Hopper. System, the Magazine of Business hired him and he began a long relationship with the publisher drawing men and women in office situations. The pay was good and he received enough assignments to consider venturing from New York to paint new subjects. He chose Gloucester, Massachusetts on the Eastern Seaboard as his destination and gregarious Leon Kroll as his travelling companion.
The tall taciturn Baptist and the short loquacious Jew worked hard all summer in and around the beaches and boat docks of the coastal town. Hopper was unusually productive, possibly egged on by Kroll’s relentless good humour and prodigious output. Leon Kroll would return often to Gloucester, eventually becoming a fixture there until late in his life. The picturesque port drew artists from everywhere so Hopper found it difficult to set up an easel and not find himself intruding into someone else’s scene.
His first time painting American scenes out of doors seemed to inspire him and he turned out Gloucester Harbor, Squam Light, Briar Neck, Tall Masts, and Italian Quarter. Each one was carved out in bright sunlight with no gauzy atmospheric effects. Virtually no human figures are present, but their boats and houses and the thrusting masts of the moored ships suggest a busy population. A thick impasto of surf crashes against the rocks at Briar Neck and large rocks litter the back alley of the Italian Quarter merging their hard-edged angles with the slanting roof eaves of the town’s frame houses. Squam Light with its wind-scoured outbuildings perches above a beach with drawn-up dories. The white of the lighthouse and sun-bleached houses is laid on with thick strokes. The facility with which the painting is dashed onto the canvas suggests Hopper was enjoying himself. Only the always-changing sky seems to have been heavily worked until one of its many permutations remained.
Tall Masts, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 74.3 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
Gloucester Harbor, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 66.5 × 96.8 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
American Village, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 96.2 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
On returning to New York, his mind was still lingering on the summer’s activity while through the carriage window he watched small towns rush past. Back at home, he painted American
Village, an early evening look down from an overpass at a village street. The windows of its stone-front buildings are still shaded with individual awnings. Street level awnings hide the shopping populace from view. A quirk of the light singles out a white frame house and yellow trolley-car at the end of the main street, but the rest of the pavement activity is only suggested by strategic paint dabs as low clouds roll overhead before the arrival of a summer rainstorm.
Hopper dragged himself back to The System, Magazine of Business and added fiction illustration for the Associated Sunday Magazine, a Sunday supplement tabloid carried by major city newspapers. But a more bittersweet test of Hopper’s resolve was still ahead, as judging was underway for inclusion in the February opening of a show to be held at 25th Street and Lexington Avenue in the cavernous hall of the 69th Regiment Armory. The 1913 Armory Show would turn the art world on its head and Edward Hopper desperately wanted to be a part of the excitement.
The opening of the Armory Show on 17 February 1913 tore into the staid American art scene with 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by more than 300 European and American artists. From Marcel Duchamps’ Nude Descending a Staircase to the realist works of the American “Ash Can” School, there were no limits or boundaries. Critics rushed about seeking the high ground, moral, or creative, or both, but mostly followed the popular line, or as one critic wrote: “It was a good show… but don’t do it again.” For a new broad segment of the public, the show brought to light the American artists who also practised this lurid internalised alchemy of paint and canvas, or stone and chisel.
During the selection process, the Domestic Exhibition Committee was chaired by William Glackens, belonging to Henri’s circle, who took part in the “Eight” show, and contributed regularly to the ongoing MacDowell hangings. This committee managed to offend almost everybody by its original invitations for admission requiring originality and a “personal note” in each artist’s work as part of the committee’s guidelines. Hopper was not automatically invited to submit as in the past.
A backlash among American artists finally wedged open the door to submissions by uninvited artists. Hopper, hat in hand and no longer one of the favoured Henri clique, brought two of his 1911 oils, Sailing and Blackwell’s Island. Only Sailing, the jaunty little sailboat, was allowed to be hung.
Unprecedented crowds shouldered their way into the Armory hall. Guffaws of laughter, gasps, and curses punctuated the rumbling murmur of the crowd as they passed works by Kandinsky, Picabia, Matisse, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Brancusi, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. The walls were alight with colour and movement.
Like many of the American artists, Hopper surreptitiously hung about near his painting, looking for reactions, listening for comments. From the crowds trudging past, pointing, and whispering behind their hands, stepped a textile manufacturer from Manhattan named Thomas F. Victor. He liked the picture of the sailboat, noted its price was $300, and being a successful manufacturer, offered $250. Hopper accepted and a show official affixed a “sold” ticket to the picture’s frame.
Finally, Hopper had sold a painting, something created from his memory and imagination. The $250 sale price is approximately $6,000 in today’s economy. This is significant money and a jubilant and revitalised Edward Hopper took the train home to Nyack to show his parents that he was finally on the fine art track to success. The legendary Armory Show closed on 15 March. Garrett Hopper, always lingering at the edge of frail health, died on 18 September 1913. Edward had vindicated himself in his father’s eyes, and considering the latter’s own fruitless struggle for success, must have been very pleased for his son.
Edward Hopper had to take stock of his life at this juncture. Realistically, his sale of a painting was more a symbol of the door cracking open than an arrival, a confirmation of his long sought after success as a fine artist. He was past thirty years of age and had developed a facility with the painting medium that obeyed what he chose to place on the canvas. Abstraction and “modernism”, as featured in the Armory Show, held no thrall for him. He had committed himself to realism and the painter’s ability to translate his personality to the selection, presentation, addition, and subtraction of elements in a given scene. Now he needed to flush away the past struggle and move on. To begin with, in November 1913, he began documenting his sales in an account book, carefully noting each acquisition of cash, no matter the source. In doing so he came to grips with the illustrative work that he needed