Edward Hopper. Gerry Souter
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Greek Revival style building at Three Washington Square North facing the park. It had been built in the 1830s and rehabilitated in 1884 for conversion to artists’ studios. Hopper’s neighbours were artists of various stripes and one of them, Walter Tittle, had been a former Chase student with Hopper. Their friendship was rekindled and Tittle helped Hopper find illustration jobs. Like it or not, Hopper was dragged into the Bohemian artist scene that had infiltrated the Italian and Irish Greenwich Village neighbourhood, The Washington North building often rang with simultaneous parties that Hopper visited by simply climbing or descending the stairs. He had shunned the riotous behaviour of the Left Bank-Montmartre crowd in Paris, but the proximity and vitality of Greenwich Village gave him some relief from work if it did not inspire him.
He was far from the most successful and hardly a gregarious yarn-spinner. His work had been juried out of their shows or accepted grudgingly. He worked in their shadows, but rarely in their company. He seemed to be seeking a key to their success in the location of their subject matter. “The American Scene” had many possibilities to draw from, and yet Hopper chose to dog the tracks of these artists and then produced works that drew no reviews from critics and did not sell. In the growing vitality of the American art landscape he became the 6ft, 5in invisible man.
And yet he continued to be a fixture in their society. If he was disconcerted, he didn’t show it, as he maintained a placid exterior. There was a dogged certainty about him that seemed to be supported by the brilliant technique he had demonstrated in Henri’s classes and in the casual skills he so disdainfully showed off in his illustrations. His friends and supporters remained loyal throughout his life.
New York Corner (Corner Saloon), 1913.
Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Station, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 51.3 × 74.3 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
World War I arrived in Europe and soon the United States was giving lip service to victory for the French and England as British war propaganda films were shown in big city movie palaces and nickelodeons. Hopper found variety from the magazine fiction he illustrated after having to read some of the mediocre text. The U. S. Printing and Litho Company churned out movie posters and each one paid Hopper $10 (equivalent to $230 in 2012). He was also paid to sit through the silent melodramas, which he preferred to the pulp fiction of the time. Movies became a fascination for him that lasted the rest of his life. Even the free movies did not calm his irritation over the theatre marketing people who demanded changes in his drawings when his realistic renderings did not conform to the stereotypes the film moguls thought the public would accept.
After building up his relative wealth into the black, Hopper needed to blow off steam. An artist acquaintance, Bernard Karfiol, recommended the Maine seaport village of Ogunquit, a popular nesting place for New York artists who descended on it each summer like a flock of seagulls. For eight dollars a week, Hopper became a guest at the Shore Road boarding house favoured by the artist population and sat down with them to a communal supper table where he met a fellow resident, a short redhead named Josephine Nivison whom he had seen in Henri’s classes. The instructor had, in fact, painted a full-length portrait of her costumed in paint smock gripping her palette and brushes entitled Art Student. The village became a gathering place for many of Hopper’s schoolmates and all the old stories blossomed to life around the dinner table and afterwards.
He plunged into a series of paintings in his usual 29 × 24 inch canvases that again demonstrated his ability to make so much out of so little apparent effort. The coastal coves are revealed under a bright sun that bathes the bays creating deep shadows and flat blue seas beneath the anchored brush-swipe dories. Two paintings distinguish themselves from the sea-washed cliffs and coves.
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