Edward Hopper. Light and Dark. Gerry Souter
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move to the past, the Nocturnes, are closer in spirit to modern art than is Impressionism. The concentration in the Nocturnes on purely formal values of colour and line traces a direct descent to the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century.[12] His use of thinned oil paints applied spontaneously to create images from his memory must have especially appealed to Hopper.
In Hopper’s Blackwell’s Island, the scene is moonlit and composed in the manner of Le Bistrot with the bridge span occupying the left side of the canvas. A tug boat chugs in midstream beneath the Queensborough Bridge and lights wink on in houses scattered along both banks. A few stabs of zinc white create a single reflection of moonlight, grabbing the painting’s almost geographic centre. It was with paintings such as Blackwell’s Island as well as many of Hopper’s later works that abstract painters acknowledged a kinship in use of colour, line and planes.
If Edward had entertained the idea that the much-painted Blackwell’s Island would be his entrée into the more successful company of his former schoolmates, he missed his chance. Robert Henri decided to pick up the Independent Artists concept one more time and produced a series of unjuried shows at the MacDowell Club at 108 West 59th Street. He designed his new programme around exhibits of eight to twelve artists showing for two weeks at a time. Each group was responsible for the painters chosen to exhibit. Hopper was chosen along with Sloan, Glackens, Luks, Speicher, Leon Kroll and Henri.
The series of shows began in November 1911, and Hopper’s turn to exhibit was scheduled for 22 February to 5 March 1912. The artists showing with him were Guy du Bois (Hopper’s personal champion), George Bellows, Leon Kroll, Mountford Coolidge, Randall Davey, May Wilson Preston and Rufus J. Dryer. Hopper brought five oils to the exhibit’s bare walls: River Boat, Valley of the Seine, Le Bistrot) (Americanised to The Wine Shop), British Steamer and – the only piece of “American” art – the jaunty little sloop, Sailing.
Guy du Bois, who must have invested quite a bit of personal vouching for Hopper to get him in after the last French debacle, was most likely stunned.
Once again, Hopper sold nothing and was rendered invisible by the critics. Once again, he trudged back home with his shopworn French pictures and began looking for illustration work. How is it possible for an intelligent, gifted person to keep pushing a product that nobody wants? He had already followed Henri’s footsteps across Europe three times. He moved his studio to an address just down the street from Henri. He even painted the same subject as Henri. He had great friends and supporters among his former schoolmates. Moreover, the idea of schlepping his portfolio of illustration samples door to door hunting for jobs drawing pictures of suspenders, straw hats, debutantes, polo matches, deskbound bosses and muscular stevedores was anathema to him.
Edward Hopper wanted success but it had to come on his terms. After being the hero for the first twenty years of his life – the perfect son, the star pupil, the best prankster, the gifted technician – he needed to maintain that level of applauded accomplishment. The voice he had developed so far was one of minimals, of impressions. He joked late in his life about “still being an Impressionist” and that 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.”
27. Gloucester Harbor, 1912. Oil on canvas, 66.5 × 96.8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
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 carriage 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 and needed.
There were plenty of jobs open to Edward 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 gabby 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 behind.
28. Tall Masts, 1912. Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 74.3 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
29. American Village, 1912. Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 96.2 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
30. Yonkers, 1916. Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 73.9 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.
Invigorated by his summer of painting, Hopper joined Kroll, George Bellows, eight other hopefuls and the ubiquitous Robert Henri back at the MacDowell Club. In January 1913, when the hanging was completed and the doors opened, Hopper had hung two paintings, Squam Light and La Berge, yet another of his Paris paintings of the Seine. He demonstrated an almost pathological unwillingness or inability to separate himself from his French work in the face of monumental indifference. Predictably, he sold nothing and was once again ignored by the critics.
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
James MacNeil Whistler, Mark Harden, www.glyphs/art/com