As a lifelong New Yorker, I pride myself on knowing the back corners and glittering avenues, and the art that takes my city as its subject. And yet, little did I know that Edward Hopper had spent decades traveling the boroughs from his base in Greenwich Village. I had always assumed that the depopulated, dawn-lit places he described must belong to some struggling upstate or New England town. But as a startling and immaculate show at the Whitney Museum of American Art makes clear, some of Hopper’s most gothic allegories about disconnection and loneliness took place in the perpetually noisy metropolis.
He took his sketchbooks on elevated trains and subways, weaved through crowds and frequented the theater. He could watch the tidal rhythms of the crowds in Washington Square Park from his studio window. Yet he methodically stripped New Yorkiness of its 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 traveled to Manhattan to attend art school, then bounced from studio to studio . In 1913, he moved into a cold water apartment with a shared 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, although in 1932 he and his wife Jo moved to a larger apartment across the hall.
He took the advice of his teacher Robert Henri to immerse himself in his surroundings, but unlike his Ashcan school buddies, Hopper aimed to distill the eternal from the ephemeral, to freeze the surface jamboree into vignettes formally complex and psychologically knotty.
All around him, the metropolis experienced spasms of manic change. Skyscrapers exploded, entire neighborhoods disappeared, the elevated train line (the El) disappeared, and cars flooded the streets. In the Village, a hive of sweatshops coexisted with artists’ studios and bohemian pubs; Just two blocks from Hopper’s home, two years before he moved, 146 workers were killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. The city Hopper painted records none of that grind, excitement, or misery. Instead, it exudes an atmosphere of timeless antiquity, its streets and windows often populated by a single sculptural figure: his wife Jo.
The Whitney Show, ingeniously curated by Kim Conaty with Melinda Lang, reveals how he treated New York as his muse and his efforts to disguise that passion. A cornucopia of sketches, studies, and watercolors betray Hopper’s acute observation of architectural details which he then edited. Recognizable places have become increasingly 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 with impressionistic strokes and moody hues, making it loom and shine. The foundations of the great span threaten to crush the old farmhouse that cowers in its shadow on Blackwell (now Roosevelt) Island. Years later, in a different vision, he relegated the bridge to a corner of the framework, a sign both of the isolation of the island and of its tenuous link with the city. The bridge had changed from protagonist to rune.
Hopper’s New York was part real and part made up, its savagery and variety filtered through its Saturnian mindset. Travels on the El provided him with glimpses of domestic dramas unfolding in third-floor living rooms, and he used this vantage point to frame imaginary scenes. In “Room in New York” (1932), he levitates past a window where a man in shirt sleeves and tie bends over an open newspaper, while a woman in a red dress lazily touches a key on an upright piano. We hear that solitary note in the evening shadow, not the noise of the train.
The famous “Early Sunday Morning” (1930) resembles a small town main street, a theater set waiting for an actor to enter. Instead, it’s a block off Seventh Avenue, but which one is impossible to pin down because Hopper is less interested in location than in the mystery of shadowy doorways, fluttering curtains, and lowered blinds in a syncopated rhythm that no one is there to hear. He transcribed a specific somewhere and turned it into anywhere.
Hopper’s form of realism was highly idiosyncratic. His goal, he wrote, was “to project onto the canvas my innermost reaction to the subject as it appears when I love it most; when the facts are united by my interest and my prejudices”.
A careful process of subtraction and elision produced this effect. Like him, I regularly passed by the spot on the upper part of Park Avenue where the trains plunge into a tunnel towards Grand Central Terminal. Although this block still looks like one of his preparatory sketches, I didn’t recognize it in “Approaching a City” (1946), in part because he replaced a building with a large – and non-existent – building industrial. Below, the dark void of the tunnel sucks in all light and emits an existential dread. The title (“a” not “the” city) punctuates Hopper’s intention to generalize: dread is universal, Park Avenue at 97th Street is not.
Hopper painted New York with a cold, retrograde love that resisted change. A staunch conservative, he hated FDR and disdained the blandishments of progress. “Through that hysterical period of American art where the first rush to modernity took place. . . Edward Hopper stalked, a figure of quiet, slightly sneering, silently honest stubbornness,” Vanity Fair noted in 1929.
As the skyscrapers stretched ever higher, Hopper kept his gaze low, knocking down towers and carving horizontal lines. In the same annoying spirit, he fights the redesign of his own neighborhood. A display case features some of his correspondence with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, building czar Robert Moses and anyone who might listen to his irascible views of the skyline. “I oppose any further desecration of Washington Square,” he said. “No more high-rise buildings should be built here.”
His position intertwined architectural preservation with self-preservation. New York University purchased his building and in 1947 unsuccessfully attempted to evict him and other artists living there. Hopper and his wife managed to hang on, but NYU eventually opened a trio of 30-story towers by IM Pei a few blocks away. Today, 3 Washington Square North still exists, but his studio houses the offices of the university’s School of Social Work. Long before his death in 1967, the city he fought, resisted, and worshiped had changed dramatically around him, looking a little less like his enduring version with each passing year.
As of March 5, whitney.org