Quiet City

Edward Hopper is remembered as the great painter of New York’s classic era in the first half of the twentieth century, and so he is. But despite his reputation for the moody, noirish introspection of Nighthawks, the human figures on display in Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney Museum do little to suggest any actual interiority. On the contrary, the atmosphere of his paintings comes from the resolute impenetrability of his subjects; they may be dreaming, but we know only that we do not know their dreams. When you look back at it, Nighthawks isn’t as atmospheric as we recall: our memories of a melodramatic haze of smoke and fog are upset by a starkly lit and oddly antiseptic greasy spoon that seems more drained of ambience than suffused with it. Popular culture has pinned Hopper with a nostalgic association that is mostly missing from the paintings themselves, romanticizing a sense of midcentury isolation that was considerably less picturesque at the time.

Which is not to say that Hopper’s paintings are actually cold and unfeeling, because they are neither. He is, in fact, one of the last painters who could stay true to the European painterly tradition while documenting the world around him, as, by the time of his death in 1967, his avant-garde contemporaries in Europe had successfully exiled conventional realism to a fringe for reactionaries and sentimentalists. More than a few painters, such as Albert York, whose work feels outside of time and occasionally manages to match the great works of the Renaissance in sublimity, have proved that realist painting is not de facto dead, but all the same, in the wake of modernity it has struggled to depict life as it is. Hopper still could, though, and as such his works show traces of received traditions: a woman laying out fruit on a table in a restaurant recalls Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Degas’s scenes of the orchestra pit at the opera anticipated Hopper’s cinema audiences, and the dense textures of his etchings even suggest something of Goya’s draftsmanship. But Hopper’s own odd quality, his modern shift in tone that distinguishes him from his forebears, is that the coldness of his distanced, often voyeuristic rendering of people is contrasted with a warmth of feeling for buildings, light, and space. Bricks and steel are presented as familiar and inviting, while skin is treated like an inert, unknowable substance.

His canvases carry a sense of emptiness in direct proportion to the number of people in them. New York Corner (Corner Saloon), from 1913, the only instance of a crowd in a Hopper painting at the Whitney, shows an indistinct mass of people in the distance that makes the foregrounded street, with its four figures, appear emptied out. By comparison, a watercolor of an empty rooftop, My Roof (1928), is suffused with sunlight, and the delicately handled shadows imply a sensuous engrossment in the act of looking that his rendering of humans lacks, alternately as expressive as mannequins or as fleeting as a stolen glimpse through a window. Where they appear, people in effect interrupt the canvas, like a jolt that pulls Hopper out of his reverie. Unlike a conventional city portrait where the subject is ensconced in their surroundings, Hopper’s figures seem like daydreamers unconsciously stumbling onto the scene of another daydream.

Born the year before the Brooklyn Bridge was completed, Hopper bore witness to some of the greatest leaps of construction that turned New York into the quintessential modern city, and the sense of awe at these accomplishments must have still been palpably fresh in his formative years. Like the cinema’s novel ability to project “real” life back to viewers, the city around him seemed possessed of grand new tools for the realization of previously unimaginable projects, as though humanity had risen to the level of some sort of demigod. New York’s evolution in the early decades of the last century brought with it unprecedented scenes for the viewer, from the expansive scale of newly built suspension bridges and elevated railways to the economic boom taking place in factories and office buildings, all of it anticipating skyscrapers as immense monuments to the city’s supremacy. Hopper himself seems to have consciously avoided depicting this explosive growth, as only small details tend to suggest anything of life past the ’20s; though he lived for nearly forty years after the completion of the Empire State Building, Hopper—to my knowledge, anyway—never distinctly painted anything taller than a few floors. Although there are a few near-grand vistas in the exhibition, like his 1913 painting of the Queensboro Bridge or The City (1927), which captures the view of Washington Square Park from his rooftop, Hopper’s sensibility tends to shrink from the epic in favor of quiet. Where his contemporary Joseph Stella found unrestrained intoxication in these industrial marvels, Hopper preferred to find moments of calm solitude within an imposing environment.

The rise of cinema was also instructive to Hopper’s temperament and choice of subject matter, both as a way of looking at the world and in his evident interest in prosceniums, barrel vaults, and other elements of theater architecture. If anything, his attitude toward seeing is as much indebted to the detached emotional investment of the moviegoer as it is to the cityscape itself. His paintings are always immaculately framed, indeed cinematic, although they seem less directly influenced by studio cinematography in the ’30s and ’40s than influential to what would come after his time, when filmmakers were freer to compose images on location. What is more crucial is detachment itself, the possibility of becoming an aloof observer of his surroundings instead of an active participant.

Hopper’s ambiguous images of a man and woman in an office (Office at Night, 1940) or the back of a woman mending a dress (New York Interior, 1921) seem to be inspired by the new opportunities for casual voyeurism one encountered in the course of riding the elevated train. Those chance glimpses became vivid imaginative experiences for him because film had added a layer of narrative perception, where one glance could imply the idea of an entire life. Before modernity the act of looking had been a concrete experience, but Hopper’s era experienced the changes that invited an abstraction from seeing things simply as they are. Cubists, Futurists, Constructivists, Dadaists, and so on explored this abstraction by other, more overt, means, which Hopper’s classical techniques mirror with an equally modern visual psychology. His perceptions, true to his time, conceived of the modern world in a manner that separated him from the past’s emotional attachments and left him in the contemplative isolation of the modern subject, able to see with a new clarity of disinterest that also blocked him from the experience of, for instance, Renoir’s animated luncheons that ultimately serve to express something of the subsumption of the individual into a collective cultural existence.

Hopper was instead left to the observation and construction of space itself, filling an empty room with light (which is, as John Walsh details in a wonderful Yale lecture, “At Edward Hopper’s Doorstep,” imaginary and optically deceitful at times) or painstakingly constructing a fictive theater out of separate elements from real theaters, invariably re-creating the lights, aisles, and curtains with great care while neglecting the central focus of the movie screen itself; for all of his images of cinemas, he shows a screen only once, and then only as an indistinct sliver in the background. But even if Hopper paints a desolate city, it is not an unfeeling one; his distance from other inhabitants corresponds to a fondness for the city itself, the fount of sights that he never tired of seeing. His New York is, unlike ours, mostly lacking in iconic monuments and towering skylines, a dense and modern city, yes, but also a modest and knowable one. Instead of recasting the world-famous view of the Brooklyn Bridge’s lapidary towers, he opts, in Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928), to commemorate its less-than-famous sister, and is content then to show the very start of the bridge before it lifts away from Manhattan, with only some small steel arches and the cement wall of the pedestrian walkway to identify it as a bridge at all. According to the Whitney’s plotting of his painting sites, available online through Google Maps, the bridge’s grandiose arch and colonnade may have even been visible from where he was standing, but he had no interest in such a classical, opulent subject. His relationship to the city was personal, not public, and his affection for buildings and space expressed in his paintings seems to have come from his familiarity with the views he painted. It’s his ability to concretely as well as subjectively document his environment that gives his images their enduring charm.

Before Hopper’s time, images were scarce and more or less represented real things and real views of landscapes; today we are so inundated with images that it becomes hard to apprehend reality as something separate from its representation, to see a view as something other than an image. Hopper lived through a period where neither held sway, where the cinematic imagination was ascendant but still a novelty that could not be confused with real life. It’s a perspective that can serve as a lesson to us today. I live across the street from the Manhattan Bridge, and the very spot where Manhattan Bridge Loop was painted is only a couple of blocks away. I walk by it all the time, but my relationship to what I see in my neighborhood is mundane. My memories of my surroundings are at best utilitarian, my appreciation of the eye-catching is haphazard, fleeting, and usually of details like signs, posters, or graffiti. The totality of a space evades me. Hopper’s quiet sensitivity to the city is something I envy in him, a relationship to familiar spaces that was sustained and engaged without any need for the stimulation of flashy or novel imagery. It speaks to a type of experience that is foreign to us now, something simple, slow, and profound.