LUX URY MA GAZINE SUMMER 2020 Early Sunday Morning, 1930, oil on canvas, 35 3/16” x 60” An American Life One of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, EDWARD HOPPER painted melancholic cityscapes and rural scenes imbued with loneliness and uncertainty—now eerily prescient. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American ArtDigital image © Whitney Scala / Art / Licensed by NY Resource, BY JASON EDWARD KAUFMAN 190 LM SUMMER 2020 LM SUMMER 2020 191 Self-Portrait, 1925–1930, oil on canvas, 25 3/8” x 20 3/8” Opposite, from top: South Carolina Morning, 1955, oil on canvas, 30 3/8” x 40 1/4” Lighthouse Hill, 1927, oil on canvas, 28 1/4” x 39 1/2” dward Hopper’s reputation is neither awe-inspiring nor picturesque, and Consider the psychological dimensions somewhat paradoxical. He emerged their occasional inhabitants tend to be bored of America, and the appeal of Hopper’s at a time when critics condemned cyphers rather than dynamic individuals. As work deepens. He is known as the painter Erepresentational painting and physical objects, the canvases are as modest of loneliness, representing the somber life promoted the innovations of abstraction, yet as their subject matter. Never monumental in of individuals absorbed in their own worlds. he remained a die-hard realist. scale, often subdued in tone, they are painted Even his unpopulated scenes are enshrouded Hopper’s life (1882–1967) spanned World in a sort of bland, straightforward manner, in an enigmatic stillness, as if time has paused War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great devoid of overt virtuosity. And yet, these to allow us to contemplate the peculiar Depression, and the Jazz Age. It continued works are hailed as artistic landmarks and sadness of its passing. Emotive power is what through the rise of Hollywood, World quintessential documents of American life. Hopper so expertly commands. War II, the nuclear age, and the Cold War, Hopper completed 366 oil paintings, “My aim in painting has always been culminating amid the Vietnam War, the birth hundreds of watercolors, about 70 etchings, the most exact transcription possible of my of rock and roll, and the counterculture of the and numerous preparatory drawings and most intimate impressions of nature,” he 1960s. Yet, throughout this dynamic epoch, illustrations. Most of his paintings are in once explained. He believed that realism his work remained divorced from the grand American museums, though major works was necessary to reflect an artist’s emotional history of headlines and celebrities. belong to Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, encounter with the world. Toward the end His choice of subjects seems almost Barbra Streisand, and Steve Martin. One of his life, he complained that “the loneliness calculated to short-circuit success. Nearly of his paintings, Chop Suey (1929), depicting thing is overdone,” but he acknowledged, “It’s all of his pictures depict everyday places and two women in a Chinese restaurant, sold probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, unextraordinary people doing nothing in in 2018 for $92 million, the record for his loneliness. I don’t know. It could be the whole particular. His cityscapes and landscapes are work at auction. human condition.” / Artists Zurich Rights Society Riehen/Basel 2020. © Heirs of Josephine Hopper / 2019, ProLitteris, Beyeler, Hopper” at the Fondation “Edward Bottom: Museum of American Art and opposite: Digital image © Whitney Scala / Art / Licensed by NY. Resource, Top Mark Niedermann (ARS); Photo: 192 LM SUMMER 2020 LM SUMMER 2020 193 Gas, 1940, oil on canvas, 26 1/4” x 40 1/4” Railroad Sunset, 1929, oil on panel, 48” x 29 1/4” IN THE BEGINNING Hopper worked for decades before gaining but insisted that he get practical training. trips to Europe, spending most of his time picture that he submitted to the landmark Rembrandt, Degas, and John Sloan— In 1923, on a painting trip to Gloucester, recognition. He was born in 1882, the second He studied commercial illustration at in Paris. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and others Armory Show of 1913 found a buyer, but melancholic scenes of the city at night, women Massachusetts, he began courting Josephine child in a middle-class Baptist family in a school in Manhattan, then enrolled at were rising stars, but Hopper had no contact it was the last painting he would sell for in working-class bedrooms, and lonesome Nivison, an artist who had attended the Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson the New York School of Art, a forerunner with the avant-garde. He studied the masters a decade. He moved from Midtown to a rural houses. Prints like American Landscape New York School of Art. She helped place River 25 miles north of Manhattan. The of Parsons, whose founder, American in the museums and painted like a late walk-up on Washington Square North in (1920), which depicts cattle crossing a his watercolors in an exhibit at the Brooklyn wood-frame house where he grew up, a few impressionist William Merritt Chase, had impressionist. His most important work from Greenwich Village. The flat had no toilet railroad track near a farmhouse, contain all Museum, and the museum purchased his blocks from the river, is today a historic broken from the academic Art Students this period, Soir Bleu (1914), is a café scene and was heated by coal that he lugged up the elements of Hopper’s mature work. The portrait of a sun-drenched Gloucester house, landmark and art center. His father had a dry League to advocate more progressive in the French tradition, with a motley cast of the stairs, but Hopper would remain there Whitney Studio Club, led by patron Gertrude The Mansard Roof (1923). (The house is one of goods store and his mother was an amateur approaches. Another teacher, Robert Henri, characters that would be right at home in a for the rest of his life. (The apartment, Vanderbilt Whitney, who later founded the many extant sites that Hopper biographer Gail artist. A gawky 6-foot-tall adolescent, Hopper admired Frans Hals and Édouard Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec. now owned by New York University, can Whitney Museum of American Art, mounted Levin photographed for her book Hopper’s spent much of his time on his own, exploring urged students to paint modern life. Hopper He eked out a living illustrating trade and be visited by appointment.) his first solo show in 1920—organized by his Places.) They married the following year, the docks, making model boats, and drawing excelled and after graduation stayed on to business journals, but he loathed the work Unable to sell oil paintings, in 1915 friend and former classmate Guy Péne du when they were both in their early 40s, and Jo and painting. His parents encouraged his art, teach, then from 1906 to 1910 made three and struggled to support himself. A sailboat / Artists Mark Niedermann Zurich Rights Society (ARS); Photo: Riehen/Basel 2020. © Heirs of Josephine Hopper / 2019, ProLitteris, Beyeler, Hopper” at the Fondation “Edward he began making etchings influenced by Bois—but none of the 16 paintings sold. moved into the Greenwich Village walk-up. 194 LM SUMMER 2020 LM SUMMER 2020 195 THE MIDDLE Petite and chatty, a former actress and school couple built a house and studio on land they the Art Institute of Chicago surveyed his teacher, Jo was the opposite of her 6-foot-5- had acquired on a bluff overlooking the watercolors in 1939, and the Whitney held a inch taciturn husband. “Sometimes talking ocean. Hills, South Truro (1930), completed retrospective in 1950—curated by Hopper’s with Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a during that first visit to the Cape, depicts ardent supporter Lloyd Goodrich—that well,” she said, “except that it doesn’t thump the landscape where they eventually decided traveled to Boston and Detroit. when it hits bottom.” Though she admired to make their home. Working mainly in New York City and his art, their 43-year marriage was marked The composition proceeds from a small towns along the New England coast, by mutual resentment and rancor. She secluded house in the foreground, past a he depicted unextraordinary and overlooked served as his model, secretary, and manager, railroad track, into a middle ground of softly people and places. Ignoring the grand Art and let her own artistic career fade under undulating hills carpeted in fecund green and Deco skyscrapers that defined progress his condescending gaze. We know from umber in alternating light and dark. In the and modernity, he trained his eye on aging her diaries that she was a virgin when they distance lies a ribbon of blue sea beneath a apartment buildings, empty parks, darkened met, and she gained no pleasure from their sky veiled with delicate pale-yellow clouds theaters, office interiors, and hotel lobbies. lovemaking. “The whole thing was entirely tinged with eastern sunlight. He makes He never painted traffic jams or airports, for him, for his benefit,” she wrote. She such scenes memorable by stripping away bustling factories or markets, packed described brawls in which he slapped and unnecessary detail, creating strong effects of speakeasies, or baseball games. He had no pushed her around, and she scratched and light and shadow, and using a limited palette interest in world leaders, pop-music icons, bit, even drawing blood. On their 25th brushed on in broad flat areas of color. The or hippies. The teeming throngs are absent; Above: People in the Sun, 1960, anniversary she quipped that they “deserve characteristic feelings of quiet and solitude present are solitary figures in sparsely oil on canvas, 40 3/8” x 60 3/8” a medal for distinguished combat,” and are present, but so is a subdued optimism, furnished rooms, with just a window hinting Hopper duly sketched her a coat of arms perhaps evidence of a fondness for the place at the siren call of public life.