EDWARD HOPPER in CRITICAL CONDITION by JAMES BARRY

EDWARD HOPPER IN CRITICAL CONDITION

by

JAMES BARRY BLEDSOE

M.A., University of British Columbia, 1974

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

in the Department

of

Anthropology and Sociology

We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

June, 1974 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that; the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study.

I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis

for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department: or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.

Department of A«rfk fbp^l^'-j <=Pn£ Socjo/o^^

The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada

Date August lj 1974 Abstract

This thesis is about the relationship between an artist and his critics.

It explores how critics develop ways of interpreting a painter's work which be• come established as the meaning of his paintings.

Edward Hopper's paintings are basically ambiguous. They can be de• ciphered in a number of ways depending upon what set of interpretive procedures are used to unlock them. Therefore any consistency in the written description of his work can be looked upon as a perceived accomplishment of the critics.

We have been taught how to interpret Hopper through the professional written analysis of the art critic or art historian. In their reviews critics make available a set of assembly instructions for unlocking the meaning of his paintings.

Through these we learn how to decode them.

For the past forty years Hopper's work has been characterized as lonely, timeless and alienated. This thesis argues that this interpretation is largely the work of Hopper's critics. It cannot be derived from his paintings as such. An important method for establishing such perceptual concensus is a classificatory pro• cedure available to critics, known as the genre concept. This concept helps to impose an order on the formal properties of a work of art. ii

The genre to which Hopper's paintings were originally assigned is the narrative painting tradition. Story-telling is the primary goal of the narrative painting tradition. It is a form of painting where the material is representational with the intention of seeing the painting as part of a sequence of events.

In applying the concept to Hopper's work, the strict story-telling defi• nition is modified. Hopper's paintings do not fit completely the representational requirements of narrative painting. Attention becomes focussed on the situational episode rather than an on-going story. The specific qualities of timelessness, alien• ation, and loneliness emerge, it is argued, as a product of the application of the narrative genre to paintings which do not fully conform. Thus the special qualities with which Hopper's work is identified are seen as a product of the critic's own interpretive work in interaction with the paintings themselves.

The thesis further explores how this effect is accomplished by describing the build-up of a critical tradition among critics of Hopper's work in the 1930s and

'40s. The specific practices used by critics in establishing an interpretive concensus are described. The primary methods used are: (1) Special insider's knowledge about

the artist himself; (2) the use of one another's critical reviews as a resource file;

and (3) the critic's privileged use of the artist's own statements.

Once the gradual establishment of the interpretation becomes recognized

as the legitimate interpretation of his work, this also creates a selection of the

painter's work as a central corpus. This consists of those paintings which typically confirm the critical consensus and which recur again and again in the critical dis• cussion of his work. Paintings which do not fit the established interpretive pro• cedures are relegated to the sidelines.

These interpretive procedures are passed on by the critics to the reader who learns from them how to recognize the important works of a painter and how to look at and interpret them. This is part of the process of cultural mediation.

Through this passing on of interpretive procedures critical traditions are constructed and maintained.

0 Acknowl edgments

I wish to dedicate this thesis to the people who have taught me sociology.

Each one has had a part to play in my education, each one has had some•

thing to do with the kind of sociologist I am. I have learned from all of

them, and would like to think that if anything I say is worth listening to

it is a commentary on the quality of the teaching, and not on the quality

of the pupil. I list them in the order in which I met them: Gary Shogren

(I know he would prefer to be called a student of human nature), Jerry

Olson, Ron Silvers, Jim, Dorothy Smith, and Phil Roth.

I would like to say a special "thank you" to Dorothy Smith who made me

come to know what it means to say something clearly and accurately. She

saw the potential value of this work when it was nothing more than a sketchy

idea, and would not let me be satisfied until I had fully explored the subject

and developed my thoughts completely. Her formulation of interpretive pro•

cedures in discussions with me contributed considerably to the overall

theoretical framework.

J.B.B.

Vancouver, B.C. 1974. Table of Contents

Page

Abstract •

Acknowledgments iv

Chapter I - The Problem Formulated and Put in Perspective 1

Chapter II - The Initial Problem of Categorization 17

The Genre Concept 18

The Narrative Painting Tradition 29

Chapter 111 - The Construction and Establishment of the

Interpretive Tradition 35

I The Narrative Painting Tradition : Main Sequence \ 35

II The Narrative Painting Tradition : Modified Sequence 44

Summary 57

Chapter IV - Edward Hopper's Own Contribution 58

(1) The Descriptive Frame 66

(2) Hopper and Alienation. 68

(3) Hopper and Loneliness 69

(4) The Stoppage of Time 70

Chapter V - "Champions are Made not born" 74

(1) Insider's Knowledge 76

(2) Reviews as Resources 85

(3) Critic's Privileged Interpretations 86

Chapter VI - Locating the Assembly Instructions 97 vi

Table of Contents - continued

Page

Conclusion 108

Epilogue: Mrs. R. G. Williams. Docent 113

Appendices: Appendix A 117

Appendix B 119

Notes*. 120

Bibliography 126 I The Problem Formulated and Put in Perspective

"Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interest• ing to-observe and examine". Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

If any one word can best describe how Edward Hopper's work first affected me then it would be 'nostalgia'. Thinking back on it now, it was the first feeling 1 can remem• ber having toward any of his paintings. I first discovered Hopper back in 1966 or '67 when

I was still an undergraduate. I had been studying in the college library one Sunday after• noon and - being bored with what I was supposed to be doing - picked up an art book that someone had left lying on the study table where I was working.

As I began turning pages one painting caught my eye. It was a painting of a gas station, vintage 1940. What had caught my attention in the painting was 'The Sign of the Flying Red Horse1, an old emblem for the Mobil Oil Corporation. By the time I first saw the painting, this sign had already gone the way of old worn-out corporate symbols, but it reminded me of a gas station that had stood on a corner not far from where I had once lived when I was growing up. I now realize that when the work was painted that is what a gas station looked like. The painter was not dealing with nostalgia at all but merely a scene from 1940 America. In the rather casual way I was introduced to the painting, however, I felt that whoever the artist was, he must have had a degree of insight in order to recognize some of the objects that were beginning to be considered as memorabilia.

The artist had helped me to think about my old neighborhood; Rexall drug stores, comic books, yo-yo contests, children who had grown up and moved away. It was quite a 2

pleasant experience for me and one that I enjoyed far more than whatever had taken me into the library originally. Eventually I put the book down and went back to my other studies without it ever occurring to me that I should write down the name of the painting, the artist, or the book the painting appeared in.

Nevertheless, the painting stayed with me, stored away in the back of my mind along with a thousand other images, odors, and sounds that I would never be able to footnote or give a source for. I still remember the way the road led away from the gas station and into the approaching darkness, the way the light came pouring out of the door and windows, the neat, clean, well-scrubbed quality as in Hemingway's A Clean Well

Lighted Place, and the flood lamp shining down on the Mobilgas sign and the tree directly behind it. The painting had left an impression on me, had cast its spell, and over the years

I found myself regretting the fact that I had not written down the name, of the artist so that

I could look at the painting again.

When I entered graduate school several years later, I had an opportunity to enroll in a class taught by Ron Silvers on the Sociology of Art. The course centered around

Silvers' interest in how artists construct ideologies of alienation and how these ideologies are applied to their work.^ It was this class's focus on the theme of alienation that finally led me back to re-discovering Edward Hopper.

Although the class eventually investigated other dimensions of art as well, it started with an examination of the concept of alienation as applied to various artists.

Since the grade for the course was based largely on one long research paper it seemed ad• visable to begin early on and find out as much about artists and alienation as one could. When I first started the course, I had had little formal background in the subject area; therefore, I started out as I suppose many people would by going over to the fine arts library and asking one of the librarians for more information. As I began to outline the nature of the course and its interests, the librarian told me that what I was describing reminded her of the work of Edward Hopper. Once she showed me some of his paintings,

I had the feeling that I had seen his work before, and that there was a chance he might have been the artist who had painted the picture of the gas station. Eventually, I found that this was indeed the case when I ran across Hopper's painting Gas (1940) which had appeared in Romantic Painting in America,^ the book I had been looking at that day in the library several years before.

Two things had now predisposed me to viewing alienation in Hopper's work.

One was the discussion of alienation in the class and the other was the expertise of a fine arts librarian. When I wrote my paper on Hopper for the course, I was convinced that he captured the spirit of alienation in his work. I found that I could demonstrate this fact easily enough but, as was pointed out to me later by both Dorothy Smith and Ron Silvers,

I could do so only by using what the critics themselves had said. It was true that they had said what they did, and it confirmed what I wanted to show. Yet it did not go far enough, for there were still some loose ends that would not fit. Loose ends, by the way, with which

I chose not to deal rather than work them into the paper I was writing.

To my chagrin, I found the phenomenon of alienation quite elusive. I felt

it and saw it in his work but the concept "alienation" never seemed to hold still long

enough for me to get a clear understanding of what it was so that I could begin to describe

it accurately. The ambiguity in Hopper's work made the interpretation of alienation, 4

timelessness, and loneliness seem appropriate. Yet, I was never able to pin down the mean• ing of these terms vis a vis Hopper's work with any degree of success. It was a pretended insight to point to what an art critic had said about alienation and Hopper and then use it to substantiate my point. I could begin with what the critics said about alienation and

Hopper's work, and then go to his painting to substantiate my point. But if I began by merely looking at his work, I could not, with any certainty, recover from it the theme of alienation. That view of his work seemed unstable without the critics' support. In short, my original project had proven to be a disappointment in that I was not able to link up a direct connection between Hopper's work on the one hand and the concept of alienation on the other.

Nevertheless, the paper had proven useful in that after collecting a number of review articles, I could see that an interesting relationship had developed between what Edward Hopper had painted and what had been written about those paintings by the critics.

One of the interesting features that was accidentally discovered while collecting information on Hopper was the remarkable degree of similarity in the statements written about his work by the critics and review writers over a forty-year time span. This striking coinci• dence is so pronounced that recently some scholarly research was undertaken to determine why there is such an astonishing degree of similarity in the accounts written of him by the critics.^ At first I thought I could simply use this fact as a further means of substantiating what I wanted to say about Hopper.

However, as I began to examine the critical reviews carefully and became more aware of the scope of the material written about him, I saw that the critics had used this 5

same procedure for substantiating what it was that they had wanted to say. They too had taken their interpretations from the interpretations made by the critics who preceded them.

To paraphrase E. H. Gombrich, the critics were treating conceptual abstractions as if they were tangible realities within the formal properties of the paintings, or merely secur• ing an interpretation through what language had already prepared.^

The methods used by the critics to build up and establish an interpretation of

Hopper's work seemed to go against what I regarded to be certain rules of scholarship. I began to find some of their methods to be particularly distasteful. At this point I was no longer interested in further aiding and abetting their enterprise, but in trying instead to understand what they did as a set of working practices. In their role of mediating between artist and "audience", critics were not doing scholarship after all. They were doing critic• ism. At first I was upset when I saw how the critics would ignore interpretations that did not confirm the interpretation they were putting forth. Secondly, I could also see that the critics would occasionally put words into Hopper's mouth simply to confirm their in• terpretations. Once I realized that these were working practices used by the critics in their day-to-day activities, I began to consider ways of showing how ignoring conflicting statements or occasionally putting words in an artist's mouth are distinctive ways in which the critic gets his cultural work done. Finally, I could see that there was clearly a pro• gression from the early stages of Hopper's career when no explicit interpretation of his work stood out prominently, to a place where a particular set of specific instructions was used in order to interpret his work. I was surprised that the critics had not mentioned the fact. Was this part of their working practices too? 6

Furthermore, while I had been engaged in the process of collecting informa• tion on Hopper another thing was beginning to happen to me as well. The nostalgia feel• ing that I had known when I was first introduced to his work was now being replaced by the notion of loneliness, alienation, timelessness, and silence. I was convinced that these must be the major themes in his work even though I was unable to prove it. I had unknow• ingly stepped into the world of socially approved knowledge^ the place where my world was "premarked", "preindicated", "presignified", and even "presymbolized".

The properties of the knowledge that I was acquiring were determined for me by somebody else. Schutz speaks of this when he says, "It is entirely irrelevant for a des• cription of a world taken for granted by a particular society whether the socially approved and derived knowledge is indeed true knowledge. All elements of such knowledge includ• ing appresentational references of any kind, if believed to be true, are real components of the 'Definition of the situation1 by members of the group. "°

In other words, I was becoming a member of the group. I was learning how to recognize, organize, and assign meaning and values to the visual features of Hopper's work. My interpretive procedures for seeing Hopper's paintings had now been influenced by the critical reviews that I had read. I was now the conceptual bearer of an artistic and critical tradition as it focussed on Hopper.

Nevertheless, there was one fact that would not go away despite the critics.

The visual properties of Hopper's work had not always been seen and described as they are today. In fact, there was a progression from a period where no explicit interpretation was predominant to a point where a particular application of specific interpretations was 7

made. The critical tradition that surrounds Hopper's work today was constructed and established over a period of time. What is currently being seen in his work was not seen originally. A change had taken place and now the impression of consecutive articulation was part of the Hopper tradition. The notion that people had always seen the same thing in Hopper's work was part of the maintenance and preservation procedures that went into making up the critical tradition that surrounded him.

What I am suggesting here, and wish to develop further in the course of this study, is that it is through a set of assembly instructions made available by critics that critical traditions are constructed and maintained. I know from my own experience that critics were doing far more than simply evaluating works of art when they wrote about them.

I had been influenced bywhat they had written. I had come from a place where I saw

Hopper's work as a kind of nostalgic representation of my youth to a place where his world was alienated, lonely, and timeless. Now when I looked at Gas, I saw the lone figure of a man standing by the gasoline pumps. I saw the road with nobody on it rolling onward into the approaching darkness. I actually looked at the painting differently. I no longer gave so much prominence to "The Sign of the Flying Red Horse". In the course of reading the reviews I had picked up a set of instructions for how to view Edward Hopper. What is more, if I was being taught how to see Hopper's paintings by the critics then, in all likeli• hood, I was being influenced by an interpretive process general in nature.

In order to obtain a clearer idea of this process I began to develop a model that would permit the examination of the rules that govern the sets of symbols and elements which make up the distinctive features of a critical tradition. Here, then, is the direction

I took in spelling out this interpretive process: 8

A work of art is analogous to a message. It is a form of communication. The visual conventions found in a work of art are rather like a code that the viewer must know how to decipher if he is to be able to see what it means.^

The viewer must know how to interpret a work of art. He must command a set of interpretive procedures which recognize, organize and assign meaning and values to the visual features of a work of art. In the case of paintings, the viewer's view depends upon the interpretive procedures he brings to those paintings. They are not in the painting in any simple sense, "though the viewer sees them in the painting, just as the meaning of a message is seen as being in the printed word. In the following study, the term "inter• pretive procedures" is used to emphasize the fact that seeing the painting as meaningful is an accomplishment on the part of the viewer. The viewer himself must command a way of seeing the painting.

On the other hand, the artist can be seen as aiming at a set of interpretive pro• cedures .which will organize and assemble the visual features of his work as he intends it to be seen. When an artist innovates, a new way of seeing the painting is called for and viewers have to learn or discover how that is to be accomplished.

The visual properties of a work of art restrict the interpretive procedures which will work for it. However, they do not determine them. For example, the visual properties of painting intended in the genre of abstract expressionism cannot be interpreted in terms of the narrative painting tradition.

Similarly, it should be realized that the painting and the interpretive procedures used to view it are not rigidly geared to one another. The visual properties of the painting 9

may be interpreted on the part of the viewer by procedures which the artist himself did not intend. In other words, the painting and the interpretive procedures are not neces• sarily perfectly articulated. They can come apart, e.g., the interpretive practices of contemporary art may be applied to art from other historical periods or to art from other cultures. The painting may be seen in a different way than it was originally painted for.

Correspondingly, when an artist innovates, people may not be able to "see anything in" his painting because the interpretive practices they are using belong to a different tradi• tion.

For purposes of defining it, we could say that an artistic tradition exists when there is a consistency and institutionalization of an interpretive practice such that particu• lar visual conventions, symbols, themes, forms, style, etc., are recognizable and under• standable in its terms. The development of an artistic tradition makes possible a coinci• dence between the artist's own intention and how his viewers interpret his work so that they can look at and interpret it in the same terms as he intends it.

These interpretive procedures are learned. One of the principal ways that we are taught how to interpret art in this culture is through the professional analysis of the art critic or art historian. The majority of art works known to us have become known through a process of critical mediation. Works of art and the craftsmen who make them provide the raw material or basic resources for the critics who manufacture and package a variety of processed solutions to visual cryptograms. Once packaged, these solutions are then made available for mass distribution through an elaborate set of institutions, e.g., mass and other media, art galleries, art schools, and libraries. In time they become 10

part of the culturally accepted products that encircle us, determining our standards of

aesthetics and influencing our notions of taste.

In using Edward Hopper's paintings and what has been written about them, we

can begin to understand how works of art are constituted so that certain elements within

the formal properties of the painting are sustained. By showing people how to look at

paintings and how to go about recognizing what is in them, the critic is assigning values

to them so that the viewer will know what should be attended to. Over a period of time,

the establishment of an agreed upon set of elements that are to be found in the formal

properties of the painting preserves an impression of consecutive articulation. Here I

am using "consecutive articulation" to mean the kind of reality consensus that critics have

used and applied when they have come to describe the features of Hopper's artistic world.

What I want to do is explicate the various dimensions of the critical tradition by which

the interpretation of Hopper's work has come down to us and, at the same time, demonstrate

how, once that tradition isjestablished, it then becomes the method for interpreting his work.

While engaged in the process of collection, anything written or said about

Edward Hopper has had equal status and validity. The statements written about him by the critics constitute all the variations on the theme; consequently their subjective correctness - what I would agree with - is not the primary concern here. I want to make it explicit that the significance of the critics' individual insights are altogetheruunimportant for my study.

During the course of this study, their written works, the insights they have obtained, and the knowledge they have communicated and passed on, will be used and dealt with in an altogether different way. Instead of agreeing with any emerging or established interpretation n

of Hopper's work, I am assuming that there is an explicit ambiguity in his paintings and am treating it as one of their properties. This avoids the conventional assumption that paintings themselves give off determinate messages. Assuming for once that they do not give off determinate messages gives me an analytical control I would not have in another framework. By beginning to negotiate with the very reality of a painting itself, this study can be used as the wild card that permits the expansion and enlargement of what constitutes appreciative interpretation, instead of a harness for conceptual bondage. In what follows

I will show that critical interpretations have a built-in set of instructions for 'reading' the object under discussion. What is more, by going through the enterprise as it applies to

Hopper and showing how it works in his case, it will cast light on.one conceivable method for how artistic traditions and interpretations are (1) constructed and established and (2) preserved and maintained.

It is important to understand what properties of Hopper's art were most outstand• ing to the critics, for the mediation of the tradition turns on these observations. We know already, that Hopper's work is open to at least two different interpretations. In the following chapters more evidence will be provided to indicate that this is indeed the case. As we will see, the visual properties of Hopper's paintings were interpreted using procedures which the artist himself did not intend. The basic ambiguity of a Hopper painting can be deciphered in a number of ways depending upon what sets of keys are used to unlock them with. His paintings and the interpretive procedures used to describe them are not rigidly geared to one another.

Hopper's work has been classified as part of the narrative painting tradition.

For what the critics have wished to accomplish, the narrative painting tradition is the genre 12

that best seems to characterize his work. (The concept of genre as the critic's tool will be described in the following chapter). This tradition is a pre-existing category that has existed in Western Art for centuries. The narrative painting tradition or narrative style are both recognized trade terms encountered in the study of the plastic arts. They are familiar terms used in the daily activities of critics and reviewers much as a sociologist would be familiar with terms like class or dialectical materialism or a plumber would be with hex bushings or counter sink plugs.

Both the genre concept and the narrative painting tradition are important for our understanding of how Hopper has come to be interpreted. They are both used as an already available starting point for interpretation. By drawing on those two concepts for use in describing his work the die has been cast. The interpretation that now exists is dependent on these two pre-selected categories; they both act as the perceptual grids through which Hopper's work is deciphered. This cannot be stressed enough. They are both used to make the initial definition of his work and become an integral part of the pack• age of instructions which comprise the viewing directions.

The Critic's Role

While actively engaged in the task of review writing, critics never bring into question the whole issue of how a particular interpretation came to them in the first place.

Reviews read as if this substantiated interpretation of Hopper's work is always out there on the surface of the canvas, waiting to be interpreted and it is merely the job of the critic to sit at a typewriter and record that which already exists. Even people who attempt to explain why critics use certain adjectival terms to describe Edward Hopper (try to do so by using the essential corpus of his paintings as the starting point for their description.

From the standpoint of the critic, 'facts' are communicated but little atten• tion is devoted to the explanation of the socially organized, historical process that went into producing an interpretation in the first place. This process apparently is not seen as being part of their enterprise, so it is consequently never discussed as an issue. I have yet to encounter a critic, for instance, suggesting to his reading audience that they use a certain set of viewing instructions for a Hopper painting simply because there might be a possible aesthetic pay-off in looking at it in that way. For art criticism's primary con• cern is not to provide viewers with alternative visual approaches to works of art. If it were, it could be done in Hopper's case. Alternative interpretations are available if one bothered to look far enough. It would be no scholarly feat to research the subject back to where alternative interpretations exist. This would seem to be an integral part of the enter prise but I have yet to see it applied to Hopper.

The crjtic acts as a go-between. His role is to mediate between the artist and the public. It is a mistake to consider a review as simply an evaluation of a work of art.

As we will see, the critic or reviewer is instructing and teaching his audience how to look at an artist's work. This will require further explication for the critical traditions have bui within their structure a set of viewing instructions which are tacit and consequently inter• pretations are always presented as if they were a concrete fact about a painting itself.

Even the critical work of addressing the picture as such involves a special in• terpretive practice, as well as special knowledge on the part of the critic which he then passes on to the viewer as an aspect of what is to be found in the picture. Jack Burnham's The Structure of Art can help us here. It acts as a warning for some.of the descriptive pitfalls one is likely to encounter in a study of this nature. It is a good example in that

Burnham was aware of the working practices of the critics, tried to avoid their use in his study, and made a conscious effort to go beyond mere art criticism.

The Structure of Art attempts to demonstrate the shortcomings of conventional art scholarship on a very large scale. In his introduction and first two chapters he lays out a rich smorgasboard of ideas, providing the reader with an interesting and thoroughly in• structive critique of both art history and art criticism. Then, using the structuralist ap• proach developed by Levi-Strauss, de Saussure, Barthes, Chomsky, and Piaget, Burnham lays out the groundwork for a seemingly foolproof method of interpreting art that would avoid the constraints of the conventional styles of interpretation and would begin to get at the underlying structure of what lies "below or behind empirical reality".

Burnham chooses to accomplish this by subjecting a number of paintings and sculptures to a formal scheme he has developed which employs the use of charts and tables, a series of black lines dividing the page into sections, and a taxonomy that reduces all the art objects he discusses into two categories, "Natural and Cultural". Notwithstand• ing the precautions he has obviously taken, and the lengthy explanation of art criticism's built-in defects, Burnham, by chapter three, is back at square one using the very same interpretive procedures he has gone to such great lengths to caution his readers against.

As can be seen in the following example, Burnham's own analysis - although side-stepping the problems of narrative description - runs into another problem by simply trying to describe what is going on in the one frame the painting deals with. When

Claude Monet's "Haystack, Winter, Giverny" (1891) is subjected to his analytic scheme, 15

Burnham says the following:

"A haystack near Monet's home in Giverny, at dawn; the snow appears to be melting on the ground; the hill and trees in the background are a medium to dark sky blue." 8

This seems to be a straightforward description of a Monet painting, and certainly Burnham has not tampered with the facts to support his own theory. The facts seem to be facts until I remember that Burnham has been trying to demonstrate the short• comings of art criticism. Remembering that, I read another whole set of implications into his statement. Clearly there is no actual evidence in the painting to tell us where the haystack is located geographically unless we are already privy to a good deal of know• ledge about Monet himself. By telling us where the haystack is located, Burnham is giving us the benefit of special insider's knowledge. By saying that the haystack is "near Monet's home" he places the haystack somewhere in the world for us. But the location of that hay• stack is not evident from any information given off by the painting unless one already knows that Monet lived in a small village that was called Giverny. For Burnham to inform us that the haystack is near Monet's home requires that he either wrench a fiction loose or that some degree of preliminary homework has been done before the painting was subjected to his Natural-Cultural scheme. Furthermore, there is the application of a specific time co-ordinate in his narrative so that we not only know that the haystack is near Monet's home, but that it is dawn and that the snow appears to be melting on the ground. There is, of course, nothing wrong with Burnham's interpretive procedures. It is certainly one way of seeing this painting and it does lend itself to a general appreciation of Monet's work. This interpretation of the painting sounds more like the procedures used by

people responding to a Thematic Apperception Test. In a T.A.T., for instance, the sub•

ject is shown a series of pictures for each of which he is asked to make up a story. The

T.A.T. depends upon and uses the procedures of the narrative painting tradition for its success. Both "normal" individuals and mental patients enter into taking this test with a previously learned set of interpretive procedures for describing to the psychologist what is going on in the picture. What the psychologist pays attention to, however, are the "figures and objects not depicted in the picture but introduced in the story, and also to items which may be prominent or significant in the picture but omitted in the story. " ^

When Burnham states that the snow is melting, that statement is an interpretive act, not a mere statement of "facts". One could just as easily have said that it appears to be at dusk and that the snow is beginning to freeze on the ground. In choosing to fell us that the snow is melting Burnham gives determination to his reading of something in• determinate in the painting and then communicates that message to us. Burnham has tried to avoid the narrative painting tradition in his description of Monet's painting. He chose instead a technique whereby the description was confined to the formal properties of the painting itself. Yet even here we see that the painting may be interpreted on the part of the viewer by procedures that are not determined completely by the painting itself. 17

II The Initial Problem of Categorization

"If the Old Man said something was so, then it probably was, because he was one of those caut• ious babies who'll look out a window at a cloud• burst and say, Mt seems to be raining', on the offchance that somebody's pouring water off the roof. " Dashiell Hammett, The Big Knockover

It would be worth bearing in mind the initial pre-selection process that is accomplished prior to the actual description of an artist's work. For it is this selecting and choosing amongst a corpus of artistic traditions which enabled a particular set of

interpretations to be made.

One of the important roles the critic has in mediating between the artist and the public is to bring new art work under survey by established interpretive practices so that they become part of a tradition.

The construction of a critical tradition depends first upon the initial selection from amongst the corpus of art traditions that the critic already has available to him. The initial definition of Hopper depends upon selection from amongst this corpus of traditions prior to the actual critical description of his work. This in itself may not be realized by either the critic or the reader but is the crucial first step in beginning to describe an artist's work. When a critic begins to write a review, the initial problem is one of categorization.

He must either select from amongst an already existing corpus of art traditions or invent one of his own. The number of categories available to an imaginative critic would depend upon his knowledge of the field as a whole, and familiarity with what has been said previously. This knowledge is parr of the critic's working credentials; that which enables him to make pronouncements on the content of works of art.

The Genre Concept

The .PJenre concept^is one of the tools a critic has available to him in his organizational repertoire. It has come to be used as a classificatory procedure. Its use makes the critic's job that much easier in bringing new work in under a set of established interpretive practices. By incorporating a single piece of art or style into a larger system, he can begin to use comparison and artistic analogy. Reviews are quite commonly formu• lated in terms of how the artist's work compares to another artist's, or to the same artist at an earlier stage of his own development. Has he improved? How does his later, more mature style compare to his earlier works when the influence of a former teacher or 'schoo was still evident? The genre concept is an initial means of categorization; a general link up with a larger process. Once it has been initiated, comparisons with other works of art become possible. The critic can then begin to get a sense of what classes or categories will apply to a work of art. If indeed a new piece of art was not seen as fitting into a previously established category the critic could develop a new genre and begin to dessi- minate a set of new interpretive practices to show people how to go about recognizing the new and the unfamiliar.

The fgenre concept helps to impose an order onto the formal properties of a work of art. It is used to group together a variety of things under one heading; the cave paintings in the south of France, for example, or the mosaics inside the Egyptian tombs.

By employing the>'eoncept, single pieces of art or a particular distinctive style can be 19

incorporated into a larger system. In The Structure of Art, Burnham described it this way:

"One mechanism by which myths operate in art history is the 'genre concept', or the means of classification which isolate artistic events into groups and sub-groups for ease of hand• ling." 11

To understand why this is the case, the reader must be introduced to one of the assumptions of art criticism. Art, for Western Man, is never seen in historical isola• tion. Without this part of the machinery in operation the whole enterprise would collapse or look drastically different from the way it looks now. "The success of art history depends upon the reducibility of every work of art, every style, to a finite point or segment in time.

As George Kuber observes, works of art do not exist in time, they have an entry point". ^

As a method of expression, genres can be understood as places where certain communicative techniques can manifest themselves. The science fiction writer Philip

Klass points out that, "genres foster a special kind of collective creativity.. .an exciting playground for lively minds. " ^A genre is a specified artistic milieu where the material used to create a work of art is seen as being organized so that it is recognizable as falling into a designated scheme of classification. By working within this designated scheme, artists working in a number of media can practice theme and variation in their composi• tions. They are not compelled to follow a strict formula for an established genre, only to know what the boundaries are within which they can range. Moreover, these schemes of classification are recognized by both artists and critics alike. As a method for description, genres exist as a location where an artist's work can be assigned to an appropriate interprer tive frame. 20

There is an analogy here between recognizing a painting as falling within the boundaries of a specified genre on the one hand, and the procedures for recognizing mental illness on the other. In the case of a painting, the viewer has been provided with a preliminary set of viewing instructions for how to recognize, organize, and assign mean• ing and values to the visual features of an artist's work. A similar phenomena holds true for the recognition of mental illness. Smith, in her paper "K is Mentally III" says that

"The conceptual 'schema which is the meaning of the term 'mental illness' (as I know it) provides a set of criteria and rules for ordering events against which the ordering of events in the account may be matched, or tested. An account which is immediately convincing is one which forces that classification and makes any other difficult. " ^

As a critical procedure for classification, the genre concept refers to kinds of subject matter; the method whereby a critic can associate an artist's work with an estab• lished set of interpretive practices. In this sense, a genre then is the designation of types of subject matter and their appropriate forms into arbitrary categories. Furthermore, genres exist as useful sets of themes and images that exist as a common body of knowledge amongst artists, critics and viewers alike. These themes, symbols and techniques of expression are recognized as a general set of motifs that can be selected for use when an artist paints a particular work; they can be selected for use when a critic describes a work of art using established interpretive practices; or, finally, they can be used as an interpretive procedure for viewing a piece of artwork.

As an interpretive procedure, genres exist as socio-aesthetic entities or models within an agreed upon range of expression. However, the actual staging of the genre can take many forms and the artist can lay out his visual representations as he sees fit. If an 2)

artist's work is seen as a departure from an established genre, then another avenue open to the critic is to begin developing and disseminating new and varient interpretive pro• cedures for viewing that work. Again, to quote Burnham, "Newly discovered art objects are, if possible, incorporated into the concepts of object, style and history. When a radical adjustment is necessary, it is made by defining a new stylistic concept, leaving other styles essentially undisturbed. In a similar way older works are adjusted and re• evaluated. " 15

Application of the genre concept enables the critic to classify the theme, symbols, and communicative techniques into a set of definite styles. These themes, sym• bols, and communicative techniques will henceforth be referred to as visual vocabularies.

These visual vocabularies are what identify and assign an artist's work to one particular genre. This way, the critic can then begin to get a sense of what classes or groups of categories will apply, and start writing about them. Once the genre concept has been initiated, then comparisons with similar works of art become possible. The definite themes or the specific aims of a painter can be analyzed and compared within a context of what other painters have done.

There are numerous genres. Each is seen as having a distinct set of characteris• tics that isolate it from others. Abstract expressionism, for example, can be distinguished from either surrealism or Italian High Renaissance painting. In looking at a piece of art that is considered to fall under the category abstract expressionism, the viewer would begin to look for styles of form and color, or perhaps the special geometric relationships between forms and color. It would never occur to a viewer that he should look for the iconographical 22

symbolism of the Italian High Renaissance or the incongruities of meaning associated with

certain surrealist painters. Likewise, the viewer would not view an abstract expressionist

painting as being a statement of a representational situation, or a statement of the artist's

relationship to a landscape. By viewing a painting and seeing it as an abstract expression•

ist painting other genres are not abandoned, they are simply not used in making an inter•

pretation. It would never occur to the viewer that he should apply other techniques for

interpreting.

Let us now turn our attention to how the genre concept applies to Edward Hopper.

As we have seen, the genre concept is an initial means of categorization; a general link-up

with a larger process. Once it has been initiated, comparisons with other works of art become

possible. The critic can then begin to get a sense of what classes or groups of categories will

apply, and then begin writing about them.

When we note the perceptual consensus made by the critics who describe Hop•

per's work, we are also witnessing the practical accomplishment that allows for the continua•

tion of the enterprise. Its continual perpetuation is subtly tied to the perceptual agreement

seen in the reviews which, in turn, is the result of critics utilizing and relying upon the same essential sets of socially recognized contexts in order to make their interpretations.

Hopper's paintings do not stand by themselves in historical isolation. As with the rest of

the artifacts that go to make up art history's descriptive domain, Hopper's paintings too have a particular time and place of origin. This, then, is what the art critics are in the practice of going about doing: devoting themselves to finding the ancient land bridges between the

large body of art that goes to make up the corpus of Western art and its connection with

Edward Hopper's work. When Hopper's work was initially brought under established interpretive prac• tices, critics compared him to the Ashcan School, otherwise known as the Ash Can School,

Ash Can tradition, and the Chase School of Art.* Next, critics note that he studied with

Robert Henri, the founder of this school. At this point, however, we begin to distinguish a difference in the use of the term genre for there is a considerable variation in the critical accounts and they go off in a series of directions.

Some underscore the influence of the Ashcan School on Hopper as, for example:

"Edward Hopper had direct roots in the Ash Can tradition... In any comparison between Hopper and Burchfield it should be remembered that Hopper had developed directly out of the Ash Can Style... Especially in such etchings as East Side Interior (1922) and Evening Wind (1921) and such paint• ings as Two On An Aisle (1927) he is still the outstanding inheritor of the Ash Can tradition, retaining in these some sense of the warmth that most of his other work lacks. " 1°

Still other critics use the influence of the Ashcan School as a basis for differen• tiation between the artist and the school. The structuring effect of bringing him under a set of established interpretive practices is still noticeable here, however:

"Rarely has a career been so strongly and singlemindedly sustained. Born in Nyack, New York, in 1882, he studied with Robert Henri, skirted the Ashcan School, Social Real• ism, American Scene Painting, and then, with an extra• ordinary display of stamina, simply outlasted them all. " 17

"But the conservative art world considered them revolu• tionaries and christened them 'The Ashcan School'. Their leading spirit was Robert Henri, a good fighter and one of the most stimulating teachers of his day. ..Edward Hopper's origins lay in the Henri group, but his development took him far beyond it. "18

*l have seen it described all these different ways and apparently there is no established agreement as yet as to which one is 'correct'. These examples illustrate the procedures critics have available for placing the artist and his work into a pre-existing category. In this case the pre-existing category is the Ashcan School. Moreover, this common procedure for classification is the initial entry point for Hopper's work into the larger scheme of art history. All these reviews allude to the lore of the Ashcan genre, and the critics' ability to associate Hopper's paintings with something they are familiar with. Edward Hopper no longer remains as an isolated event.

The Ashcan School is his entry point back into the extended process of art history. Now he has a place, a location in space and time. Now he can be talked about, described, inter• preted. Once he has been located, that provides also for .1 differentiating as a critical strategy. Other critics have pointed out how Hopper was able to move on to another style which was more an expression of his own self:

"Edward Hopper was probably the most generally respected of all contemporary American artists. His work, which is intensely individual, cannot be classified beyond the state• ment that it is realistic, and no school or movement has been able to claim him as its own." 19

As Hopper's work itself is placed into a larger framework, so, too, is the

Ashcan School seen within a larger interpretive context. Like abstract expressionism, surrealism, Italian High Renaissance painting, etc., the Ashcan school is seen as a genre having a distinct set of characteristics that isolate it from the others. The critic, therefore, prior to describing Hopper's work, made the pre-selection of the Ashcan School from amongst an already existing corpus of art traditions. For what the critic wanted to accomplish, that was the genre that best described what Hopper did as a painter.

However./,there is still another problem we must deal with concerning the in• terpretation of Hopper's work. Most of the interpretations we have of Hopper first appear 25

in the early thirties and have been consecutively maintained up to the present. I have

argued that Hopper's work is, in fact, ambiguous and can yield alternative interpretations -

for example, my own experience in going from a nostalgic interpretation of Gas to one in

terms of alienation. Thus the meaning that has been given Hopper's work cannot be derived

from it. Hence the consistency of the critical interpretations of his work cannot be under•

stood as a result of the fact that they are all talking about the same thing because it is

the same. There is a social and historical process of building up a critical tradition and

it is this which accounts for the consistency of interpretation. Consistency develops over

time as the product of the work of the critics in relation to Hopper, in relation to his work and in relation to one another. It was not present from the outset. Early accounts of Hopper's work differ greatly from those made after the alienation interpretation had become estab•

lished as a major theme.

In announcing the suspension of judgment on agreement with a particular emerg•

ing or established theme, I am turning away from the current interpretations of his work and am focusing instead on the reviewer's procedures for making those interpretations possible.

Here are two critical accounts written forty-three years apart. The first account, written in 1972, shows how his work is currently being interpreted while the second account is one recovered from the relative obscurity of the late 1920's. The latter does not coincide with what is currently being written about him.

First, an excerpt taken from Jack Smith's column entitled "Alone in the Auto• mat", which appeared in the Seattle Times, Saturday, April 8, 1972: 26

"HOPPER'S CITY WAS COLD and empty; its light was harsh; its people were lost among the millions; nameless and disenchanted. That's what I had read anyway, and that's what I felt from the things I had seen. I wondered if this sense of loneliness would seem even larger when I looked at the originals. "^0

Compare the Smith excerpt with this next one which was taken from an article that Forbes Watson wrote for Vanity Fair in 1929 - a magazine, let's not forget, that was considered to be a style-setter on both sides of the Atlantic for over 20 years. Watson does not mention the loneliness and alienation which increasingly came to be recognized as one of Hopper's major themes, but as we will see later his account did provide the basic founda• tion on which later reviews were built:

"He once said that he was striving to achieve the greatest possible austerity without loss of emotion. These paintings are much more than austerely selected pictorial records. They have an architecture of their own in their convincing concentration on the architectural subject matter. The humor of these uncluttered structures seems sometimes to have been the whole reason for the picture...A lyric imagination, not immediately apparent because the artist's sense of the ridi• culous occasionally obtrudes, lifts the art of Edward Hopper far above mere humor and witty ridicule. "21

Smith's view of Hopper is considerably different from that of Watson and we can begin to wonder why? How did Hopper's paintings journey all the way from being charact• erized by humor and lyricism to a place where nameless and disenchanted people were lost among the millions? Is it simply that the two critics are focusing their attention on pictures from a different period? This does not appear to be the case. Smith's article is entitled

"Alone in an Automat", a title which alludes to one of Hopper's paintings, Automat (1927)

22 which was first exhibited at the Rehn Galleries from February 14 to March 5, 1927. The article Watson wrote for Vanity Fair was done in late 1928 and there is evidence to show

that Watson was aware of the exhibition at the Rehn . Hopper wrote to Watson on December

10, 1926, telling him that "Rehn expects to give me a show in February and I am trying my

best to get some canvasses done before that time. " 23 What is more, after Watson's article

was published, Hopper wrote him again in December, 1928, taking issue with the descrip•

tion of his own work as showing "the greatest possible austerity without loss of emotion. "

Hopper refused to take credit. "The phrase...is no child of mine however.

Rehn is the real father of this cutey and has tried to hang it on me. It makes no difference,

though, as it listens good in type. As we will see, it made considerable difference as time went by.

Smith and Watson have set the proper mood for what will follow. Smith's review

puts in a nutshell what we will be running into all through the course of this study. Watson, on the other hand, has helped to dislodge the established interpretation we have of Hopper, points to how it could be other than the way it is now, and recovers an alternative inter• pretation from the past. But it is necessary to push the point still further.

As I have already noted, reviews read as if on a conceptual level, the estab• lished interpretation of Hopper is always on the surface of the canvas, and is merely waiting to be unlocked and recorded by the critic. It is implied that the message a painting gives us is a constant, and it is simply the critic's task to communicate that message to us. Further• more, once a formula has been constructed for interpreting an artist's work, there is little attention given to the social process that developed the interpretation in the first place.

Take, for example, this description written by Susanne Burrey in an article called, "Edward

Hopper: The Emptying Spaces": 28

"Desertion is the usual theme of Hopper's landscapes. In Gas the attendant is busy with a pump at sunset and no car passes. The country store with its dusty placards is nakedly exposed at 7 A.M. Hostile winds blow through the streets of Weehawken; if there are inhabitants, they remain inside and a "For-Sale" sign signals the emptiness of the suburbs. "25

Here we see Burrey stressing the psychological interpretations of Hopper's work.

Country stores are nakedly exposed, and the winds of Weehawken are hostile. Yet Hopper himself did not feel that there was an inherent message in the subject. On the contrary, there is evidence to show that he knew full well how people obtained their interpretations!

"It's like sunsets. The people around here telling me about beautiful sunsets. It is what you add that makes them beautiful. No, the unsophisticated think there's something inherent in it (the subject). A pond with lilies or something. There isn't, of course. "26

Similarly, he once told critic Brian O'Doherty that not only was the "loneli• ness thing1 overdone, but it was the critics who gave the artist his identity:

"The loneliness thing is overdone. It formulates some• thing you don't want formulated. Renoir says it well: 'The most important element in a picture cannot be de• fined' ... cannot be explained, perhaps, is better." In trying to explain this inexplicable he denies influ• ences. "I have no influences really. I don't mean that in a conceited way. Every artist has a core of originality - a core of identity that is your own. " He refused to go further. "I don't know what my identity is. The critics give you an identity. And sometimes even, you give it a push. "27

Hopper's statements have raised yet another question. If the artist himself states that there is nothing inherent in the subject itself, that loneliness has been overdone and that it is the critic who gives the artist his identity, why then isn't this included as part of the interpretation of his work? How is it that critics continue to write as if the instructions were in Hopper's work independently of what either the artist himself has said or of the procedures the critics have used to find them with?

In order to fully understand how the interpretation of Hopper's work has changed over a period of years and how the artist's own privileged interpretation of his work is ig• nored or sidestepped, we will have to take an excursion ourselves and begin to trace the development of this critical tradition from its earliest origins right up to the present time.

Before we take this excursion, however, I would like to introduce one more concept which will help make the journey easier.

The Narrative Painting Tradition

In Hopper's case both the genre concept and the narrative painting tradition are selected for use in describing his work. The critics have made the narrative painting tradition the exclusive method of interpreting Hopper's paintings. All of Hopper's paint• ings are consigned to that interpretive tradition and it is accorded the status of being the only way to view Hopper with any chance of appreciating him. If the critics had not assigned Hopper to the narrative painting tradition, there would not have been an attempt to trace the meaning of his work as part of a sequence of events. As we will see later, this is what Edward Hopper's work depends upon in order to achieve its effect.

Once the gradual establishment of an interpretation becomes recognized as the legitimate interpretation of his work, it results in several significant consequences.

Current interpretations are based on a number of works that comprise a corpus of the 'essential Hopper paintings'. There has been a gradual build-up in this corpus over time.

These are the paintings that embody the features of the 'essential Hopper' to the greatest degree. As a result, these are the ones continually being referred to in the reviews.

Secondly, while this essential corpus is being established another phenomenon takes place simultaneously. As the framework for the essential corpus is being built up, another method

is developed for relegating to the sidelines those paintings which do not fall within that corpus. The paintings that do not fall within the interpretive boundaries produced by the original corpus come to be considered as his minor works. In effect, the critics have de• veloped a tandem arrangement for the appraisal of Hopper. The procedures that are de• veloped for recognizing what the corpus is, also produces a means for knowing what the corpus is not. Now the critic can recognize paintings that comprise the 'essential Hopper' and paintings that do not; the latter should be discarded or given only minor consideration.

These procedures are then passed on by the critics so that the reader too can learn to dis• tinguish between good and bad, minor and major, important and unimportant. But how is it done?

To answer this question, there is another aspect that must be taken into con• sideration: the passing on of the assembly instructions so that the reader/viewer can con• stitute Hopper's work in a certain way. The general pattern has already been developed; now it is a question of how to communicate the knowledge of the distinctive features of that tradition to others.

What phenomenon occurs in order to produce the interesting kind of concensus that prompts critics to assert that the message is part of the painting itself? It can be shown 31

that the object does not necessarily have a determinate message by simply looking back on earlier interpretations prior to the establishment of one specific interpretative tradition.

The critics assert that the message is part of the painting itself, but I have shown that al• though the visual properties of Hopper's work may restrict the interpretive procedures which will work they do not solely determine them. We know then that the object does not in fact determine wholly/ what the critics will attribute to it. In other words, the paintings themselves do not give off a determinate message. The critics do that.

The critics have created a formula for the interpretation of Hopper's work; an interpretive framework for unlocking and articulating what the meanings of his paintings are. As we read the reviews, an interpretation begins to emerge from the framework. Mean• ings are attached and fastened so as to direct the viewer's attention to certain aspects of the paintings and away from others. The formula that critics have engineered permits them to both include and exclude paintings from their established categories. If the critics did not use a narrative tradition then they would not try and trace the meaning as part of a sequence of events. Correspondingly, they would not try and teach this interpretive pro• cedure to others. Finally, if the critics did not try to trace the meaning of Hopper's work in a sequential fashion, then there would be no great need to search for a story within the boundaries of a Hopper painting.

By attempting to make the structure of the painting intelligible through the narrative painting tradition, the ambiguous character of Hopper's realism is brought into sharp focus. In Gas, for example, it is difficult to determine what has happened just prior to the one frame the painting deals with or what is likely to happen next. A sequential interpretation can be applied but there is a degree of uncertainty as to whether it will be 32

"correct". The object is rendered ambiguous which in turn enables critics to constitute the paintings as lonely, alienated and timeless.

By tracing the meaning of the paintings through a sequence, an ambiguity arises in the relationship to the instructions for telling a story. The message of the object is then

'up in the air'. This method of interpretation enables critics to notice Hopper's selection of time and place when nobody is about. Places or locations where we are ordinarily accustomed to seeing people are no longer populated by the typical crowds. There has been a breach in the sequential ordering of events that go to make up a story. The rules for narrative story telling and the articulation of the painting in the usual way are no longer possible given this context. The critic provides us with the traditional context and we are then deprived of the necessary 'something' to fulfill it. The critic gives us a set of instruc• tions on how to read something but his set of instructions is incomplete given the traditional framework. With this set of incomplete instructions the reader/viewer is forced to deal with the paintings in a speculative, thoughtful way.

Now emphasis on psychological elements in Hopper's paintings has been made possible through the use of the narrative tradition and the 'genre'concept. As a result, adjectives that suggest a strong psychological connotation now make sense. Certain ele• ments in his paintings, such as loneliness, alienation, timelessness, a stoppage in the tradi• tional time structure, now seem more than reasonable - it is what is there!

When the narrative painting tradition is selected for use in description, it means there is no formal outlet for thoughts about other possibilities that are also available, but not made explicit. It would certainly have made an immense difference in the way Hopper is currently viewed if his work had been initially interpreted through another tradition, such as abstract expressionism or surrealism.

In abstract expressionism, for instance, the psychological considerations would be toned down in order to give more attention to the colors Hopper used, or geometric con• siderations such as his application of design and his use of parallel and horizontal lines.

As to the question of whether Hopper's paintings would restrict such an interpretation and make it impossible to assign abstract expressionism procedures to his work, the reader will be advised to look at Parker Tyler's, "The Loneliness of The Crowd And The Loneliness of

the Universe: An Antiphonal". In the review Tyler makes comparisons between Jackson

Pollock, considered by many to be one of the leading abstract expressionists, and Edward

Hopper. The psychological considerations are still present, but Tyler has also given at•

tention to "geometric variety", "modulation of volumes", and "light whose horizontal ity /

creates strict vertical separations of shadow". 28

The visual properties of Hopper's paintings restricted the kinds of interpretive

procedures which would work for them. They did not determine them totally. The stories

that the critics produced about Hopper's art were influenced and determined by how the objects were organized for description. Those descriptions ran along a continuum from very

abstract to very detailed analysis. In what follows, I will show several examples from this

continuum. Some will be descriptive accounts limiting themselves to the basic physical

properties of the paintings, such as size of canvas and materials used in painting; other ac•

counts will describe motifs and prominent features in and sometimes out of the paintings,

while others will describe Hopper's paintings in a speculative fashion, wrenching fantastic fictions from them. Other methods will be discussed as well. They include description in

a narrative mode - describing what story is taking place within a work, making speculative 34

or prophetic statements about events that the paintings allude to; or by using special bio• graphical knowledge about Edward Hopper himself, some reveal what the artist's own moti• vational intention was relating to a specific work in question.

Most of the interpretations we have of Hopper first appeared in the early thirties and have been consecutively maintained up to the present. But we have seen that this was not always the case. Furthermore, in order for the psychological elements of his paintings to be articulated, those elements needed a specific context in order to be under• stood in that way. Therefore, Hopper's paintings have undergone a change in how they are interpreted. In showing people how to look at the paintings a new and variant interpretive procedure was introduced and developed by the critics. In this chapter I have discussed the genre concept and introduced the reader to the narrative painting tradition. There is still more to be learned about the narrative painting tradition, however, and I turn my attention to that next. 35

III The Construction and Establishment of the Interpretive Tradition

"The nature of the brain is such that we see what we have seen before, and what we have a name for. We are blind to things to which we have not been properly introduced." Robert N. Buck Weather Flying

I

The Narrative Painting Tradition : Main Sequence

Oil painting of the kind that Edward Hopper became famous for carries with it a lot of mental baggage. The aforementioned genre which the critics assigned both to his paintings and the Ashcan School was the narrative painting tradition.

Both the Ashcan School and Hopper's paintings are classified as part of the narrative painting tradition. For what the critics chose to accomplish, that genre is the one that best seems to characterize his style of work. Once Hopper was firmly established in his own right, the Ashcan interpretation was dropped or shown to be a point of differen• tiation between himself and the school. Hopper had by then been brought under the struc• turing effect of an established interpretive practice; consequently, there was no longer a need to rely heavily on the Ashcan interpretation.

The narrative painting tradition was the important plug-in for the critics. It is through this pre-existing category that Hopper's work is interpreted in terms of the human values to be found there. The psychological elements within the paintings, Hopper's theme of alienation and loneliness, his abstract personality types, and the last of interaction bet• ween actors in the paintings, only becomes relevant when you are told to view his paintings 36

in terms of the narrative painting tradition. This tradition is what locates the paintings for the critic. A set of relationships which had not been previously recognizable are now transmitted to our awareness through the critic's reviews as a lack of expression of joy, optimism, or humor, and Hopper's selection of settings when nobody is about has now been interpreted as 'timelessness'.

In the narrative painting tradition, story-telling is the primary goal. An artist organizes his material in such a way as to accomplish that act. The Glossary of Modern Art defines narrative painting as follows: "An extreme form of description or literary art which serves to tell a story or illustrate an incident as, for example, in much late 19th century painting in England. The term, although often contemptuously applied, aptly describes many works of considerable artistic merit such as Hogarth's 'Marriage a la Monde', the Bayeux

Tapestry and certain Egyptian and Babylonian Friezes."29 |r js a'rype of painting which flourished in the nineteenth century, it relies on anecdotal subject matter to create interest*

The title is an important part of the whole: 'Last Day in the Old Home' by Martineau and

'When did You Last See Your Father?1 by William Frederick Yeames as examples. "^O Ray• mond Lister described Martineau's "The Last Day in the Old Home (1862) as follows:

"Another sermon against drink and gambling, and on the goodness of woman contrasted with the foolishness of man. The old family seat, Hardham Court (its name is on the catalogue lying on the floor), is about to be sold up to pay for the gambling debts of the heir to the estate, here seen raising his glass of champagne, his other arm on the shoulder of his son, who is already being taught by his father to gamble and drink. In the man's hand is a racing notebook, with racehorses on its cover, and a picture of a racehorse stands against the cupboard on the left. The wife, who has been weeping, holds out an appealing, res• training hand, while her mother-in-law, weeping bitterly, hands over her keys and last few possessions to the agent, 37

"who takes them with all the tact he can muster. The The little girl looks at her sympathetically... " 31

The narrative painting is a form where the material is representational with

the intention of seeing the painting as part of a sequence of events. An extreme example

of this would be William Powell Frith's "The Road to Ruin" (1887) series where "In This

Victorian version of "The Rake's Progress", Frith'takes us through five episodes in the down•

fall, through gambling, of a young man of fortune".^ The paintings are organized so they

will present a plot, i.e., give cues to a viewer so that he can determine what has taken

place just prior to what the paintings now deal with or what will happen next as a consequence

of what is taking place in the one frame of the painting.

Narrative paintings require the presence of certain component parts in order for

them to be recognized as a story. Even the simplest narratives contain a rudimentary setting

in space and time, a plot line of some kind, and the casting or characterization of objects

in certain specific ways. . Of course the construction of the narrative can take many forms, vary widely, and not necessarily possess all the components to the same degree. Everyone would recognize the difference between Tom Jones and the Gingerbread Man. And although they are both quite different in terms of length and the degree to which they have been ac• corded literary merit, each of them contains certain properties that enable them to be con• sidered stories about something. Both have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Both deal with the main character as he journeys on the road, both are concerned with people and

places the main character meets along the way.

Furthermore, the recognition of the narrative genre as a set of interpretive pro• cedures exists as part of a shared common experience. This shared group of visual vocabularies 38

is commonly understood by artists, critics, and viewers alike. These visual vocabularies are analogous to the words in a written message where the reader must know how to decode the message if he is able to understand what it means. Similarly these visual vocabularies are every bit as complicated as a written language and include the necessary procedures for how to distinguish the difference between a past, the historical present depicted in the paintings now, and the future.

For the artist these visual vocabularies are his method of expression; his means of telling a story to his audience. These vocabularies manifest themselves in the artist's ability to organize material into story form so that one moment or one episode in the story's progression can be conveyed. The artist can be seen as aiming toward the narrative genre when there is an agreement between what he intended to be seen, on the one hand, and a set of interpretive procedures that will organize and assemble visual properties into a story• telling sequence, on the other.

Let me exhibit a general illustration of the story-telling characteristics which are recognizable (by me) as a common feature of the narrative painting tradition and show how there can be an agreement between my understanding of a set of procedures that organize and assemble visual properties into a story-telling sequence and what the artist himself intended to be seen. In an earlier draft of this work I had selected Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream as an example of the narrative painting tradition, showing how it was that the narrative pro• cedure worked. I described The Gulf Stream in the following way:

"Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream illustrates nicely what I have been talking about. In viewing that work, one be• gins to ask certain questions regarding what is taking place on the canvas. How, for example did that Negro get way out in the middle of the Gulf Stream? Why is his boat wrecked? Will the sailing-ship on the horizon see him and rescue him, or will the approaching water spout capsize his boat? And what about all those sharks? Are they going to eat him? See what I mean? If it was a motion picture serial this would be the time to flash 'continued next week' on the screen". 33

Later I was reading through some books on natural history for my own enjoyment and I ran across the following statement writen by Homer himself:

"Winslow Homer's famous canvas The Gulf Stream. Contemporary criticism of the picture was unduly harsh, so Homer wrote the following to a dealer: 'The criticism of The Gulf Stream by old women and others are noted. You may inform these people that the Negro did not starve to death. He was not eaten by sharks. The waterspout did not hit him. And he was rescued by a passing ship which is not shown in the picture.1 " 34

What I find interesting about my original remarks is that they are well within the boundaries of a narrative tradition that first received Homer's work for viewing. The significance of my insights, as an accurate description of what is going on in that painting,

Is 5. unimportant. What is important is that there is an agreement between my interpretive procedures and those that Homer himself intended. The Gulf Stream as a painting has story- telling properties in it. I was viewing the painting in a fashion similar to people attempting to make that particular work intelligible through the narrative tradition.

For the critic and viewer, on the other hand, there are many sets of visual vocabu laries available for viewing what exists within the formal properties of a painting. We_co.uld call this the social organization of looking. There are a series of levels to this organization, some more complex than I intend to deal with in this thesis. One level of interpretation, for example, is the work done by people like Gillies or Arnheim.^A level of study that exa•

mines the co-ordination of eye movement with painting or the relationship in space of the surfaces of objects. This study admits that there are these levels to the social and psycho•

logical organization of looking. A description of how these various levels of looking

interact with one another in our perception is work that needs to be done in order to deter•

mine the effects the particular levels have in combination. That work goes beyond the scope

of this examination.

I am dealing with the level that could be regarded as sociological. That is,

the level where this process is learned and how it is communicated. Consequently, the

level that concerns us here is the one which allows for viewing the visual vocabularies of

the painting within a narrative framework.

One of the problems associated with the interpretation of painting is that for so

many of us, we were first introduced to art through the narrative painting tradition. One

only has to remember his or her favorite children's book with the large narrative paintings and the accompanying text to see my point. To name the first example that comes to mind,

take the work of the illustrator N.C. Wyeth for Scribners. His illustrations for Treasure

Island, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, and The Last of the Mohicans seemed to be as much a part of the text as what either Stevenson or Cooper had written. Indeed, in my own case,

I can remember looking at Wyeth's pictures long before I ever got around to actually read•

ing the books themselves.

The problem we are harnessed with is what Maurice Natanson has called, "the

historical weight of association".3° In other words, the illumination of expression does 41

not lie simply in the visible but in a unity of meaningful relationships and information that the viewer brings to the painting when he views it. If paintings are viewed using the same procedures that would be applied in looking at a favorite children's book then there will be a difficulty in "seeing anything in" an artist's work without an accompanying text. It takes social practice to do it and it is a procedure that must be learned. When we are separated from a story that we associate with paintings it requires a new set of interpretive procedures before a painting can be seen in an isolated context.

The ability to understand a painting within the frame of the narrative tradition implies a commonly understood social structure. Narrative exists as a pre-existing category for both my sociological research and the critical description of art. The procedures I use to assemble and interpret my data are not essentially different from those who I am studying.

In her paper on mental illness Smith noted a similar phenomenon in regard to how a woman came to be defined as mentally ill by her friends. What Smith was seeking to explain had already been structured by the interpretations and characterizations of those she was studying.

"That structure is an essential feature of the phenomena, not something added to it which she must strip away to get at 'how things really are'. Moreover the procedures she uses to assemble and interpret her data are not essentially different from those that lay actors use in bringing about the phenomena which become her data. What she so uses has already been worked up for purposes which have usually nothing to do with hers. In the construction of her data, others have been busy. The process of transforming social action into sociological data

37 must be recognized as a joint, though not ordinarily purposefully concerted, activity."

If the narrative framework is used for interpreting the painting, then the paint• ing is seen as one moment in a story. Using this method of interpretation the painting is 42

viewed with a prior knowledge of what has happened just before the one moment the paint•

ing deals with, or what will happen next as a consequence of the one moment in the paint•

ing. This is done because the critic and the viewer both know how to see something as part

of a story. They both know that interpretive procedure method of interpreting a painting.

In the actual staging of the narrative tradition the artist lays out the material so that the techniques for traditional story-telling can be applied to the painting easily.

There is the title which bears a close connection with the subject, thereby providing imp•

ortant clues for how the painting should be interpreted. Furthermore, there is something

taking place within the painting. There is either (1) completed action which is the result of something that has happened offstage and is now culminated within the one frame that the painting deals with, or (2) incomplete action pointing towards a completion in the future.

FIGURE ONE

Slot A Slot B Slot C

Past Painting Future

Slot B = The Painting's Now It is t this middle frame that the artist deals with . How he handles this slot is what con• cerns us here.

Being able to recognize something as being part of a story already exists as an interpretive frame. The interpretive procedures are then made available to the critic or the viewer who have this pre-knowledge of what those procedures are for picking out a story. In this sense the narrative painting is similar to the motion picture where the 43

techniques of cinematography are applied. Marshall McLuhan has called it "the reel world."

Sheldon Twer states that "It may be that people know that sometimes what hap• pens in a depicted momentary scene is perhaps understandable or can be made understand-

38 able by locating the longer scene in which it is a part." Twer is talking specifically about photographs, though it applies to the activities of the critics as well when he says,

"A photograph scene begins and ends within the brief period that the lens aperature is open, yet elicits descriptions whi ch seem to necessarily include an extended period of time." ^

Similarly, Harold Gatty, who is probably best known for his attempt at coming up with non- instrumental ways to navigate the open seas, reveals a method he has found to be useful in his own research investigations:

"I often play the photograph analysis game. It is amazing how much the problems of identifying a photograph without captions adds to its interest and improves one's own powers of perception and deduction. The photograph ceases to be a photograph and becomes instead a story. "

We know already that the genre concept and the narrative painting tradition are available as the initial starting points for constituting a specific features of Hopper's paint• ing, thereby assigning a special status to certain determinate features in the painting. Using those two categories as starting points, it is then a simple step for the critic to begin to or• ganize and describe his account around what has happened in the painting, what is happen• ing in the painMng, or what is about to happen next in the painting.

When there is a conjunction between the artist and those who view his work such that the interpretive procedures they use are the same as those that the artist intends, then an artistic tradition exists. 44

The narrative painting tradition as a set of communication procedures for both artist and viewer can be formulated as follows:

(1) Within the paintings'formal properties the artist has provided images necessary

for extending the story out onto a larger panorama of past, of future; out be•

yond the one frame that the picture deals with.

(2) People viewing the painting are in possession of a common set of interpretive

procedures sufficiently similar to those of the artist so that they can analyze

its images as a moment in a story of the same kind as the artist intends.

(3) The viewer's procedures for seeing a painting within the narrative traditions

are a stable set of socially established procedures which can be learned and

applied to other visual structures; paintings, photographs, cartoons, certain

sculpture - objects which can be seen as incorporating literary or iconographi-

cal meaning into their structures.

II

The Narrative Painting Tradition : Modified Sequence

Instructions for interpretation are not wholly contained within the paintings.

It is never true that the instructions are implicit within a thing. The instructions are learned.

In his painting, the artist may aim at a given type of interpretive procedure, but paintings do not completely "determine" how they are to be interpreted. Nor for that matter does any other document. It takes practice at looking at something within the proper context. Persian carpets which we see as a decorative item that can add a touch of color to 45

a living room floor, were originally "patterned after the ground plan of a little private plea• sure garden or paradise. The Persian term for the background design in these carpets means

'earth'. The carpet's border is a canal within which is a formal arrangement of plants, trees

I cl „ 40 and flowers .

Paintings are a form of document with a degree of permanence to them. As in the case of the Persian carpet, the original interpretation assigned to a painting can come apart from that document and be lost. The artist who makes a painting dies but his work exists long after he is gone. The permanence of the document takes precedence over the

life span of the individual artist. That is how the two of them come apart. Once the artisan is no longer available for comment, the wrong procedures can be applied to his work, as is often the case when art from the past is interpreted by current standards.

New artistic forms aim at interpretive procedures which are not yet established to many viewers. In this sense, critics are very important in establishing for an artist what set of interpretive procedures will apply to his work. If, for instance, art is meant to be

"merely decorative" a procedure has to be learned for seeing it in that way. In his essay,

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", Tom Wolfe gives his reader a set of instructions which transform George Barris from an auto-body mechanic to a sculptor:

Barris starts taking me through Kustom City, and the place looks like any other body shop at first, but pretty soon you realize you're in a gallery. This place is full of cars such as you have never seen before. Half of them will never touch the road. They're put on trucks and trailers and carted all over the country to be exhibited at hot-rod and custom-car shows. They'll run, if it comes to that - they're full, of big, powerful, hopped- up chromeplated motors, because all that speed and power, and all that lovely apparatus, has tremendous emotional meaning to everybody in customizing. But it's like one of these Picasso or Miro rugs. You don't walk on the damn things. You hang them on the wall. It's the same thing with Barris1 cars. In effect, they're sculpture. ^

In section one of this chapter, I defined narrative painting as telling a story.

That is its chief purpose and reason for being.

Here is how the narrative painting tradition can be applied to a Hopper paint• ing. In this standard application of the narrative tradition a hook-up is made between the painting^ now and the anticipation of a future event.

When Time Magazine interviewed both Hopper and his wife this is the inter• pretation she gave to the painting Cape Cod Morning (1950):

"It's a woman looking out to see if the weather's AO good enough to hang out her wash."

Knowing as we now do Hopper's preference for working with the idea of incomp• lete instruction, it is not surprising to see the manner in which Hopper took issue with that interpretation:

"Did I say that?", Hopper rumbles in contradiction. "You're making it Ncrman Rockwell. From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just look• ing out the window.

What I wanted to illustrate here was Cape Cod Morning's ability to generate two different accounts. There are, of course, other things going on in that review. For example the way Mrs. Hopper's statement is arranged in written order, the critic can show that Hop• per himself did not agree with his wife's interpretation and therefore the viewer himself should not try to apply interpretive procedures that would give him an explicit story. 47

In Cape Cod Morning it is possible to come to rest on an interpretation only to

be told that it was not correct. It is not a woman looking out to see if the weather's good

enough to hang out her wash. Going further we could say, it is not a woman looking out

the window to see if the weather's good enough to go on a picnic, it is not a woman looking out the window to see if the weather's good enough to observe sun spot activity. We can continue making these kinds of interpretations but we will never know for sure. The artist himself then tells us that she is just looking out the window, just looking out the window.

In applying the concept to the work of Edward Hopper, however, there is a need to modify the definition slightly in order that it can be recognized as a distinctive set of in• terpretive procedures, differing from the strict story-telling definition. We also saw in the first section that one of the ways critics will establish a set of interpretive procedures for an artist is by subsuming his work within the boundaries of an existing tradition. Interpreting a

painting within the narrative tradition involves locating the painting in a narrative sequence so that, for example, in Hopper's painting, Cape Cod Evening (1939) we would attend to what the dog in the painting is looking toward, or the direction the man and the woman are

looking in, where they are coming from, or what they will likely do next.

But there is strong evidence to show that Hopper worked at playing down the story-telling or on-going qualities of his painting. One procedure he had for accomplishing this was to give his paintings titles that did not invoke conceptions of a story. "Hopper pre• fers the title, 1 Cape Cod Evening'(1939) to its story-telling alternative, 'Whippoorwill', just as Winslow Homer preferred 'Halibut Fishing' to 'The fog Warning'.^

Given these kinds of instructions, we are only able to see the dog in Cape Cod

Evening as turning his head, we are only able to see the man and woman as staring off into 48

space. We are beginning to view the painting in a slightly altered way. This new proced• ure confines the action of the picture to the picture itself, whereas the narrative procedures related it to what went on beforehand or what will likely come afterwards.

Jersy Pelc can help us here. He makes the following distinction between the two types of narration we are dealing with. According to him, one of the ways narrative types are classified is whether they refer to events or to things. "Stories are told about events and things are described.. .A description, i.e., the other variation of a narrative in the broader sense of the term, is a statis representation of persons, things, situations, back• grounds of events. When describing, the narrator stops the progress of the plot,, when tell• ing a story he sets the plot in motion.

Both the narrative and descriptive techniques become immediate investigative problems for anyone interested in an examination of the procedures used by the critics in the writing of their reviews. Despite well-meaning claims of trying to avoid a traditional approach, as long as someone continues to describe whfat he himself sees in a painting it re• mains part of the mechanism for sustaining the conventional approach to art criticism. The reader is reminded that this analysis is not interested in the significance of the critics' indi• vidual insights, but in what lies behind their ability to say the things they do. In order to grasp a concrete understanding of where their unquestioned interpretive assum ptions originate from, it is necessary to develop a procedure whereby I can avoid their particular interpretive tradition altogether. But to see a painting differently than how it is currently viewed is more difficult than one might imagine. We rarely see the paintings in an isolated position. In• deed, we rarely see the paintings themselves outside of galleries, or the reproductions we encounter in magazines or picture post cards. In the gallery we are influenced by the talk of the viewers or by the statements of the tour guide. Magazine and post card companies 49

have their staffs of blurb writers. All these go to make up a small portion of the tradition.

Often their influence on us is so slight that it is difficult to suppose that they have had any

effect at all. But like the critics themselves who have been influenced by them, they all

play their parts in helping to establish a tradition firmly in our minds.

Beginning with the Lewis Mumford review in 1933, critics introduced a method

of interpreting Hopper's work that differed from a strict story-telling narrative. At this

point we begin to see a definite modification in the choice of attitude toward the subject

matter. This change moved away from describing his work in a strict narrative sense with its

emphasis on representational forms thot affected action, and moved towards a description of situational episodes. Despite some differences of opinion amongst the critics early in

Hopper's career, by 1933, he was beginning to be grounded quite firmly in a particular ex•

planation. There existed a set of standards for viewing Hopper, i.e., the pre-existing cate• gories of genre and narrative, the austerity interpretation, and all were starting to be drawn upon as the means of determining what Hopper 'should be'.

This next account, written by Lewis Mumford,.demonstrates the point well. Mum• ford does not draw upon the themes of loneliness and alienation that would later come to be recognized as a characteristic feature of Hopper's work, but he does begin to apply the al• ready existing pattern for interpretation:

"So, Hopper, in the work of the lost decade has caught one phase of America, its loneliness and its visual exhilaration: the loneliness of even occupied homes, the exhilaration of even mean cottages and the sordid tenements when the sun slices through the crystal air and makes welcome the horrid form for the color it reveals under Hopper's skilful hand. So good is Hopper at transfiguring our visual sins and crimes into graphic virtues that he looks for nothing else. The result, for one thing, is that he has lost his hold on the human figure, the people in his restaurant in• terior, his hotel bedroom, his barbershop, are not as real as the furniture. His limited vision is good, but it is not enough. This fixed focus and this special choice of subject have limited the painter who was still latent in the Hopper of fifteen years ago." ^ 50

This somewhat prophetic description demonstrates that there already existed a rudimentary method for measuring Hopper's art. Although Mumford's account is not 'a per• fectly developed example', a pattern is beginning to show itself. Mumford, for instance, uses the modified narration sequence if only for his own purposes of prediction when he says,

'the loneliness of even occupied homes',or 'the people in his restaurant interior, his hotel bedroom, his barbershop, are not as real as the furniture.' Later on, the critics would notice this same feature and imply that it was an intended touch rather than a mistake.

Finally, we can see that Mumford establishes a setting for events to take place in, has de• vised a plot so that he can characterize the objects within the paintings in a certain way and, although he does not mention loneliness to the extent that later critics would, he does mention it at some length.

Hopper was beginning to be seen as innovating; yet for the larger public, they were having trouble 'seeing anything in' his paintings because the interpretive practices they were using belonged to the main sequence of the narrative painting tradition. As the Mum• ford example shows, what the critics began doing at this point was providing their audiences with a new set of viewing instructions that would allow for a slightly modified interpretive pro• cedure.

For example, here is how Horace Gregory provides his audience with a new set of interpretive procedures. He first points to the difficulty people have had in seeing any• thing in Hopper's work when he writes:

"MANY PEOPLE believe that Edward Hopper isn't an artist at all. His non-spectacular realism offends them and they are willing to read into his restraint an actual lack of emo• tion, an inability to look behind the architecture, sunlight, wind and sky that he sets before us." Gregory then tells his reader/viewer which set of interpretive procedures should not be applied to Hopper when he says:

"I think that Hopper's relationship to his immediate con• temporaries, Rockwell Kent, Coleman and Sloan, is of the most superficial order, and that by direct comparison with them it is possible to misinterpret his intentions, to underrate the quality of his realism and to attack him for not being a mystic."^

Finally, Mr. Gregory gives his audience a new set of interpretive procedures for viewing Hopper's work and illustrates them by pointing to paintings where this new set of interpretive procedures will most likely work:

"He has proved for our generation at least that honesty need not be accompanied by dullness or inadequately expressed intentions. His sense of an American reality includes solid craftsmanship and the art of redesigning architectural masses into coherent form. If his America often seems bright and empty, very well, we must grant him the right to interpret what he sees, whether it is the lighthouse at Two Lights or the harsh interior of a hotel bedroom." 49

Gregory's role as mediator between Hopper and the public is fairly clear in this example. In this case, Gregory was not required to bring Hopper's work in under an established interpretive practice for that already existed with the association to Kent,

Coleman and Sloan. What he does begin to do in his review, though, is develop for the reader/viewer a new and varient interpretive procedure that will show people how to look at Hopper's paintings with a newly assigned set of values. Finally, he initiates the sorting process by showing the reader/viewer which paintings this new set of interpretive procedures will apply to. 52

. The development of a modified procedure for interpreting Hopper opened up the possibility of another set of varient interpretations for viewing his work. Although one modified procedure finally became recognizable as the method for interpreting Hopper's paintings, alternative frameworks were suggested but, somehow, did not become established.

Here is how Douglas Denniston described Edward Hopper's work for a University of Arizona exhibition catalog:

"There is one requirement to the understanding of his work, however, and that requirement is this: There can be no formu• la for art in the mind of anyone who wishes to find the meaning of Hopper's work. Those who insist on a stereotype for the art they will accept ^cubist, surrealist, abstract expressionist, magic realist,pop, and the like) will need to exclude Hopper's paint• ings. He is related not to any narrow category but rather to the great tradition of Western painting which has been concerned with an image in space. He has accepted the difficulties of continuing with great tradition and, as a result, his work has all the strength of tradition." 50

Although Denniston's interpretation never caught on it still exists as a possible future resource for critics who would want to be in a position to write something about Hopper which WHS original and different from, say, the work of Lloyd Goodrich. Denniston accomp• lishes two things when he says "Those who insist on a stereotype for the art they accept (cubist surrealist, abstract expressionist, magic realist,pop, and the like) will need to exclude

Hopper's paintings." First, he informs a reader as to which interpretive procedures will not fit property in making an interpretation so should therefore be ^discarded -t and, secondly, by differentiating Hopper's work from the other interpretations Denniston provides a means for locating the work in a different tradition. Furthermore, the line, "He has accepted the difficulties of continuing the great tradition and as a result his work has all the strength of tradition", may lead a reader to i discover one set of meanings rather than another. 53

This leads us back to the statement made by Jack Smith in the last chapter.

Not only does Smith's statement,

"That's what I had read, anyway, and that's what I felt from the things I had seen. I wondered if this sense of loneliness would seem even larger when I looked at the originals,"

parallel my own experience of being influenced by what I had read but it also shows how the alternative interpretation frames, selects, and assembles the features of the painting differently than they had been viewed before the modified narrative sequence was introduced.

This modification in interpretive procedures focused attention on the situational episode rather than an on-going story. It is by assigning Edward Hopper to the narrative painting tradition and then introducing this modification in interpretive procedures that the specific ambiguity arises with respect to his paintings. In this procedure, the on-going nar• rative character of the picture is now stopped and a build-up of description begins. Further• more, this kind of interpretive procedure when applied to Hopper's work does not tell the viewer how to come to rest on a satisfactory conclusion for a story. An ambiguity arises in respect to what has happened just before or what is likely to happen next. The characteri• zation of his paintings as expressing loneliness and alienation is a by-product of this ambi• guity. It is this interpretation which eventually turned into a new descriptive category of its own.

Here are a series of review exerpts which illustrate how the'situational interpre• tation of Hopper's work yields description attributing loneliness, emptiness, etc., to the paintings as their expressed intention. Nighthawks (1942) provides us with an example of how the critics see Hopper using time. He often painted times of day when nobody is about. 54

This could be interpreted as Denniston suggests, i.e., in terms of Hopper's in•

terest in "the image in space". A "situational interpretation" looks for what is happening

in terms of the human values. The absence or relative absence of people is described in

terms of isolation and loneliness. Lloyd Goodrich mentions that:

"Often he chooses the hours when few or no people are abroad: late at night, as in Nighthawks, or early early Sunday morning, as in the picture of that title, full of the poignant emptiness of the streets before anyone is up. "52

Correspondingly, Frank Getlein described Early Sunday Morning (1930) in the

following way:

"The days have only just begun, but even when the sun is straight overhead, the street will be a street in the desert and the walkers, in whatever number, will walk alone." 53

In 1948, Parker Tyler wrote an article in Magazine of the Arts entitled "Edward

Hopper: Alienation by Light." (This, incidentally, is the first actual mention of the word

"alienation1 as it was applied to Hopper). Tyler was concerned with how Hopper had gained

a mood or "the paint-feeling, especially with reference to the light." Tyler, for instance,

noted that:

"his light unites (if it does) through monotony rather than variety. " Further along he mentions "it might be said that he illuminates the earthly dark by ac• centing its resolutely opaque surface; thus light is an apparent means by which an object or person isolates itself both from other objects and persons and even from the universe - that is, from a sense of unity with all other things." 54

He ties this all in by noting the self-estrangement of the usherette in New York

Movie (1939): 55

"the usherette leaning against the side wall is separated in her light zone from the dimmer light supplied by ceil• ing lamps under the boxes on the opposite side of the per• spective and by the light from the movie screen itself. How pathetic is the sharp 'theatrical' emphasis given her: only small gleams from the brass rail in the lower centre connect her with the light of the world of the imagination."

Since our procedures and methods of learning about Hopper would correspond with those of anyone else interested in learning about him, we can use this to our advantage here. Knowing what we do about the genre concept and the narrative painting tradition, we can begin to piece together how the interpretive tradition that surrounds Hopper's work came into being.

Consider the following accounts as part of a recapitulative process. The critics draw upon principal points of an earlier review and then use them as a resource for generating further material in their own accounts.

In 1964, Brian O'Doherty wrote a piece for Art in America entitled, "Portrait:

Edward Hopper". One of the characteristics O'Doherty underlined and stressed was the way

Hopper used (or did not use) people in his paintings. Notice in the following construction how O'Doherty presents the reader with a set of instructions for seeing that aspect of Hopper's work:

"He has also forced a more acute sense of personal presence by not using people at all. In 1930 he put a person in one of the windows of Early Sunday Morn• ing and then painted it out - the fact that he had done so was a topic of conversation among the artists, Mrs. Hopper remembers. In his latest picture, Sun in an Empty Room, he put in a figure and then took it out. By - .putting a person in and then eliminating them, their presence somehow haunts the room. 56

When Lloyd Goodrich mentions Sun in an Empty Room a few years later, there is a remarkably similar ring to the way he describes what is going on in the picture:

"One of his last paintings is Sun in an Empty Room, the same concept as Rooms by the Sea, but even more drasti• cally simple: light has become the entire motif, filling the picture with a haunting presence. When Brian O'Doherty asked him: "What are you after in it?1 he answered, 'I'm after me' ". 57

Here is how Sun in an Empty Room was described by A.T. Baker when he wrote an article on Edward Hopper for the art section of Time:

"'What are you after here?' critic Brian O'Doherty once asked him looking at a particularly austere painting called Sun in an Enpty Room. 'I'm after me1, said Hopper. "58

Both Goodrich's and Baker's descriptions of Sun in an Empty Room appear to have been heavily influenced by O'Doherty's original article. From the above evidence it seems unlikely that these two interpretations were gained through thought and private contemplation.

Furthermore, Goodrich and Baker both give an oblique recognition to O'Doherty's original article when they use what I consider to be a curious kind of foot-noting system used in magazines and periodicals catering to an audience of a non-scholarly nature. In their reviews, both Goodrich and Baker have applied portions of the following quote which appeared in the original O'Doherty piece one page further on:

"What are you after in it?" "I'm after ME", he said with a slight smile to take the exasperation away. Silence. The empty room in the canvas seemed to gather it in. It was quite II -SQ eerie. 57

We have witnessed the actual procedure for establishing an interpretation of

a work of art. O'Doherty's observations and opinion, his acquaintance with the artist

himself, is written down and communicated to others. Portions of what he felt to be import•

ant are selected out and used as a method for viewing a.specific painting. By the time Sun

in an Empty Room becomes an interesting subject for the pages of Time this set of instruc•

tions has become a "fact". What is more, both Goodrich and Baker become parties to this

process; they both act as part of the apparatus for the manufacturing of the critical tradition.

Slowly, review by review, the interpretation of Hopper is brought to completion as specific

features of a critical account are selected for repeated use.

Summary

In this chapter I showed what the main features of the narrative painting tradi•

tion are as well as introducing the notion of a modified narrative sequence. This modified

narrative sequence differed from the main narrative sequence in that the usual concern with

an on-going story was played down and attention was given instead to the situational episode.

In the case of Edward Hopper's work, the on-going narrative character is stopped and the

build-up of description begins. Beginning in the early thirties and continuing up until the

present the critics have described Hopper using this modified narrative sequence as the means

for establishing which set of interpretive procedures would best apply to his work. Moreover,

the development of a modified interpretive procedure opened up the possibility of varient

interpretations which could possibly be used as a future resource in describing his work.

Finally, I showed how critics will draw upon one another's reviews as yet another resource for establishing an interpretive tradition. 58

IV Edward Hopper's Own Contribution

Mandrake The Magician suggests hypnosis.

It now seems necessary to devote considerable attention to how, precisely,

Hopper contributes to the interpretation of his own work. What has he done with paint and brush so that people generate their accounts similarly? In this chapter I will under• take an examination of (1) Hopper's work lends itself to narrative interpretations and (2) show how the modified narrative interpretation combined with ambiguity is made by the critics to yield significance for loneliness, alienation, and timelessness. The accompany• ing figure will help illustrate the course of my inquiry.

FIGURE TWO

(1) Main Narrative Sequence

Slot A Slot B Slot C

The extrapolation of a The Painting's The Imputation of past Now some future event

(2) Modified Descriptive Sequence

Slot A Slot B Slot C

Past? The Painting's Future? Now Hopper can be seen as painting in the narrative painting tradition that has been around in Western Art for centuries. It was through this traditional way of comprehending painting that his work was first viewed by the critics. Hopper's work lends itself to a narrative interpretation and this interpretation can be recovered and employed as a set of viewing instructions with relative ease. All one need do is show Hopper's paintings to someone who is not familiar with the current interpretation of his work and the narrative frame will spring into being.

The first time I experienced this phenomenon was with my own son Nathan, who was three years old at the time. I had been sitting reading Lloyd Goodrich's Edward Hopper when Nathan crawled up onto the davenport and wanted to see what it was that I was look• ing at . As we began to thumb through the book together, he tried to articulate what he saw going on in the paintings by using the narrative technique. Even though he was handi• capped by a somewhat limited vocabulary, he was clearly trying to put together a logical narrative in terms of what the people in the painting were doing. Furthermore, Nathan was using a set of interpretive instructions that was contrary to the interpretation that was cur• rently being applied to Hopper's work.

What struck me as significant about this was how early this attempt to describe things in a linear fashion takes place. Although I imagine that there is a limit past which this could not be done with children - language being needed as the first requirement for sub• stantiating anything we might suspect - it would seem that even young children tend to des• cribe a painting in a narrative context, seeking to pull out a story from the canvas' surface.

Of course, Nathan's ability to put together a logical narrative may be a feature of the problem that I mentioned briefly in the last chapter - children who have been read to may already have learned this way of looking at pictures.

Nevertheless, this did indicate to me that within the formal properties of the painting a mental list of objects existed and were available for putting together a story.

In other words, formal qualities that are needed in order to put together a story are there within the painting.* I did experiment further by showing Hopper's paintings to various people, although it was certainly not a properly conducted survey. The most striking re• sult of my questioning came when I would seek a response from young children concerning what they saw in the paintings. All of them chose the narrative as the method for descrip• tion. When I would show them one of Hopper's paintings, they would immediately begin to give me a story about what was going on inside the painting.

Edward Hopper might be said to become specifically ambiguous only in the con• text of the narrative painting tradition. By attempting to make the structure of his paint• ings intelligible through that genre the object is rendered ambiguous which, in turn, enables critics to constitute the paintings as lonely, alienated and timeless. By tracing the meaning of the paintings through a sequence of events, an ambiguity arises in the relationships bet• ween Hopper's paintings and the instructions for telling a story. The message of the object

is 'up in the air1. This method of interpretation enables critics to notice Hopper's selection of time and place when nobody is about. Races and locations where we are ordinarily ac• customed to seeing people are no longer populated by typical crowds. There has been a breach in the sequential ordering of events that go to make up a story. Rules for narrative

*l was reminded of the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup where Groucho is looking at a map on the wall and says, "Why, any three-year-old kid can figure this out!". There is a pause, and then he says, "Quick, somebody, go and get me a three-year-old kid." 61

story-telling are no longer applicable and the articulation of the painting in the usual way is no longer possible given this context. The critic provides us with the traditional context and then we are deprived of the necessary 'something' to fulfill it. The critic gives us a set of instructions on how to read something, but his set of instructions is incomplete given the traditional framework. With this set of incomplete instructions, the reader/viewer is forced to deal with the paintings in a speculative, thoughtful way.

As I noted elsewhere, modern psychological testing theory has incorporated these same descriptive principles into the Thematic Apperception Test. Among other things, this test has been used to determine the degree to which a patient is alienated. Depending on what the patient says he sees, psychologists claim to be able to determine the degree to which a patient is alienated.* Furthermore, it should also be remembered that alienation is somehow viewed as a negative value by psychologists and this test, when administered to people seen to be suffering from psychological distress, is analyzed for recurrent or unusual themes for what it will reveal regarding the individual's underpinning assumptions and attitudes.

If the individual is defined as alienated after taking a T.A.T., it is on account of what he has read into the painting. Interpretive procedures thbt unlock the meaning of a painting by (1) introducing figures, objects, or events that are not depicted within its formal properties, or (2) a description that excludes an account of items considered to be prominent or significant but omitted in the story, are used to measure alienation. Although

*See, for example, Kenneth Keniston's The Uncommitted : Alienated Youth In America Society. New York: Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1965. 62

I have no further intention of going into this issue here, I would like to leave my reader

with one thought concerning the notions of alienation vis a vis this type of psychological

testing. It seems legitimate to ask why, in the case of Edward Hopper's paintings, are the meanings implicitly in the paintings for art critics while, on the other hand, under conditions of psychological testing they are a dimension of the patient's mind and something

he has brought to the painting in order to interpret it?

When the viewer approaches a Hopper painting, bringing with him interpretive

procedures for story-telling, that is when the visual vocabularies yield the necessary ele• ments for building one. Out of a seemingly infinite number of reconstructions a viewer can

locate the paintings into a story sequence by using the interpretive procedures of the narrative frame. With Hopper's work, however, the story's outcome remains uncertain us• ing this procedure and the formal elements will not decide for the viewer exactly what the story should be. This ambiguous effect in Hopper's work is what the critics have gone to such lengths in describing. The material still exists for a story to be made, but in this new organization it is difficult to complete a story; difficult to come to rest on one definite interpretation. Figure three illustrates this pant.

FIGURE THREE

Slot A Slot B Slot C

Past'(?) The Painting's Now Future? 63

What Hopper has succeeded in doing is making the travel across these slots

difficult to accomplish. His paintings breach some of the traditional rules for viewing

narrative paintings. His material does not lend itself to the development of a list of

mental images needed to put a story together with a satisfactory link-up with either the

past or the future. This breach in the application of interpretive procedures arises when

Hopper's paintings are interpreted in the narrative genre. It is then that the ambiguity

arises. When that set of interpretive procedures is used, there is an inability to extrapo•

late a satisfactory past or impute a satisfactory future onto the situational episode of the

painting's now. When Hopper stages the material for us, he deliberately distorts the re•

presentational fabric, thereby making it more difficult for the viewer to continue making

connections w between the painting's now and either Slot A or Slot C.

This distortion In.the representational fabric is an artifice that Hopper achieves

in conjunction with the way he is currently being described by the critics. It is a produc• tion of the critics plus Hopper. His work contributes to this effect because Hopper himself gave titles to his paintings which reduced the story-telling features of the paintings as well

as. confusing the , cues that can be gotten from his work when he talked with the critics.

Edward Hopper's "power to disturb" our senses of what is or should be going on in a painting

comes out of this relationship between himself and the critics. With their help, he has

grafted his own yet-to-be-articulated genre on to the narrative painting tradition and

has elevated certain variations of this tradition for his own expression. This is his new

staging of commonly understood modes of communication. Under these circumstances,

the viewer no longer has the kind of freedom to pick up the standard image list for making

a story. By jettisoning the current narrative form with its emphasis on plot and anticipated

story, he has used the narrative style in order to explain his own themes, symbols and 64

vocabularies. Now the concept of serial progression is abandoned and all pretense of expla• nation is dropped. He adopts a useful set of common themes and images as the skeletal out• line for the development of hisown unfamiliar conventions. Thus common scenes are no longer familiar because of his private usage. His forms are not necessarily realistic or re• presentational of the common experience.

Hopper worked with the idea of incomplete instruction very well. By that I mean once the context of the narrative is given (or taken) by the viewer, he is then de• prived of all the necessary and essential ingredients required to fulfill it. The viewer is then put in a position of lacking a specific piece in order to put the whole puzzle together.

There is a part that has not been observed, an incomplete set of instructions, where the viewer is forced into dealing with the painting in a speculative thinking way. We saw in Chapter three how he applied the notion of incomplete instruction to the painting Cape Cod Even• ing. If the painting had been called "Whippoorwill", it is then given a new set of mean• ings by the viewer. For example, I can "see" the dog turning his head and listening to the notes of a bird singing off-stage somewhere, if the title is Whippoorwill. I have a good deal of difficulty doing that when it is called Cape Cod Evening. In that instance, the dog is only turning his head.

In the main narrative sequence the artist aims at a set of interpretive procedures which will organize his work info one of continuity and connection between the past, pre• sent and future. Hopper can be seen as breaching some of these traditional ways of viewing the narrative painting tradition. This breach in procedures is why it is difficult to extrapo• late a past or impute a future onto the one painted frame the viewer is asked to deal with.

He is unable to know what has happened prior to the scene he is viewing or what will occur 65

next. No travel is permitted across the lines from within the painting. If the narrative struc• ture is used as an organizing method then there is a difficulty in identifying the traditional story-producing signs that are normally there.

The only mention that Hopper himself ever made of this phenomenon was once when Brian O'Doherty asked him about the 'eclipsing frame1:

"The eclipsing frame is a device felt very strongly. "The frame? I consider it very forcibly, " he says. The subject is always cropped in ways that stimulate and frustrate at• tention. Sharp croppings imply movement and change while fixing the subject, so that his pictures seem like solid frames in some slow-motion, life-long movies. " $®

This breach in the normal procedures for framing a narrative painting is the rea• son why there is an inability to extrapolate a definite past or impute-a definite future onto the surface of the painting's now. One possible reason why it was applied so quickly in

Hopper's case is that with documents of a certain nature, a breach seen as a violation of a normal set os procedures is available to us as an alternative or auxiliary set of interpre• tive procedures for viewing a document.

By using the modified narrative sequence combined ;with the notion of ambiguity critics make it to yield the specific interpretations of loneliness, alienation, and timelessness.

Story-telling stops and description is built up layer upon layer. The concern is now with descriptions of persons, things, situations, and backgrounds of events. By assigning Hopper's paintings to this genre, the critic plugs them into a definite set of interpretive procedures that are seen to be distinctively different from the narrative genre he was originally assigned" to.

Using the material thus far presented in this chapter as an additional set of instructions, I would now like to present several written accounts where the reviewers do constitute Hopper as alienated, lonely, and timeless. These are the types of description

that the principal architects of the tradition surrounding Hopper have mentioned with the

most frequency.

(1) The Descriptive Frame

In an article which appeared in Sao Paulo 9, William Seitz provides the reader

with a quite lengthy description of the painting, Office At Night (1940); yet, as the follow•

ing example shows, he has developed his descriptions around the descriptive moment, stop-

ping the story and describing what is taking place within the one frame the painting deals with:

"One marvels, looking at such a work as Office at Night, that in 1940 any American painter devoted so much care and skill to the depiction of commercial activity and the utilitarian setting and equipment. The graceless walls, partitions of electric lighting from inside and out. The desk, the heavy office chairs, the umbrella stand, telephone and lamp, the typewriter, and papers are given a psychedelic clarity. Against these artifacts the rounded body of the sec• retary is strikingly sensuous. By contrast with her strong form and assured stance, her employer is a hollow man, hardly human. Nevertheless an almost painful psychic, even sexual, tension results."

Seitz gives the woman's body a particular sexual status when he refers to her as being Strikingly sensuous'. This enables him then to construct a set of assembly instructions whereby 'an almost painful, psychic, even sexual, tension results'. Seitz was able, on the other hand, to keep his attention upon the moment that the painting dealt with and did not step outside the boundaries outlined by the artist. He.does stress psychological aspects as much as possible but within the boundaries of the painting. Seitz characterizes Hopper's work by stressing the psychological aspects in the

painting, yet is satisfied to remain within the boundaries outlined by the artist's own hand.

Now let's glance at Parker Tyler's interpretation. He received a similar message from this

painting, but felt that he could push its logical conclusion out beyond the frame that the

painting deals with:

"Office at Night" shows light as a wedge, pressing people back into their own private darkness; under the merciless glare from overhead (seeming symbolic of the constraint of working overtime) the girl clerk's figure is united with the filing cabinet cshe stands by while her boss is united with his desk: the blond, blank wall divides them while they are fused with things. The dark welding of desk with filing cabi• net at the lower parts of these objects contains a certain ero• tic insinuation: this little contact after hours may be prelude to an 'evening out' for these two workers." ^

Tyler attributes erotic insinuations to both desk and filing cabinet, then fits that interpretation nicely to correspond with a description of the girl clerk's figure being united with the filing cabinet, while her boss is united with his desk. Then he suggests that this little contact may be a prelude to an evening out for these two workers. The link• up is made in such a way as to suggest that 'something will happen' off stage between these two people; that events will occur in a world that we will never share or occupy. One way to fake Tyler's meaning here is that the two people will have a sexual interlude later on.

However, it would be just as easy to suggest that they were about to send out for coffee and sandwiches or go roller skating. Given what Tyler chooses to observe and describe, how• ever, that interpretation cannot be made to stick. Consequently, his interpretation of what

"may be" is given an ambiguity. It is an " "evening out' " (and Tyler uses the quotes) for these two workers. The interpretation now falls within a speculative realm and from the set of instructions we- receive, we cannot come to rest on one absolute interpretation. (2) Hopper and Alienation

Parker Tyler's "Edward Hopper : Alienation by Light" started the ball rolling as far as that specific interpretation was concerned. It appeared in Magazine of Art in Decem• ber, 1948. Giving his reader both a set of instructions that are not intended to apply and then those that will, Tyler says:

"Just the contrary was true of impressionist painting, for in Seurat and Monet we see the world of objects, no less than the air, saturated by natural light. But whatever rigidly limited expression light achieves in Hopper's work, it makes the best of it, negatively, by alienating whatever resists it." 63

In this next example we see how Lawrence Campbell has reinterpreted the early Hopper. Instead of the "lyric imagination " given his work in the late twenties, that same work is now seen in, light of the modified interpretation:

"The early Hopper was a pleasant enough painter. The 'real' Hopper of the diabolically straightforward technique, the con• trasting light and darks, the menacing shadows, the late Vic• torian buildings, and above all the mood of estrangement and isolation of man in an outside world of urban buildings - man alienated both from it and from himself - crystallized in the etchings." °4

Similarly, we learn that:

"Hopper's vision is a depressing one, and whatever pleasure there is in it, is perverse - the realization that the artist has stripped himself of the artistic, sensuous way of seeing, almost as an end in itself, and has brought it down almost to the level of the ordinary, unimaginative, alienated vision which sees the world only as a collection of things to be used if useful, to be rejected if not.1,65 69

(3) Hopper and Loneliness

Another common formulation of Hopper's designed ambiguity is the loneliness interpretation. In the following review Lloyd Goodrich gives an interpretation that allegedly explains why this is so:

"The pervading sense of loneliness in Hopper's art is linked to his reserved emotional attitude towards human beings, and to its corollary, the strong emotion he concentrates on the non-human elements of the world in which he lives. There is a transference of emotion from humanity to its setting ana• logous to the landscapist's transference to nature." 00

Occasionally, an interpretation will find itself being assigned to the wrong painting as was the case when Margaret Breuning wrote an article for The Art Digest:

"One of Hopper's marked gifts is the evocation of an at• mosphere of isolation: a roadside gas station at night called Early Sunday Morning, a street with closed shops, or a dreary stretch of an empty Weehawken street are all enveloped in a veil of remoteness and loneliness." °^

It would be difficult to determine how the roadside gas station at night received the title Early Sunday Morning. In this case it may have been a printing error or the fact that several sentences that should have been included in the review were left out. The fea• ture to note, however, is that Breuning's loneliness interpretation - as a set of instructions - has been assigned to three different paintings while she really only mentions one. The road• side gas station she is speaking of is more than likely Gas which we have talked about earlier on. The empty Weehawken street she speaks of can only be a description of East Wind Over

Weehawken (1934), the only painting that, to my knowledge, deals with Weehawken streets. A reader can also learn that Hopper's loneliness is due in part to the fact that he is "Part Puritan", and part "Peeping Tom" as Lawrence Campbell describes:

"This finds an outlet in his paintings in repeated Peeping- Tom situations, like the story of the clergyman in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, who knocked out a pane from the stained glass window in his church in order to spy on a woman lying in a bed in a room across the street. In a Hopper painting, the missing pane of glass is usually a window across the street or a hidden place within a room from which one can safely observe a woman undressing or stripteasing, or a naked woman standing or sitting on a bed looking out of a window, and when there is no woman in view, a mysterious lighted window suggests she may soon appear.

These fantasies occur in an America which Hopper sees as a world of utter loneliness and monotony, inhabited, if at all, by people with anonymous, white, executive faces. He throws a light into his buildings with a beam as unwavering as moon• light. When his people sit facing into the sun it is as though they were looking into an empty grave. Even unspoiled nature seems dehumanized and ominous. " ^

(4) The Stoppage of Time

One further way that critics have chosen to describe Hopper's situational episode is by mentioning the apparent stoppage of time in the sequential ordering of events in his pain ings. Critics have chosen to recognize this as one of the important features of his paintings and, similarly, as one of the aspects of painting itself that Hopper has skilfully achieved.

In order to bring this to the attention.of the reader/viewer critics have selected a metaphor that alludes to a temporal pause and to the temporary inaction in his paintings.

For example, James Thrall Soby describes Hopper's work in the following manner:

"Hopper's pictures tell the time of day or night accurately, but only in order to bring the clock to an absolute halt", or that they "have created an evocative imagery of temporal pause, an imagery 71

"in which an atmosphere of time-gone-by acts as a foil to a hushed present." 69

Correspondingly, Mark Strand utilized the same metaphor in his description of

Hopper's oil painting, House by the Railroad:

"And across the tracks is Hopper's forbidden land, where the present is lived eternally, where the moment is without mom• ent, where it is always just after and just before - in this case just after the train has passed, just before the train will arrive."

This interpretation of Edward Hopper, stressing the metaphor of pause, has not

been exclusively isolated to the world of art criticism. I found its spreading influence spill•

ing over into the world of short story fiction as a social fact. John Casey's short story,

"Testimony and Demeanor" which appeared in the New Yorker, mentions Hopper's ability

to stop time. In the following we overhear the dialogue between two characters alluding to

the current interpretation of Hopper's paintings:

Ann said, "It is like a Hopper. A cliche imbued with realism. A realized cliche. An intensified cliche. No, you aren't mak- anything up? I said, "No". She said, "What I like about Hopper is this - the other dimension, the suggested dimension, is absolutely, precisely in focus. There is nothing to play with, to giggle into focus. It all comes at once. In fact, it all comes at once even though I don't know of another painter who can suggest that a scene - the one of the inside of the movie theatre, for instance, has such a stretch of long, boring time locked into it. Just on and on and on. Even his house with the yards grown over. And yet every one of his paintings has such a clear point. I mean all the time is brought to a head, as though his picture is a dam waiting for you to look at it for all the time to be released. " 71

Casey's story shows several interesting things that ought to be noted here. For one thing, Casey has placed into his literary context an interpretation of an artist as if it were a social fact. One of his fictional characters is speaking about a feature of the world rather

than the narrative expository voice of a critic. This gives the interpretation another dimen•

sion. It is as if real people were talking about Hopper in a 'real life' situation. You read

it as an audience would listen to a play. Furthermore, it shows how once an interpretation

is established, there are a variety of ways, other possible avenues, by which the interpre•

tation can be mediated.

What I have tried to describe above is that it was the critics who worked at

assigning Hopper to the modified narrative genre. The features that are attributed to his

paintings are the product of (1) the formal properties of Hopper's work, plus (2) the critics'

interpretive procedures for decoding the message in his paintings; plus (3) the instructions

the critics give to the reader/viewers so that they can command a similar set of procedures

for seeing^ the paintings in the same way. The features of alienation, loneliness, and time-

lessness that are attributed to his work are not the product of a relationship between the

artist and his visual vocabularies, but the product of the relationship between the critics'

interpretive procedures and the formal properties of the paintings.

It is interesting to note that Hopper himself disclaimed almost all association with the interpretations that were being assigned to his work. In an interview with Hopper that took place in 1965, Rafael Squirrie noticed that:

"The discussion amused him and made him think. I realized then - and it was true of the whole interview - that Hopper appeared to be more interested in what his wife or I had to say than in saying anything himself. So out of respect I did most of the talking, while he listened, and I tried to read the expressions on his face and discern his thoughts." 7^ Squirrie's remarks have set the stage for what we shall turn to next. In looking back over what we have covered so far, there is the prominent mention of interpretive pro• cedures. Yet, little detailed mention has been made of how these procedures are used by the critics as tools when they are engaged in the actual practice of doing art criticism.

What are some of the ways critics go about performing their task? What are the methods available to them for establishing an interpretive tradition? To paraphrase Mr. Squirrie, let us now turn our attention to how the critic reads the expression on the face of a Hopper canvas, and how he tries to discern its thoughts. V "Champions are Made not born"

Painting is a form of communication. For the artist, the visual vocabularies he chooses to put forth on canvas are his means of personal expression; his means of conveying a message to an audience. Coming at it from another direction, we could also say that works of art and the craftsmen who produce them provide the raw material or basic resources for professional critics who manufacture and package a variety of interpretive solutions to visual cryptograms. Once packaged, these solutions are then made available for mass dis• tribution through an elaborate set of institutions. In time they become part of the culturally accepted products that encircle us, determining our standards of aesthetics and influencing our notions of taste.

What then is the basis for a relationship between an artist's paintings, the inter• pretive procedures of the critic or reviewer, and the process of cultural mediation? In

Hopper's case it is based partly on the critic's use of insider's knowledge about him, partly on the use of one another's critical reviews as a resource, and partly on Hopper's unwilling• ness to declare what his paintings intended.

With Hopper, the art critic who is regarded as the number one insider is a man named Lloyd Goodrich. He acquired his reputation largely because he amassed the most primary source material on Hopper. What is more, Goodrich was, for a long time, director of the Whitney Museum which, after Hopper's death, became sole heir to the Hopper estate.

I first became aware of Mr.. Goodrich's (eminent position when I wrote Garret McCoy of the Smithsonian institute regarding what information they had relating to Hopper. McCoy wrote me back saying: "The leading authority is Lloyd Goodrich, who has gathered a large amount of information on Hopper's work. I believe he plans to publish a book and is accordingly reluctant to share his documentary information. Still, you might write to him care of the Whitney Museum in New York. Both that institution and the Museum of Modern Art have prod• uced excellent Hopper exhibition catalogues. The Whitney Museum is also the heir to the Hopper estate. "* (see Appendix B)

With the exception of Lloyd Goodrich who knew Hopper personally, and a

handful of interviews that have been done through the years there was little primary source

material available on Hopper. The critics were as dependent as I was on the few good re• views that dealt with him as a topic.

In my own case, for instance, I was able to attain a command of the existing background material as well as forming a reasonable idea of what critical accounts were considered to be among the most authoritative, in little more than two months. Even when the local University Library did not have a certain article or review in its possession,

I had only to wait a matter of weeks before obtaining it through the inter-library loan sys• tem. Thus, within a period of a few months, I was able to determine which articles were the most informative, which articles were used by other critics to build their own reviews on, and which critics had played key roles in the establishment of the tradition that sur• rounded Hopper's work. I found that, as in other fields, art criticism too has the category of expert or professional. In Hopper's case certain art critics had come to be regarded as the outstanding authorities on the subject. Moreover, I discovered that once this occurred their interpretations became almost sacrosanct and other critics paid them recognition and respect.

* Everything McCoy said turned out to be true, including Goodrich's reluctance to share written material. He never replied to the letter I wrote him concerning Hopper. 76

The relationship between an artist's paintings and the interpretive procedures

of the professional critic is one of certification. Critics and reviewers act as professional

authorities in authorizing specific interpretations for works of art. When Hopper avoided

stating what his paintings intended, this was used by the critics to authorize the interpreta• tion they made of his works, and to sustain the picture of loneliness, alienation and time•

lessness. In doing this study, I found three primary methods critics have used to authorize

their interpretations. For the record they are: (1) the use of special insider's knowledge

about the artist himself which is related to his work; (2) the use of one another's critical

reviews as a resource which is drawn upon for establishing an interpretation; and/or (3)

the critic's privileged use of the artist's own statements to authorize his own. In this

chapter it is my intention to examine these methods in depth.

(1) Insider's Knowledge

Insider's Knowledge is a method frequently used for firming up an interpretation.

Critical assessments of an artist's work are often enhanced by applying biographical informa•

tion, showing how the artist has developed, relating stories and incidents that concern the

production of a particular painting - noteworthy features that contribute to the general lore that already surrounds him. The use of insider's knowledge as it relates to an artist is import• ant in the construction of an artistic tradition. This kind of knowledge places the critic who

possesses it in a unique position vis a vis the artist. In building up an interpretive tradition, critics having inside sources of material on an artist can then carve out a special role for them• selves in the process of mediation. In a sense, the critic has a set of negotiable securities that can be utilized for the practical purpose of generating written copy in addition to 77

strengthening his own position as expert.

In order to make the structure of Edward Hopper's paintings intelligible this method has been used extensively. This is partially due to Hopper's somewhat unique position in relation to art history. He has presented the professional riddle-solvers with an interesting problem: In contrast to the volumes that have been written on artists like Delocroix or

Michelangelo, the amount of written material available on Hopper is still quite small. Due to this shortage of written material, it is far easier to become a Hopper "expert" than it would be for certain Renaissance artists who have had literally hundreds of books written about them.

From what we saw earlier it became clear that Goodrich used some of the mat• erial O'Doherty had written to enhance and weight the interpretation he gave to Sun In an

Empty Room. When he was describing light, motifs, and a haunting presence it appeared as though he had obtained his information directly from O'Doherty's review. That is due to the inter-locking quality of this particular authorization procedure. In the case of Sun in an Empty Room, O'Doherty can be seen as having access to special insider's knowledge.

In his interview with Hopper features of the painting were discussed thus giving O'Doherty's interpretation a privileged status. In chapter one Burnham accomplished a similar thing when he described Monet's painting to his reader. Knowledge about the artist related to his work is used in this way to establish and preserve an interpretation.

We know that the correct interpretation for Sun in an Empty Room was estab• lished through the use of critical reviews used as a resource. However, for the sake of understanding how that painting came to be seen as representing part of the essential corpus let us re-examine what features of that painting critics choose to talk about. 78

Technically speaking, we know that the figure has been painted out of the

picture. The critics themselves keep reminding us of that fact. When, for example, I first

read A. T. Baker's review in Time, I was quite moved by the flash of pleasant insight that

I thought Baker's interpretation had produced. In all three accounts, Sun in an Empty Room

is seen to have a 'haunting presence' due to the existence 'in the painting' of some kind

of apparitional form. Our attention is directed to a set of relationships which would have

been impossible to recognize if critics had not recognized that absent figure as a reality

and communicated that specific feature to our awareness. The object presents itself but the

figure is not present unless the critic provides a frame of reference which points to it.

The notion of a 'haunted presence', of human figures first being included and

then painted out, is not recoverable from the painting itself unless one of the following conditions have been met first:

(1) There is a phenomenon sometimes associated with older paintings called 'pentimento'.

This occurs when the surface oil begins to grow transparent and objects painted under•

neath begin to show through. This could have happened in this case, but it generally

occurs with oil paintings that are four or five hundred years old. Since none of Hopper's

paintings are over 75 years old, we can rule pentimento out as a possibility.

(2) The critic has access to special information and anecdotal material concerning the

artist's painting techniques (in this instance, O'Doherty's interview with Edward

and Jo Hopper).

(3) The critic has familiarized himself with some of the accounts about the artist written

by fellow critics and has done so prior to the actual writing of his own review. 79

Here is how A. T. Baker described the figure in Sun in an Empty Room when he wrote his review:

"Hopper had originally placed a female figure in the room and then painted it out. The resulting picture is haunted by a sense of a presence that is not there, of a room that has just been left." 73

A female figure! By the time Baker writes about this apparition it has acquired a specific sex.

In reality, the figure has been painted out of the picture and is now non• existent. Yet the critics persist in bringing this point to our attention. If they did not bother to mention the figure, then another thing happens. Sun in an Empty Room becomes just that. Its ambiguity ceases to exist. It is just an empty room and there is nothing more to it. In fact, one begins to feel that if it were not for the ghost story that critics keep repeating, Sun in an Empty Room might very well have been seen as a painting that did not embody the features that critics have talked about.

Thus we can see that the products attributed to Hopper's paintings are of the result of the interpretive procedures used by the critics. In describing Sun in an Empty Room, the critics have given the reader/viewer a set of instructions for how he can view it similarly.

By using the o critic's description as a set of assembly instructions, anyone wishing to ac• complish a similar interpretation would be able to do so. By taking a quote from the artist's own lips, "I'm after me", which allegedly legitimates Hopper's own personal intentions, and then following it up with the 'haunting presence' interpretation, a document is produced which accompanies the painting. It gives strength to an already existing interpretation of Hopper's work, and makes it considerably more difficult for anyone in the future to come along and substitute an alternative.

In the painting Two Comedians (1965), Goodrich uses some of his own insider's knowledge in order to charge the painting with meaning. The two figures are Edward and

Jo Hopper because Mrs. Hopper confirmed that fact to Goodrich. Goodrich's interpreta•

tion is taken seriously because of who he is - close friend of the Hopper's, former director of the Whitney - all that. As Smith has noted, "One important restriction on the reader/

hearer's being able to work on the account is because of authorization rules which give

'witnesses a privileged status versus the reader/hearer. This consequence is to be under• stood as a product of the social organization of the account which places the reader/hearer at a disadvantage with respect to those who were members of the events." His viewpoint

is an excellent instrument for authorizing an interpretation because of what is known about

him. Combine the longtime friendship between Goodrich and the Hoppers, Goodrich's distinguished reputation in the field of art criticism, and the authorship of the major work

concerning Hopper, and Goodrich comes off looking like one of the leading authorities on

the subject.

Yet there is another way insider's knowledge is used in art criticism and it is worth considering here. This particular instance occurred after Hopper had died and was

no longer around to "rumble in contradiction". Goodrich had this to say about Two Com•

edians:

"Illness in 1964 kept him from work, but in 1965 came Chair Car, which showed no sign of failing powers. That year he did his last painting, Two Comedians. It is a personal statement; the tall male comedian and the small feminine comedian who he is presenting to the public are obviously himself and Jo Hopper...a fact which she her• self confirmed to me." 74 This Two Comedians story illustrates a different kind of interpretive procedure

beloved by the critics. It could be described as "the device of the hidden symbolic mean•

ing." It is a major critical resource because it usually involves a special knowledge of

painter and painting. Specially when it takes a special knowledge even to know that there

is a hidden meaning, as in this case. The work of the Flemish artist, Hieronymus Bosch is

another case in point. You cannot really understand his work without knowing what the

hidden meaning is for his depictions of paradise or hell. This interpretive procedure involves

the setting up of structure where there is an appearance meaning and the "real" meaning;

the "face value" of the object and "what's behind it". This device creates the structure

of the riddle by supplying a solution.

In Cape Cod Morning we saw how the painting was charged with meaning and

made intelligible by showing the reader/viewer first what set of interpretations are not appli•

cable and then showing him what set is. In Two Comedians we see Mrs. Hopper being used

again as an interpreter for a painting. This time she is used to supply the answer for the

real meaning of the painting.

In both cases the narrative painting tradition is used but for different purposes.

In the case of Cape Cod Morning, the critic is using Mrs. Hopper's statement for the purpose of showing that Hopper did not agree with her interpretation and, furthermore, that his paint•

ings do not give off an explicit story. In the case of the Two Comedians Mrs. Hopper's re• marks have been employed by Goodrich to provide the "real meaning" for the painting which lies behind its "face value" meaning. The story-telling elements were selected be• cause they were important for the critic to complete his riddle. Given another set of view•

ing instructions for deciphering this painting, other elements would have been stressed, not whether Edward and Jo were bowing out for the last time. The hidden meaning behind Two Comedians also serves the purpose of cleaning up and tidying the existing loose ends.

Just as the police.do not like to have a series of unsolved crimes on their books, neither does art history like to have any loose ends lying around to complicate matters. Great painting careers must come to an end. And what more fitting way than with the Hoppers bowing out together, thus bringing to an end a long and distinguished painting career. To the critic, it's the last painting; a husband and wife team saying their last goodbyes to the public.

Let us focus our attention on the description of the two comedians. The tall male comedian and the small female comedian are made intelligible as Edward and Jo

Hopper only after the reading of Goodrich's account which conveniently provided the readi with both the explanation and the solution. We cannot get those cues by ourselves. . They are not recoverable from the painting itself unless the reader/viewer is provided with the appropriate tag line... "a fact which she herself confirmed to me."

James R. Mellow's comments in The New York Times Magazine have a close resemblence to the remarks Goodrich has made about Two Comedians with the exception of one important element: from what Mellow says about the painting it is implied that Mrs.

Hopper had told Mellow about the subject matter:

"Two Comedians" (1965) ... Edward Hopper's last painting, completed two years before his death, touches upon one of the major themes of his work, the theatrical world. Mrs. Hopper acknowledged before her own death in 1968 that the two comedians bowing out represented her and her husband." 83

This quote has a convenient ambiguity to it as it applies to Mrs. Hopper's acknowledgment of the crucial meaning-giving fact. To whom did Mrs. Hopper acknow• ledge this fact? A specific set of viewing instructions have been given the viewer for

Two Comedians and the set of instructions has been repeated. We have here a case where two critics have chosen identical biographical sources for making their interpretations, have succeeded inpulling out the same set of viewing instructions, and have then passed them on to their reader/viewers. A consensus is again produced, and we see yet another method for establishing interpretive traditions firmly.

A different approach can lead us to the same conclusion. In the Cape Cod

Morning example, Mrs. Hopper's interpretation is made before Hopper's. In Two Comedians confirmation by Mrs. Hopper is included after the original assertion was made, but we can assume that it was made to the critic before the review was written. In other words, the critic had that knowledge available to him prior to his. writing the review. Therefore, how he organized the account for reading becomes important. If he had said Jo Hopper had in• formed him that the two comedians were herself and Edward, then it would have been redund• ant to say that the two comedians are obviously Edward and Jo. However, by turning the order around, the critic can employ a set of instructions in a way that will get maximum use out of the available information, as well as fit the painting into an already existing tradition.

An integral part of the package of directions which comprise the viewing in• structions is to show what the artist's intent was and then provide motivational explanations that lead the viewer to see these aspects of the painting. The original definition of who the two comedians are needs the lines 'a fact which she herself confirmed to me1 or 'Mrs.

Hopper acknowledged before her own death in 1968 that the two comedians bowing out

represent her and her husband1, in order to sustain itself. Without the qualifying remarks, the interpretation would not be possible.

What I am trying to get at here is how certain information is utilized in the construction of an account. The essential 'facts' concerning Two Comedians were not selected . at random. The critics have a reservoir of information to draw from and they selected elements from the painting that would go toward making a particular interpreta• tion sound convincing. Jo Hopper's remark would have been used for another purpose en• tirely if Hopper had been alive and the critic had been trying to locate the painting in an• other corner of the interpretive tradition. The way both Goodrich and Mellow have pre• sented the material to their reader/viewers, "Jo and Edward Hopper bowing out" has been attributed to Two Comedians as its subject matter.

To see how quickly this feature became institutionalized as the interpretation of

Two Comedians, let us look at a portion of one more review. The following account was written by Bryan Robertson when he reviewed Goodrich's book for The New York Review of

Books:

"There is much evidence that Hopper sometimes used him• self and his wife as models or, more accurately, I believe, cast them both in the requisite roles. His last painting, Bowing Out (1965) shows Hopper with his wife in theatri• cal costumes on a darkened stage.. " ^

Robertson hros made a mistake here, and it is a revealing one. For there was never a painting entitled Bowing Out done by Hopper. I have looked carefully for this phantom and 85

it does nbt exist. I am convinced he is talking here of the painting Two Comedians. One would like to ask Robertson how he came up with the title Bowing Out. Moreover, how

it was that he came to the conclusion that Hopper would cast himself and his wife "both

in the requisite roles". If Robertson means by 'requisite' that it is essential that Jo and

Edward Hopper be seen as the two figures "in theatrical costume on a darkened stage" in

order to come up with the title Bowing Out then I would agree with him. It is requisite for

him. If is also requisite for the reader/viewer to have that set of instructions so that he too

can see what Robertson is talking about.

In leaving this section I would like to leave the reader with this thought. It

was something that John Dewey once said concerning special insider's knowledge. Dewey

noted that often these "biographical incidents are given as substitutes for appreciation of the

painting". Further, he said that "knowledge of social conditions of production is, when it

is really knowledge, of genuine value. But it is no substitute for understanding of the object

in its own qualities and relations. " 77

(2) Reviews as Resources

Critics will often construct their interpretations by using one another's written

reviews. Reviews that have been written by other critics can be seen as a resource that is

drawn upon for further establishing an emerging interpretation. Both the interpretation for

Sun in an Empty Room and Two Comedians was established using this procedure. What had

been attributed to the paintings in earlier reviews was then picked up and recycled in later

accounts. For both paintings there was a similar use of language and concepts which af•

fected the character of the reviews. The interpretation of Two Comedians has an agreed and understood meaning which is recognizable in each review. The same holds true for 6-6

Sun in an Empty Room. We see the same interpretations repeated, we see the same anec• dote used again and again. The critics build on to one another's work an authorization which is almost chain-like. The result is that a particular way of understanding the mean• ing of those paintings gets built into them as a sort of standard critical resource.

(3) Critic's Privileged Interpretations

Insider's knowledge only works as an authorizing procedure as long as the artist himself is in agreement with the conventional interpretation of his work. If that is the case then the artist's interpretation is treated as a special privileged interpretation. The critic will use the artist's own words to assist him in producing an interpretation. With Hopper, however, this was not the case. He was not very co-operative in going along with what the critics said. As Squirrie noted "Hopper appeared more interested in what his wife or I had to say than in saying anything himself."

John Morse was faced with a similar situation when he interviewed Hopper.

Both he and Hopper were looking through a series of photographs of Hopper paintings one day at the Whitney Museum. During the interview Hopper reached for one photograph in the pile:

"That's not bad", he said. The interview follows: MORSE: "Mr. Hopper, about that picture you picked up - Apartment House, painted in 1923. I think you'll be in• terested to know that both Mr. Goodrich and I felt that in this painting you had, in a sense, crystallized the style that you were to develop, and have continued ever since. Do you agree?" HOPPER: "Yes, I think that is so." MORSE: "Do you recall where it was painted?" HOPPER: "It was painted in my studio on Washington Square. that's all I can remember about it". 87

"When I asked him if there were any other pictures that appealed to him more than others, he picked up another photograph. HOPPER: "Well, I think that one did." MORSE: "Cape Cod Morning, do you recall painting it? Was it a pleasure to paint, as well as look at today?" HOPPER: "Well, they're a pleasure in a sense, and yet they're all hard work for me. That's why I can't say its pure pleasure. There's so much technical concern involved." MORSE: "Why, then, do you like it today, do you think?" HOPPER: "Well, as I say, it perhaps comes nearer to my thought about such things than many of the others. That's all I can say about it. " • 78

This is the kind of interview Hopper usually gave out. There was always an unwillingness on his part to declare what his paintings intended. He would say very little that could be used to press an interpretation and he gave his interviewers few handles to grab hold of.

By the same token, Hopper himself did not write a great deal. Therefore, there is a limited number of instructions from the artist himself as to how his paintings should be viewed and interpreted. In the case where the artist has written a great deal, the interpre• tation of the work correspondsbl.argely with what the artist has to say about it. For what the

painter has to say concerning his work has priority over what the critic says. The painter's motivational intentions are considered seriously as an essential segment of the whole. We could say that the painter's version is treated as the privileged version. It is difficult to assign motives and explanations contrary to those that the artist himself made when he did the work. In cases like this, we often find what the artist has said and what the critic has said to be in close harmony. Not necessarily because any of it is true, but because, from the ground breaking ceremonies onward, the tradition has been built, using what the artist has said about his work, and always keeping that in mind as the reviews are written. 88

Hopper did not write much, however. When I first began doing research on him I soon discovered that I was going to have certain problems gathering primary source material. The first indication that Hopper had not written very much came when I kept running into the same quote time after time. Anybody who has ever written anything on Hopper, and who wanted to back it up with something the artist himself had said, used some part of an introduction he wrote for The Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalog back in 1933.*

Outside of this one statement he had written little. He once wrote Forbes Watson, then editor of the Arts, "I sweat blood when I write and a thing that you could probably do in a day would take me I am sure a week or two." 7^

Two things occur as a consequence of the small amount of written material by or on Hopper. First, anybody interested in learning about him is dependent on the few good reviews and the limited amount of other material available on him. Secondly, this limited amount of material also serves the critic's purpose in that it permits certain liberties with the authorization of interpretations. Even Hopper's reluctance to state what his paint• ings are about is turned into an advantage. Interpretations that a critic would not be per• mitted to tamper with under conditions where the artist has been a prolific writer can now be ignored or modified. In this sense, Hopper provides an obvious advantage to critics.

They can say whatever they choose about one of his paintings without worrying that an extensive body of literature (written by the artist) exists to contradict something that has been said.

In Hopper's case the artist is not given a privileged version at all. In fact, as the following excerpt shows, the artist's interpretation is played down. The way the

* The quote is reproduced in Appendix A in total. S9

explanation is organized first plants the thought the critic himself wants the reader to have, and then, so as not to be accused of being historically inaccurate, also shows that the artist did not agree with this interpretation:

"The light in Hopper's paintings always underlines the aliena• tion of American life, the isolated and lonely aspects of Ameri• can experience, although the artist taciturnly disclaimed any intention of creating such effects. Of one painting that strongly suggests those associations Hopper wrote: 'This picture is an attempt to paint sunlight as white with almost or no yellow pig• ment in the white. Any psychologic idea will have to be sup• plied by the viewer."

Davidson uses the same technique here as many a good court lawyer will do when he asks the jury to disregard the following testimony, knowing full well that they cannot. The contradictory evidence has been given. An instruction to disregard the in• formation only serves to emphasize its importance. Furthermore, the word 'taciturnly' is a loaded word. My Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines 'taciturnly' as

"habitually silent; not given to conversation." It means that somebody does not talk very much, as was indeed the case with Hopper. The way Davidson uses it, however, is to imply that because Hopper never said anything that would go against this interpretation, we can consider his interpretation to be the correct one after all.

If a tradition has been built up around an artist's work and the artist's own state• ments have been given secondary importance, then the critic must play down the importance of the artist's words altogether and stress them as little as possible. Consider what Lloyd

Goodrich does in the following:

"Particularly in his last fifteen years or so, certain paintings revealed their rectilinear and angular structure even more clearly. High Noon, for example, is almost pure geo• metry; the dominant straight lines and acute angles, the emphatic pattern of sunlight and shadow, the extreme simplification and utter clarity - all create a design that has interesting parallels with geometric abstraction. (This is a comparison, incidentally, that Hopper did not care for; when I told him that in a lecture I had used a slide of High Noon together with a Mondrian, his only comment was, 'You kill me'.) Even more severely geometric is Rooms by the Sea; an empty room with an open doorway looking out on blue water, and sunlight falling in a diagonal pattern on the wall and floor - a painting made up only of interrelations of light, space, and a few bare forms. And in 1940, when he was seventy-eight, he produced one of his boldest, most vig• orous, and most uncompromisingly angular works, Second Storey Sunlight. (In answering a questionnaire from the Whitney Museum when it purchased the painting, his only statement as to its subject was: 'This picture is an attempt to paint sunlight as white, with almost or no yellow pigment in the white. Any psychologic \; idea will have to be supplied by the viewer'."'8'1

In two places in the above paragraph, 'You kill me' and 'This picture is an attempt to...1, Goodrich has used Hopper's written or stated version. He mentions them in passing, but not to bolster his own interpretation. It is almost as if the artist's own interpre• tation is allowed or tolerated due to his annoying but undeniable ability to produce the work of art the critic is talking about. If we take Hopper's statement 'You kill me', to mean that he did not necessarily agree with Goodrich's interpretation of 'interesting parallels with geometric abstractions', as indeed Goodrich himself states, then it leads us back to the central point in question. After Goodrich has explained to his audience that Hopper did not care for that comparison, he goes on, audaciously continuing with his own geometric interpre tation. 'You kill me', gets sandwiched in between geometric interpretations of High Noon and Rooms by the Sea. Goodrich's introduction of parallels and geometric abstractions shows another interesting point as well. Here is the first use of another method of interpret- ing what is going on in the paintings; another possible set of assembly instructions. That 91

Hopper did not like the interpretation is of little importance. After all, when the critics were saying his work was characterized by loneliness and alienation, they never bothered to consider what he said, why should they start now?

If we remember how the interpretation of Hopper came down to us in the first place, then it is equally as easy to imagine another set of interpretations developing at another time. Critics could begin to use this Goodrich interpretation as the starting point and go on from there. Since what the artist himself said never seemed to have played an important role in the mediation of the tradition anyway, his words could be ignored here as easily as they were back in 1929 when he wrote Forbes Watson to tell him that he was not responsible for the 'Austerity without loss of emotion' quote.

Lawrence Campbell also noticed this exchange between Goodrich and Hopper:

"In his most recent of several books and essays on Hopper, Lloyd Goodrich recalls Hopper's reaction when told that Goodrich, in a lecture, had projected two slides on the screen, side by side, one of Hopper's High Noon, the other of a painting by Mondrian. Hopper's comment was, "You kill me." Right he was! For the oppression of a Hopper painting is precisely what Mondrian spent a lifetime elimi• nating from his own work. In any Mondrian subject, content and form are paradigms of each other, and each work is an attempt at getting a little bit closer to reality, to that some• thing which Ludwig Tieck, the German Romantic, first spoke of as having been lost to modern life. A Hopper painting, no matter how 'real' it looks as a depicted scene, is neither "real" as> a depiction of an actual place, nor is the experience des• cribed anything more than a highly subjective one, despite its enormous power. A Hopper painting, any Hopper painting, is like a painful memory of the boredom of childhood and of everyday yesterdays. It is a distillation or abstraction of such grey moods. " - ^ 92

Campbell does an interesting thing here. He starts out agreeing with Hopper and disagreeing with Goodrich. However, after he has gone through Mondrian, Ludwig

Tieck, and German Romanticism, the interpretation we have of Hopper is back to where it was prior to the Goodrich "geometric abstraction". Although it is not my intention to proceed along these lines any further at this time, this may point to the beginnings of yet another interpretation of Hopper starting to develop. Campbell may have problems

"seeing" what Goodrich says is there simply because he has not received enough instruction in seeing Hopper paintings in that way.

Another critic who drew upon authorization procedures that overruled Hopper was O'Doherty. In the following account we even see him go so far as to try to change what the artist's own verbal impressions were:

"From all this one could easily - as many have done - make a legend of loneliness and isolation, finding plenty to support it. It would have, and has, a certain truth but for the wrong reasons. He feels the critics' emphasis on the isolation of his figures is a sentimental distortion of the facts as he presents them. 'The loneliness thing is overdone. It formulates something you don't want formulated. Renoir says it well: 'The most import• ant element in a picture cannot be defined'.. .cannot be ex• plained, perhaps, is better.' In trying to explain this inexpli• cable he denies influences. "I have no influences really. I don't mean that in a conceited way. Every artist has a core of originality - a core of identity that is your own.' He re• fused to go further. 'I don't know what my identity is. The critics give you an identity. And sometimes, even, you give it a push.' " 83

O'Doherty's review article is gracious enough to include the artist's own evalua• tion of his work. Nevertheless, as we can see by this next excerpt, O'Doherty returns to the issue trying to get Hopper to alter his own interpretation:

"Since he does not bring back direct reports from that 'vast and varied interior realm, ' I returned half a year later to the same subject of isolation, attempting with cunning and gradualness to surprise that trout, shy of light, lurking in the shadows of his mind. He was sit• ting in the same chair, leaning forward, the air outside thundering with birds, the square below stony with sun• light. Our conversations, especially in the first few years, were often seasonal, months between sentences, picking them up where we left off. 'You really think the loneli• ness thing is overdone?' His eye unlatched from me and went off to stare at the wall. 'Well, your paintings are sparing and empty, those people are insulated with space.' He thought for a moment. The trout trembled under the rock. 'Maybe they're right,' he said at last, meaning the critics, and the trout and he and I and everything receded into the yawn of his pessimism." 84

It would seem from the evidence collected here that once the basic fundamental interpretation has been firmly established, the critics have a series of procedures that can be utilized in order to preserve and maintain its interpretation. Even in light of alternative interpretations given by a critic or the artist himself.

We can see that there are at least two ways to maintain the interpretation des• pite a painter's own voiced objections. In the case of Goodrich, Hopper's own opinion is nothing more than a somewhat interesting entree, sandwiched between a main course of geometric forms. In the case of Campbell, Hopper's own opinion is employed to bring the review back around to where Campbell wants it, i.e., describing the psychological dimen• sions that critics have used for forty years.

If we can take O'Doherty at his word, he even went so far as to try and change the artist's own statement concerning his work. To return to a subject a half year later, "with cunning and gradualness to surprise' strikes me as the action of someone with a vested

interest to preserve, and he even made a conscious effort to change opinion for the record.

"Well, your paintings are sparing and empty, those people are insulated with space", is a

statement made by someone accustomed to giving instructions. In this case he even goes so

far as to try and tell the artist himself what his work is all about.

'Maybe they're right1, could be construed as Hopper finally acknowledging the

critics' opinion of his work as being correct. It could be interpreted as a polite statement

by a man who was simply tring to keep a pesky critic off his back, or ( and this is at the

low end of interpretive procedures) perhaps by the end of Hopper's painting career he was

beginning to paint more toward a particular style and with subject matter and a specific

audience already in mind. We will never know that, of course. That is outside our realm

of experience.

A further note on O'Doherty's statement that provides indication of a definite set or procedures in operation is that the way his statement characterized Hopper's work is

again in the narrative mode. It evokes a reply from the artist that is within the same tradi•

tion. "Perhaps they're right", is not much of a motivational intention and great volumes of

criticisms cannot be built on that statement alone. It is, however, a reply to a question that was well within the boundaries of the narrative painting tradition and O'Doherty gets as much distance out of it as he can.

When James R. Mellow wrote his review on Hopper for the New York Times

Magazine, Hopper's basic disagreement on how the critics viewed his work has been subtly changed in such a way that it begins to promise his own acquiescence: 95

"Hopper disagreed, too, with those critics - the vast majority - who saw his work as a commentary on the alienation of American life. "The loneliness thing is overdone1, he said, "it formulates something you don't want formulated1. But several months later, back to the same question because of O'Doherty's insistence, he was willing to concede, 'Maybe they're right1, then clammed up tight on the subject. "85

This quote has several dimensions worth noting in depth. And here 1 must point out that I do not think this is a dead issue. If the reader thinks I am making too much of it, then I ask him to consider how often these casual bits of information subtly sink into the mind...That Hopper disagreed with a vast majority of critics and then finally concedes that maybe they're right was written for the purpose of substantiating an interpretation. And not that Hopper had won a lifelong battle over the incorrect notions of critics. Used the way Mellow constructs it, 'a vast majority' and 'Maybe they're right' looks as though

Hopper has finally given way under democratic pressure. A vast number of critics have associated alienation with Hopper's paintings, and it's time he got with the program. Mellow reports Hopper's statement correctly, and at first glance there appears to be no distortion in the way it is utilized. Nevertheless, the way Mellow fastened the statement at the end - whether intentional or not - reduces Hopper's own interpretation to secondary importance

vis-a-vis: . what the critic thinks is the important issue. Secondly, by attaching the statement at the end of the paragraph adds a certain weight to the statement and, hence, corroborates what the critic was>originally suggesting. It is alright for Hopper to have an opinion, and it will be duly recognized and reported, but in such a way so as to fit it within the marked-off boundaries of the interpretive tradition.

From this we can see that the critic is in the business of producing and legitim• izing the "correct" instructions for how to view Edward Hopper's paintings. With the use of authorization procedures that give the critic a privileged status, he begins to show peopl

how to look at what Hopper has done, he shows the viewer how to recognize and assign values to the paintings, gives him procedures so he will know what to attend to. VI Locating The Assembly Instructions

Once a gradual establishment of the interpretation becomes recognized as the legitimate interpretation of his work, it results in several significant consequences. First, there is the eventual build-up of a number of works that come to comprise a corpus of the essential Edward Hopper. These paintings are considered to embody the features that

Hopper was trying to paint to the greatest degree. As a result, they are the ones continu• ally being mentioned and alluded to in the reviews. While this essential corpus is being established, another phenomenon is taking place as well. As the framework for the essential corpus is being developed, another method is being built for relegating to the sidelines paintings that do not fall within the essential corpus. Accordingly, the paintings that do not fall within the interpretive boundaries produced by the original corpus, come to be considered as his minor works. In effect, the critics have devised a tandem arrangement for appraising Hopper's work. The procedures that are developed for recognizing what the important corpus is also produces a procedure for knowing what the corpus is not. The critic can both recognize which paintings come to comprise the 'essential Hopper' and which paint• ings do not fit the corpus and should be discarded. These procedures are then passed on by the critics so that the reader too can learn to recognize what paintings are important works.

By legitimizing a specific set of interpretive instructions for how to view Hopper's work, the critics generate a corpus of "essential Edward Hopper" paintings. Certain paintings come to be recognized as embodying the features of loneliness, timelessness, and alienation to the greatest degree. The critics' interpretations generate a corpus of paintings that are 9a

seen as those paintings where their interpretive procedures work effectively. Assembling this essential corpus involves selecting out and employing those Hopper works which best lend themselves to the interpretive procedures that the critics have established as legitim• ate. In so doing they can make a preconceived plan appear plausible. Then this essential corpus can be seen by the viewer as the group of paintings where the interpretive proced• ures of the critics - if analyzed - would work effectively.

What are the entrance requirements for getting into this essential group of

paintings? One way to find out would be to discover which paintings have been ment• ioned with marked repetition and then learn what has been attributed to them.

There are a number of paintings that one finds constant reference to in the critical reviews. Some of the most commonly mentioned ones include: House by the Rail• road (1925), Room in New York (1932), Office at Night (1940), New York Movie (1939),

Gas (1940), Early Sunday Morning (1930), Approaching a City (1946), Two on the Aisle

(1927), Eleven A.M. (1926), Hotel Room (1931), Chop Suey (1929), Automat (1927),

Hotel Lobby (1943), East Wind Over Weehawken (1934), Drug Store (1927), Cape Cod

Evening (1939), Cape Cod Morning (1950), Sun in an Empty Room (1963), Light at Two

Lights (1927), and Lighthouse at Two Lights (1929). Not only are these paintings ment•

ioned in the reviews, but when some of Hopper's work accompanies a review, in the form of a reproduction, it is usually one taken from this set of paintings.

This set of paintings is part of the essential corpus of Hopper's work. Using a

mode of analysis that the critics have outlined, the viewer can compare these paintings with what the critics have said and come up with a similar interpretation. This corpus is seen to have a unifying strand running through it. If the reader/viewer has seen paint• ings within the essential corpus he becomes aware of the general pattern. We find that once the tradition begins to establish itself, it is this set of paintings which gets repeated mention. They are mentioned because this set of paintings embodies the features that critics have been talking about to the greatest degree. Frank Getlein once said that

"anyone who has thought of Hopper's work would divide it into two broad categories by

86 locale; the city and the beach". In a sense this is true, but these categories are singu• larly narrow and many of Hopper's paintings would fall outside the boundaries Getlein has set up.

In the paintings mentioned above there is a wide range of subjects and themes making it difficult to learn why they are included in the essential corpus merely by assign• ing them to the city or the beach. Please get me straight on this: I am saying that it is the treatment of these subjects which determines whether they will fit the essential corpus or not. In order for a Hopper painting to be included in the essential corpus it has to meet certain entrance requirements. And to find out what these entrance requirements are it will be useful to break the above list of paintings down into a number of sub-categories in order to discover why they lend themselves to the interpretations the critics have given them. The paintings which have been assigned the features of ambiguity must have some pre-established set of meanings which make them so. Some of the various features that we might look for in the analysis of his paintings can be categorized as follows:

(1) Paintings or etchings with only a single person in the picture. A partial list of

this type of picture would include, Gas, Eleven A.M., 'Hotel'Room, Automat, Morning in a City, Cape Cod Morning, and such etchings as East Side Interior

(1921), Evening Wind (1921), Night in the Park (1921), or Night Shadows (1921).

All of these paintings can be seen to lend themselves to the loneliness interpreta• tion. In Eleven A.M., for instance, a woman sits in a chair, naked, looking out a window. It fills the requirement of loneliness nicely and, in addition - as with

Hemingway's Leopard on Kilimanjaro - no one has explained what a woman is doing naked in a chair looking out a window at Eleven A.M.

Paintings with only a few people in the picture, none of them seen having inter•

action. In paintings like Chop Suey, Hotel Lobby, Room in New York, Two on

an Aisle, and Office at Night, there is an ambiguity due to the concern with the

descriptive episode. Two on an Aisle, for example, is set inside a theatre. It is

difficult to tell from the instructions given by a narrative tradition what is going

to happen next. It is hard to determine whether the play or motion picture is going

to begin in a short while, and these people have come to the theatre early, or

whether the play or motion picture is already over and these people are the last

to leave the theatre.

Paintings or etchings depicting a time of day when nobody is about, or simply paint•

ings that do not include people in the picture at all. This group breaks down into

two groups. Paintings that depict times of day when nobody is about include

Rooms for Tourists (1945), Dawn in Pennsylvania (1942), Drug Store (1927), and

Solitude (1944). I consider them differently than this next group which simply does

not include any people in the painting. In this group the time of day does not necessarily explain why there are not any people. Hopper simply did not include

any people in the paintings. Examples include House by the Railroad, Early Sun-

day Morning, Approaching a City, East Wind over Weehawken, Light at Two

Lights, and Lighthouse at Two Lights.

; Imdemonstrating to their audience the qualities that have been extracted from Hopper's work, exclusive attention is given to some paintings while other works are not mentioned at all. Critics mention certain paintings and then only a select few of these are used to illustrate the critical principles they refer to. In the reviews them• selves the corpus is brought together in two ways. The first of these is very general, the second quite specific. When the corpus is alluded to generally, specific paintings are not cited but, instead, a general statement is made acknowledging the fact that there is a recognizable group of paintings in existence. For example, when Bryan Robertson re• viewed Goodrich's book in 1972, he included this statement concerning the corpus:

"A final qualification, but an important one. Hopper painted approximately twenty-five to thirty haunting pictures which will take their sure place in American art. These paintings could be shown in any other country, for that matter, with justifiable pride. The value of this book is in assembling a large number of paintings and drawings for reference through reproduction. "

So we learn from Robertson's account that there are twenty-five, maybe even as many as thirty paintings that can be shown anywhere in the world with justi• fiable pride. 102

He does nor go so far as to fasten down what specific paintings he is talking about, only says that they do exist and that there may be as many as thirty of them. By not naming the paintings specifically, he can leave the boundaries of the category open, making it

possible to negotiate paintings which come close to approximating the features of the

essential corpus.

On the other hand, when specific paintings from the corpus are used to demon•

strate or illustrate what the critic is talking about, they are named and spelled out in de•

tail. These are the paintings which have a set of instructions to accompany them. When

the reader/viewer sees these paintings he also has access to a written review that gives

him a set of assembly instructions for seeing the paintings in the same way that the critic

does.

Now that we have some idea of what the essential corpus is, let us take a look

at the kinds of paintings that have been left out of the corpus for one reason or another.

For occurring simultaneously with the development of the essential corpus is a method for

relegating to the sidelines any of Hopper's paintings that do not fall within the interpretive

boundaries that went to produce the original corpus. Put another way, an exclusion policy.

One should remember in looking at this group of paintings that it is a residual category

having no distinctive or coherent set of features. Furthermore, the status of this category

may be subject to change at any time. Robertson, for instance, tells us that:

"It is interesting to know that Hopper made thirty or forty drawn studies for a particular interior with figures, and to see one or two of them as plates. But Hopper also made a large number of unexceptional paintings and many repetitive potboilers, especially in watercolor." 88 103

So Robertson gives the instructions for how to see Hopper's watercolors as being

repetitive potboilers. It is a procedural technique for sidelining a number of Hopper works

that do not incorporate the qualities that the critics regard as distinctive characteristics.

He tells us that they are unexceptional and repetitive. This interpretation is packaged

neatly, leaving the impression that Robertson wanted to convey to his audience. Through•

out the review, Hopper is again constituted so as to highlight the features that have already

been established, as well as discounting paintings that are not within that.specific interpre•

tive tradition. None of these repetitive potboilers lend themselves to the lonely, timeless,

alienated interpretation. Earlier, Robertson mentioned that there were perhaps as many as

thirty haunting pictures which will take their place in American Art. If, however, Hopper

had been characterized as one of the greatest watercolor painters in American Art, these

thirty haunting pictures would not fit that corpus. It would then be as easy to say that Hop•

per painted thirty haunting repetitive potboilers that concerned themselves with themes of

loneliness, alienation, and timelessness. I mention this for the following reason. In the mid-

seventies American Art is experiencing a renaissance. There is every likelihood that Hopper's

watercolors will all of a sudden be seen as a category unto themselves. In the light of his

current fame, these watercolors could be re-evaluated. In order for that to happen, they will

have to be evaluated using another set of interpretive procedures besides the ones that made

his oil paintings famous. The interpretive procedures .' that work effectively for the oil

paintings do not work for the watercolors. Critics would have to strike a new category,

something like "Edward Hopper's essential watercolors".

The American artist, Charles Burchfield also had a hand in relegating certain

Hopper paintings to the sidelines. Here in the following excerpt we see how he drew his 104

boundary lines:

"Of the very early work I know only through hearsay; there seems to have been some influence from the Im• pressionists in the pictures done in Paris before 1910. But as he shrugged off this spurious influence very soon, I do not feel the need of concerning myself too much with it. Likewise the story of his early career - his struggles and frustrations, his constant rejection by the Academy, his pot-boiling illustrations, etc. - has been so ably described already (see especially Edward Hopper by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Museum of Modern Art, 1933) that I will pass this by, too, and go on to the year 1913, the earliest date on any picture of Hopper's which I have seen." 89

As with Robertson, Burchfield too tells us which works were his pot-boilers.

Moreover, the influence of Impressionism is seen to be spurious, so anything painted before

1910, during his Paris period, can be excluded from the important works. There is also another feature to be taken into account. Burchfield mentions Alfred Barr's account as an• other place a reader can go to find out which work is not to be seen as essential. That is, in fact, according to Burchfield, where one can find out that Hopper's illustrations are pot• boilers.

This method of inclusion and exclusion has within it the kernel of a self-fulfilling prophesy - not just for Edward Hopper - but for the whole of art history. For one of the things that art galleries and museums have available for use is the technical skill necessary for touch- up work and restoration. Instead of the Pieta being scrapped as junk marble after it was worked over with a sledge hammer, the technicians went to work on it and restored it to it's 'original' state. The same was true for Picasso's Guernica:

A thick coat of varnish on Pablo Picasso's monumental "Guernica" saved it from permanent damage when a man sprayed foot-high letters in New York's museum of Modern Art officials say. 105

The 25-by-l 1-foot painting was quickly restored Thursday by museum conservators using a solvent.

The same holds true for Hopper's work. Although as yet no one has defaced a

Hopper painting, those same conservator methods would be available if they did. The ones within the essential corpus are the ones given the most pampering and attention. They are the ones that command the highest price at a gallery auction and enhance a gallery's repu• tation for having such a work within their collection.

If these paintings begin to soil, lose their lustre, or generally deteriorate, it is this group of paintings that are likely to be given first attention. Over the years, other

paintings that do not embody the features that the critics have based their reviews on are

conveniently forgotten or characterized as minor paintings and are sold to galleries that are off the main road of the gallery scene. As in baseball or hockey, art too has its major and minor leagues that are well known to the players and fans. That is another issue, however, and one that does not directly concern us here. For the purpose of this discussion let us see what kinds of paintings have been left out of the essential corpus and try to put our finger on why they have been left out.

I have selected the following paintings as being part of a "shadow corpus", paint• ings that on the one hand do not have the content necessary to lend themselves to the current interpretation of Hopper's work, or, on the other hand, are a group of paintings where the interpretations of the critics, if analyzed, do not work effectively:

(1) Jo in Wyoming (1946). This particular watercolor does not fit the corpus because

there is absolutely no ambiguity in it. It is a painting of his wife Jo. She is sitting in a car with the door open, and she is looking out the door and sketching some mountain scenery which can also be seen.

Corner Saloon (1913). This painting does not fit because there are too many people in the painting. It is an active street scene. The closest it can be seen to fitting the corpus is by saying that here Hopper was beginning to develop his painting technique as in the following. We pick up Burchfield's account where we left off above:

"This is his Corner Saloon (p. 16). Already in it are evi• dent, however haltingly stated, the qualities which, while they have developed and grown richer through the years, are the main characteristics of his work today. From that time on there have been no detours or digressions, the march toward his goal has been uncompromisingly sure and straight." ^1

Le Quai des Granda Augustina (1909). This painting shows too much of a French Im• pressionist influence. (No, I'm not taking my instruction from Burchfield. That was my opinion before I saw what he had written). The Stylistic characteristics are not ones that lend themselves to the current interpretation of his work. There is a nice use of color in this painting and I regard it as cheerful. I happen to be quite fond of this particular work, incidentally.

Les Deux Pigeons (etching, 1920). This etching shows a woman sitting on a man's lap and the two of them are kissing. In the background a French waiter is looking on and smiling. Lloyd Goodrich described this etching as one showing "a surprising tender

... M 92 sensuality .

The paintings Girlie Show (1941) and Bridle Path (1939) can only be accorded a second• ary classification as far as the essential corpus goes. Within a narrative frame, both 107

their messages are too clear cut. In each case there is a clear narrative statement and one can begin to tell a story about what is going on in both paintings without the least hesitation. In Girlie Show, for example, a stripper has just come on to the stage to begin her act. The audience is watching her perform. In Bridle Path three equestrians are riding their horses along a bridle path and are about to enter a tunnel. 1 say these two paintings can only be accorded a secondary status because some of the features of ambiguity do exist. In Girlie Show there is one male figure who is not looking at the stage. It is not totally clear whether he is a musician of some sort playing the stripper's theme song, or if he is a member of the audience who is getting up to leave. The same is true for Bridle Path. One of the horses is beginning to rear its head as if it did not want to go into the tunnel. In this case there is some problem'in deciding just what, exactly, will happen next. 108

Conclusion

Ir should be clear by now that Edward Hopper was assigned a certain status by the critics and reviewers. Once the construction of the interpretation of his work was comp• leted and the critics had built up the tradition surrounding his paintings, Hopper's private usage of common scenes became recognized as the description of alienation, timelessness and loneliness. By painting a train station at dawn instead of during commuter rush hour, or by painting a street scene early in the morning before normal business hours, Hopper is said to have captured the spirit of loneliness and isolation that is part of the American ex• perience. Hopper's specific ideas and feelings are made public and understandable under this interpretation. He is then lauded for his ability to do sociological extrapolation; to describe the society's ills, or for his ability to put his finger on one of the current prob• lems in American life.

It is also worth remembering that in the process of cultural mediation, the inter• pretation of visual vocabularies is an on-going process. In Hopper's case, the critics have spent the last forty years working on and developing their interpretive descriptions of his work. Our definition of Hopper is based on consequences of a process that has been in the works for forty years. In working on and developing this interpretation, the critics have produced another recognizable genre form, one that can now be used to fit other artists into, as indeed they have in the case of comparisons between Hopper and Wyeth.

What is more, critics of Hopper have been slow and even shy in abandoning present narrative forms and plots, or narrative styles in their criticism of his work. The genre concept is too important to the maintenance of art history to be abandoned outright. 109

Although there are assurances on the part of critics that considering an artist's work in relation to arbitrary categories is now an outmoded and dogmatic theory of art, I do not have to believe it simply because someone says it is so.

Hopper's themes,, private symbols and private visual vocabularies were first fitted into an already existing category rather than examined and understood as an individual entity.

An entry point in art history was found for Hopper, a traditional way of comprehending ex• perience was first selected for use in interpreting his work, and the interpretive procedures first applied to his work fit him into this previously designed mold.

In the early thirties all this began to change. The critics started using another set of interpretive procedures to understand what was going on in Hopper's paintings. The paintings were presenting themselves as they always had but the viewer's judgment concerning them was different. The critics began to develop and disseminate a new and varient interpre• tive procedure. They began to persuade the senses of reader/viewers. They began to show people how to look at his paintings in a new way, they taught people how to recognize them, they assigned new values to them so that certain elements in his paintings were sustained over time, thus maintaining the impression of consecutive articulation.

It has been shown in Hopper's case that alternative interpretations were available if one bothered to look for them. If art criticism was concerned primarily with providing the viewer with ways of acquiring an appreciation of a work of art, then it is conceivable to imagine one or more critics using a technique whereby a series of interpretive instructions would be made available for viewing. Dali's "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach" comes to mind. The face and fruit dish are quickly discernible but there is a dog in the pic• ture as well. The dog is hidden within the structure of the painting itself and it takes some 110

time before one can find it. However, once you are made aware of it it is easy to see the face, the dish, and the dog as well. By simply being provided with another set of viewing instruc• tions, a reader/viewer can obtain a totally different interpretation of a painting that can act as a means of further extending his viewing appreciation of a work of art.

Although this is possible to do, it was not done in Hopper's case. The interpretive tradition that .surrounds Hopper has built into its structure a tacit set of viewing procedures which the tradition is based on. Consequently the interpretation is always presented as if it were a concrete fact about the painting itself. The facts are there on the surface of the paintings and all the critic is doing is going about and gathering them up for us. By assigning values to the paintings and organizing them for description the critic is doing more than simply evaluating. He is instructing and teaching people how to look at artistic work. He is show• ing them how to look at the paintings so that they too will see what he says is there. The

critics review gives the proper context; the correct formula for interpretation that fastens and secures specific sets of meaning to the elements in the painting. Reviews direct our attention

to certain aspects of a painting and, as a result, away from others. It is the practice of

selecting what seems best from various sets of meanings. But the results of such a method of

interpretation go much further than this. It is the beginning of a process of mediation through

which a tradition is delineated. Whether we know it or not, the critic's review is a method

we have learned for judging a painting's merit and correctness.

Critics would agree, I think, when I say that their inferences are controlled by

rules outside themselves. However, they would say that their interpretations are governed

wholly by what the artist has produced and by what lies on the canvas waiting to be interpreted.

This is the point where the critics and I would part company. Their dialectic is governed by

the institutions they work in and the market economy that gave them birth. From the in

standpoint of the critic, "facts" are communicated, but little attention is devoted to the expla• nation of the socially organized historical process that went into the production of the interpre• tation in the first place. Since this process is not seen as being part of their enterprise, it is never discussed as an issue.

In the course of this paper I have brought you along the path of my making. We have looked at certain things together,' but it was always me pointing out the objects of in• terest. For the sake of making an air-tight case, it would have been better for me not to have shown you certain things. I could have created diversions at crucial points, and you would never have been the wiser. But in trying to write about Edward Hopper truly, it was impossible to ignore the loose ends, or the pieces that did not fit.

There are parts of this thesis that I feel more comfortable with than others. I think

I have accurately described Hopper's painting technique. If you have learned something about it from reading this, then I will know that part of the job I set out to do has been accomplished.

On the other hand, I am not satisfied with what I told you about alienation. A complete dis• cussion of that dimension of Hopper's work must wait until I have worked out some problems that I am still having trouble with.

To me the concept of alienation is still elusive. I wanted to write about the prob• lem and then give these written ideas to you, but I know you have not had the same experiences

I have had. In bringing my ideas to you something was lost along the way. I have a picture of a writer scooping up a handful of ideas and then carrying them to a reader who is far off. In the process of carrying those ideas many of them drop out along the way or, to use a liquid analogy, leak through his fingers. By the time the idea arrives, there is not much left to really appreciate.

Here I will say one final thing that seems to be true and then I will have to stop.

We will have come along my path as far as it now goes.

When Edward Hopper painted, he was painting some feeling that he had toward an existing scene. He saw it through his own eyes and then communicated it to us through the medium of painting. What he saw - the aspects of reality he selected for us to view - have been called something else by other people. What Hopper would say about all this I

have no idea. He seemed to delight in not saying anything at all. He seemed to prefer to

let others tell him what they saw in his work. I will never know if he would have agreed with what I have said about his work, but I would like to think I have done him justice and

that he would have been interested in what I had to say about him. 113

Epilogue: Mrs. R. G. Williams. Docent.

I had been working on this study for nearly two years before I actually saw an original Hopper painting in a gallery setting. I was familiar with his work and what had been written about it. I had seen most of the major paintings that were regarded as

part of the essential corpus of Hopper's work. But my viewing of his work had always been somewhat disappointing since it had been restricted to magazines and books where some• times his paintings were poorly reproduced. These reproductions differed greatly in terms of color and brightness and I felt that I had no real sense of the colors he had actually used or how he utilized his skills with the brush. It had not particularly mattered for what I

intended to include in the thesis but, after spending as much time as I had working on him,

I thought it would at least be nice to see some of the man's work close up.

Hopper was being rediscovered in the early 1970's, at just about the same time

I was starting work on this thesis in earnest. When Mrs. Hopper died in 1968, she had be• queathed a large number of unknown paintings, sketches, and drawings to the Whitney Museum in New York. The Hopper bequest had made a noteworthy splash in art circles and after showing in New York, major portions of the exhibit began circulating around the United

States as a king of travelling exhibit. When I learned that there was to be a showing of the bequest in Seattle, I decided that the opportunity was one that I could not pass up and that

it would be worth my while to go and see some of his paintings.

The guided tour connected with the painting exhibit proved to be the most

interesting feature of the afternoon spent in the gallery. I had been on guided tours be• fore but never on one where I was so completely familiar with the artist's work beforehand. 114

I was interested to see how the tour was going to be handled and just exactly what was going to be said about Hopper.

The time for the tour to begin was 2:00 o'clock and as the time neared a well- dressed woman came into the gallery, spoke a few words to the woman selling tickets, and then took up her place near the location where we had all been told to wait for the tour to begin. This woman, who I will call Mrs. R. G. Williams, had a name plaque pinned on her suit that said in plain gold lettering, "Mrs.. R. G. Williams, Docent". This was my first encounter with a docent, and as the afternoon unfolded, it proved to be a most instructive one.

Keep in mind thot most of the preliminary work had already been done on this thesis by the time I first saw this exhibit. For the most part it had been done away from human contact. Except for the one or two letters I had written, most of the research had been done on something that had already been collected for me by the libraries. All I had been doing was reshuffling and rearranging material in another sequence in order to give it intentional unity for a sociological interpretation.

Looking back on it now I cannot remember exactly what it was that I was expect• ing to see or hear that day, but I certainly was not prepared for what I got. Having done considerable research on Hopper already, I felt fairly up-to-date on him in terms of back• ground information. As Mrs. Williams began the tour, I was surprised at how familiar her information sounded to me. I had already read the material she was drawing on for her pre• pared talk. At first I felt cheated. Since I already knew all this, I felt that it was the museum's responsibility to provide me with more than this mere sketch. Mrs. Williams 115

would lead us to a particular painting and then begin speaking about Hopper's use of time, the way the loneliness stood out in his work and how the theme of alienation ran through all the works displayed there in the gallery. To me it was like hearing someone talk about a book or film that you have read or seen yourself, and are quite familiar with.

It was clear to me that both Mrs. Williams and I had read the same material. Our know• ledge of Hopper was based on the same documentation; derived from identical sources - namely, reviews that had been written about him earlier on in his career. I began to see that Mrs. Williams' interpretation of Hopper and mine had already been provided for us by the critics' pre-selected themes and categories. By listening to her talk about the paint• ings, I could plainly see that she was reporting what, was currently being said about him by the art world in general. There was nothing new in what she said; I listened for it. I listened carefully for it. I wanted it. I wanted the puzzle not to fit for a change.

After the tour was over I followed up my hunches by asking Mrs. Williams where she had collected the material for her talk. She told me that when the bequest came to

Seattle she had been asked if she would like to act as tour guide for the exhibit. After she had accepted, she began reading up on Hopper in the library, and talking with several people at the museum about him. From what she told me I gathered that the director of the Seattle

Art Museum had been quite helpful in assisting her to run down sources and finding back• ground material.

What I think is important to remember is that this episode exemplified the process that anyone interested in learning about Hopper is required to go through in order to familiar• ize themselves with his work. They must approach the study of Hopper much as I have done. 116

For Mrs. Williams, her role was to communicate a previously recorded message to a group of people in a gallery setting. Her job was to reduce a whole tradition, boil it down and prepare a short talk suitable for a guided tour - a thumbnail sketch of the current Hopper interpretation. In order for her to do that she had to go over the same ground that I had covered; read the same books, look up the same magazine articles, become aware of which critical accounts provided the "best" discussion of his work.

That I felt cheated about the information she was giving that day tells more about me than it does about Mrs. Williams. What was I expecting anyway? Surely the notion of tradition and institutionalized information, the two ideas that I had been trying to work with, implied roles such as Mrs. Williams'. Why had I been so ill-prepared for it when I ran into it? Her job was merely to transmit a body of knowledge and interpretive practices which are already established and legitimated. She was simply passing on the properly authorized version of Edward Hopper. If she had introduced new information I probably would have made an ass of myself by telling her she was wrong. Certainly the critics would have immediately discredited it as sheer nonsense. It would be illegitmate information be• cause the critics would have volumes of documentation to show otherwise. For what she was djoing, Mrs. Williams was required to learn what had been said about Hopper already, by people in authority - people whose business it is to know such things. It is these experts who design and legitimate the interpretations of Hopper's work. It will be up to them to change it. That Mrs. Williams was passing along information without interposing herself and her ideas into the process is part of the social accomplishment of an artistic tradition. 117

Appendix A

I

"My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature. If this end is attainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely dec• orative conception of painting. One must perhaps qualify this statement and say that seemingly opposite tendencies each contain some modicum of the other.

I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and imp/essive form possible to me. The technical obstacles of painting per• haps dictate this form. It derives also from the limitations of personality. Of such may be the simplifications that I have attempted.

I find in working, always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, (italics mine) and the inevitable oblitera- tion and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. The struggle to prevent this decay is, I think, the common lot of all painters to whom the invention of arbitrary forms has lesser interest.

I believe that the great painters, with their intellect as master, have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.

II

The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable<> In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people. French art seems to prove this.

The Romans were not an aesthetically sensitive people, nor did Greece's intellectual domination over them destroy their racial character, but who is to say that they might not have produced a more original and vital art without the domination. One might draw a not too far-fetched parallel between France and our land. The domination of France in the plastic arts has been almost complete for the last thirty years or more in the country. "If an apprenticeship to a master has been necessary, I think we have served it. Any further relation of such a character can only mean humiliation to us. After all we are not French and never can be and any attempt to be so, is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface o

In its most limited sense, modern art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period. In its larger and to me irrevocable sense it is the art of all time; of definite personalities that remain forever modern by the fundamental truth that is in them. It makes Moliere at his greatest as new as Ibsen, or Giotto as modern as Cezanne.

Just what technical discoveries can do to assist interpretive power is not clear. It is true that the Impressionists perhaps gave a more faith• ful representation of nature through their discoveries in out-of-door painting, but that they increased their stature as artists do by so doing is controversial. It might here be noted that Thomas Eakins in the nineteenth century used the methods of the seventeenth, and is one of the few painters of the last generation to be accepted by contemporary thought in this country.

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression. There may come or perhaps has come a time when no further progress in truthful representation is possible. There are those who say that such a point has been reached and attempt to substitute a more and more simplified and decorative calligraphy. This direction is sterile and without hope to those who wish to give painting a richer and more human meaning and a wider scope.

No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylized design. There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature, and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions." 119 Appendix B SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION A IDT1 JL X WASHINGTON CENTER FA-PG BUILDING, 8th & F STREETS, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20560 (202) 381-6174

February 19, 1971

Mr. James B. Bledsoe Department of Anthropology and Sociology University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

Dear Mr. Bledsoe, The Archives of American Art has a few Hopper letters, most of them quite routine. I enclose a copy of our Journal which includes a short piece based on some of our material. But it is true that Hopper papers are scarce. The leading authority is Lloyd Goodrich, who has gathered a large, amount of information on Hopper's work. I believe he plans to publish a book and is accordingly reluctant to share his documentary information. Still, you might write to him in care of the Whitney Museum in New York. Both that institution and the Museum of Modern Art have produced excellent Hopper exhibition catalogues. The Whitney Museum is also the heir to the Hopper estate. As for the Archives, the Journal will give you some idea of our resources. If you could persuade the University of British Golumbia library to become a member, it would receive all back issues and, this summer, a fairly complete guide to our collections. This year we hope to open a branch office on the west coast, probably in San Francisco, which will have a duplicate set of the microfilm containing most of our collections.

Sincerely,

/ Garnet t' McCoy Deputy Director-Archivist^

GM:lw

TRUSTEES Russell l.yncs President Henry deK Baldwin Robert I.. McNeil, Jr. Chapin Riley Laurence A. Flcisrhmau >ward W. I.ipman Vice President Edmond duPont Abraham Mclamed Girard I,. Spencer Mrs. Edsel 11.Void Harold O. I.ovc Vice President Joseph M. Mirshhorn Henry Pearlman Edward M. M. Warburg is. Otto I.. Spaeth Vice President James IIii(ophry III Mrs. Dana M. Raymond James H. Wineman DIRECTOR nforcl C. Stoddard Treasurer Miss Milka IconomofT Mrs. William I,. Richards Willis F. Woods William E. Woolfcndcn Irving Burton Secretary Eric I.arrabee E. P. Richardson 120

Notes

Chapter I: The Problem Formulated and Put in Perspective

1. See, for example, The Modern Artist's Associability: Constructing A Situated Moral Revolution by Ronald J. Silvers in Deviance and Respectability: The Social Construc- tion of Moral Meanings, Jack Douglas, Editor, Basic Books.

2. The'class turned into a kind of experimental teaching laboratory, a student/teacher workshop for the development of alternative methods in the teaching of sociology generally - sociology of art in particular. See Letting Go in the Classroom, by Ronald J. Silvers, which was presented at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Associa• tion meetings in St. John's, Newfoundland, June, 1971.

3. James Thrall Soby and Dorothy C. Miller, Romantic Painting in America, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1943, p. 39 fn.

4. See'The Timeless Space of Edward Hopper" by Jean Gillies in Art Journal, Summer, 1972, Vol. XXXI, number 4., pp 404-412. It is, to my knowledge, the most recent and best explication of the Hopper/Critic phenomenon. It is a departure from the standardized interpretation of his work. Gillies, however, makes two very crucial mistakes in her arbitrary starting conditions. One is that she takes the critics at their word and never bothers to examine the buildup of the interpretive tradition that sur• rounds Hopper. Secondly, she used the corpus of paintings that the critics have selected as being the "essential Edward Hopper"; the corpus that best lends itself to the interpretation that the critics have given. Gil Ties can demonstrate her theory be• cause in the paintings she analyzes those interpretations work effectively. It would be interesting to see her try to apply her theory to Hopper's paintings which have not been included in the essential corpus for one reason or another.

5. E. H. Gombrich, "The Cartoonist's Armoury" in Meditations On A Hobby Horse, Phaidon Press, London, p. 28.

6. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, p. 348

7. There are parallel properties that do exist between language, on the one hand, and the visual vocabularies of art on the other. In this study I have been careful to say that they are only analogous since a full development of their parallel properties would be an extremely complicated subject and goes well beyond the scope of this project.

8. Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art. George Braziller, Inc., New York, 1971. p. 66

9. Victor Barnow. Culture and Personality. Homewood, Illinois, The Dorsey Press, Inc. 1963. pp 260-261. 121

Chapter II - The Initial Problem of Categorization

10. The concept of "genre" should not be confused with "genre painting". It can become confusing because of the fact that a particular sub-class (genre painting) and a general classification procedure (genre) have the same name. Genre painting can describe the epic or great ode, convey a yarn or tale, or simply illustrate an incident. Artists like Frederick Remington or Charles Russell who painted scenes from the 'old west' would certainly be included within the boundaries of the term 'genre painters'. What is more, despite the limiting constraints imposed by the definition given above, there seems to be enough difference of opinion as to what a genre painting actually is for me to include religious paintings within the boundary as well. Tintoretto's "Christ on the Sea of Galilee" or William Blake's interpretation of the Book of Job would be considered - if not outright genre painting - as paintings that fell within a religious genre.

11. Burnham, op. cit., p. 39.

12. Ibid. p. 36.

13. Gerald Jones, "Onward and Upward with The Arts (Science Fiction)", The New Yorker. July 29, 1972. p. 34.

14. Dorothy E. Smith, "K is Mentally III: The Anatomy of a Factual Account" in M. Atkinson and R. Watson (eds.) Ethnographies. (Martin Robertson Ltd. London, forthcoming, Fall, 1974).

15. Burnham, op. cit., p. 40

16. Milton W. Brown. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton, N.J., 1955. pp. 173-176, 180, 181.

17. Brian O'Doherty. Object and Idea, 1967. "Edward Hopper", pp. 43, 44.

18. Lloyd Goodrich. Whitney Museum of American Art: Edward Hopper Retrospective Exhibition, 1950.

19. Art In America. September/October, 1967. Vol. 55. Number 5. "Sao Paulo: Homage to Hopper", p. 84.

20. Jack Smith, "Alone in An Automat". Seattle Times, Saturday, April 8, 1972.

21. Forbes Watson, "A Note on Edward Hopper". Vanity Fair, Vol. 31. (February, 1929). pp. 64, 98, 107.

22. Garnett McCoy. "Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper: Some Documentary Notes", Archives of American Art, Vol. 7. Numbers 3 and 4. July - October, 1967. p. 13. 23. Ibid. p. 12.

24. Ibid. p. 15.

25. Suzanne Burrey,"Edward Hopper: The Emptying Spaces" Art Digest. Vol. 29. April 1, 1955. p. 10.

26. Brian O'Doherty. "Portrait: Edward Hopper". Art in America. Vol.52, December, 1967. p. 80. O'Doherty article, incidentally, is one of the best reviews that I came across in my research. It is an in-depth interview and took place - off and on - over a period of several years.

27. Ibid. p. 72.

28. Parker Tyler. "The Loneliness of the Crowd and the Loneliness of the Universe: An Antiphonal". Art News Annual. Vol. 26. 1957. pp. 86-107.

Chapter III - The Construction and Establishment of the Interpretive Tradition.

29. John O'Dwyer and Raymond Le Maze. Glossary of Modern Art. New York; Philosophical Library, p. 81.

30. Herbert Reid (ed.), The Thames and Hudson Encyclopedia of the Arts. London: Thames and Hudson, 1966. p. 657.

31. Raymond Lister. Victorian Narrative Paintings. London, Museum Ftess Limited. 1966. p. 90.

32. Lister, Ibid. pp. 62-71.

33. James Bledsoe. Edward Hopper, p. 15. An unpublished paper.

34. Thomas H. Linewearer III and Richard H. Backus. The Natural History of Sharks. The Trinity Press, Worcester and London. 1970. p. 31.

35. Rudolf Arnheim. Art and Visual Perception: a* psychology of the creative eye. University of California Press. Berkeley. 1954.

36. Maurice Natanson. "The Fabric of Expression", p. 505. The Review of Metaphysics. Vol. XXI. No. 3, March, 1968. Issue #83. pp. 491-505^

37. Dorothy Smith. Op. cit. p. 1.

38. Sheldon Twer. "Persons'Structures for Making Sense Out of Behavioral Episodes: Examinations of Persons' Descriptions of Behavioral Episodes." Irvine School of Social Science. 1969. p. 41. (Mimeographed). 123

39. Ibid., p. 41.

40. Harold Gaily. Nature is Your Guide. London: Collins. 1956. p. 23.

41. Tom Wolfe. The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. New York, Farrar, Straus, and Groux. 1965. p. 83.

42. "By Transcription". Time. Vol. 55, February 20, 1950. p. 60.

43. Ibid., p. 60.

44. Romantic Painting in America, op. cit. p. 39 fn.

45. Jerzy Pelc. "On the Concept of Narration". Semiotica, Vol. Ill, No. 1. 1971.. p. 6.

46. Lewis Mumford. "Two Americans". The New Yorker. Vol. 34. November 11, 1933. pp. 60-61.

47. Horace Gregory. "A Note on Hopper". The New Republic. Vol.77. December 13, 1933. p. 132.

48. Gregory. Ibid. p. 132.

49. Gregory. Ibid. p. 132.

50. Douglas Denniston. University of Arizona, Tucson. A Retrospective Exhibition of Oils and Watercolors by Edward Hopper. 1963. p.

51. Smith, op. cit.

53. Lloyd Goodrich. Edward Hopper Retrospective Exhibition. New York. Whitney Museum of American Art. 1950. p. 8.

53. Frank Getlein. "American Light: Edward Hopper". The New Republic. Vol. 152. January 9, 1965. p. 28.

54. Parker Tyler: "Edward Hopper: Alienation by Light". Magazine of Art. Vol. 41. December, 1948. pp. 292-293.

55. Tyler. Ibid. p. 293.

56. O'Doherty. op. cit. p. 78.

57. Lloyd Goodrich. Edward Hopper. New York. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1971. p. 151.

58. A. T. Baker. "Light and Loneliness." Time. Vol. 98. September 27, 1971. p. 38.

59. O'Doherty. Op. cit. p. 79. 124

Chapter IV - Edward Hopper's Own Contribution

60. O'Doherty. op. cit. p. 78.

61. William Seitz. "Edward Hopper: Realist, Classicist, Existentialist". Sao Paulo 9: United States of America: Edward Hopper: Environment U.S.A., 1957-1967. Washington, D.C. p. 27.

62. Parker Tyler. Op. cit. p. 292.

63. Parker Tyler, op. cit. p. 292.

64. Lawrence Campbell. "Edward Hopper, and the Melancholy of Robinson Crusoe". Art News. Vol. 70. No. 6. October, 1971. p. 37.

65. Campbell. Ibid. p. 39.

66. Lloyd Goodrich. Ibid. p. 154.

67. Margaret Breuning. "The Whitney Hails Edward Hopper". The Art Digest. Vol. 24. February 15, 1950. p. 10.

68. Lawrence Cam pbel I. "Hopper: Painter of'thou shalt not'". Art News. Vol.63. No. 6. October, 1964. pp. 44-45.

69. James Thrall Soby. "Arrested Time by Edward Hopper". Saturday Review. Vol. 33. March 4. 1950. p. ,42.

70. Mark Strand. "Crossing the Tracks to Hopper's World". The New York Times. October 17, 1971. p. 26.

71. John Casy. "Testimony and Demeanor". The New Yorker. June 19, 1971. p. 42.

72. Rafael Squirrie. "Edward Hopper". Americas. Vol. 17. May, 1965. p. 15.

Chapter V - "Champions are Made Not Born"

73. A. T. Baker. Time, op. cit. p. 154.

74. Lloyd Goodrich, op. cit. p. 154.

75. James R. Mellow. "The World of Edward Hopper". The New York Times Magazine (cover story). September 5, 1971. p. 18.

76. Bryan Robertson. "Hopper's Theater". The New York Review of Books. Vol XVII, No. 10. p. 39. 125

77. John Dewey. Art as Experience, p. 316.

78. John Morse. "Edward Hopper: An Interview". Art in America. Vol. 48. April, 1960. p. 62-63.

79. Garnet McCoy. Archives of American Art, op. cit. p. 15.

80. Marshall B. Davidson. American Heritage History of the Artist's America. New York, American Heritage Publishing Company, Inc. 1973. p. 314.

81. Lloyd Goodrich. Edward Hopper, op. cit. p. 149.

82. Lawrence Campbell, op. cit. p. 78.

83. O'Doherty. op. cit. p. 72.

84. O'Doherty. op. cit. p. 72.

85. Mellow, op. cit. pp. 15-16.

Chapter VI - Locating the Assembly Instructions.

86. Frank Getlein. op. cit. p. 27.

87. Robertson, op. cit. p. 40.

88. Robertson. Ibid. p. 40.

89. Charles Burchfield. "Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry". Art News. Vol.49. March, 1950. p. 15.

90. Vancouver Sun. March 1, 1974. p. 3.

91. Burchfield. op. cit. p. 15.

92. Goodrich. Edward Hopper, op. cit. p. 35. 126

Bibliography

Books

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: a psychology of the creative eye. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1954.

Atkinson, M., and R. Watson (eds.) Ethnographies . (Martin Robertson Ltd. London. Forthcoming, Fall, 1974).

Barnow, Victor. Culture and Personality. Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, Inc. 1963.

Brown, Milton W. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton, New Jersey. 1955.

Burnham, Jack. The Structure of Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1971.

Davidson, Marshall B. American Heritage History of the Artist's America. New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, Inc. 1973.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: 1939.

Douglas, Jack, (ed.) Deviance and Respectability: The Social Construction of Moral Meanings. New York: Basic Books.

Gatty, Harold. Nature is Your Guide. London: Collins. 1956.

Gombrich, E. H. Meditations On a Hobby Horse. London: Phaidon Fress. 1968.

Goodrich, Lloyd. Edward Hopper. (The Penguine Modern Painters), Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. 1950.

. Edward Hopper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1971.

Lineweaver, Thomas H. and Richard H. Backus. The Natural History of Sharks. Worcester and London: The Trinity Press. 1970.

Lister, Raymond. Victorian Narrative Paintings. London: Museum Press Limited. 1966.

O'Doherty, Brian. Object and Idea. 1967.

O'Dwyer, John and Raymond Le Maze. Glossary of Modern Art. New York: Philosophical Library.

Reid, Herbert. The Thames and Hudson Encyclopedia of the Arts. London: Thames and Hudson. 1966.

Schutz, Alfred. Collected Papers of Alfred Schutz Vol. 1. The Hague. 127

Shepard, Paul. Man in the Landscape. New York; Alfred A. Knopf. 1967.

Soby, James Thrall, and Dorothy C. Miller. Romantic Painting in America. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. 1973.

Twer, Sheldon. Examinations of Persons' Descriptions of Behavioral Episodes. Irvine: School of Social Science. 1969.

Wolfe, Tom. The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Groux. 1965.

Exhibition Catalogs

A Retrospective Exhibition of Oils and Watercolors by Edward Hopper, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. 1963. Text by Douglas Denniston.

Edward Hopper Retrospective Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 1933. Articles by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper.

Edward Hopper Retrospective Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. 1950. Text by Lloyd Goodrich.

Edward Hopper: Selections From The Hopper Bequest To The Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: 1971. Text by Lloyd Goodrich.

Sao Paulo 9, The National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C, 1967. Text by Lloyd Goodrich and William C. Seitz.

Periodicals

Art in America, Vol. 55, ^5. "Sao Paulo: Homage to Hopper", September/October, 1967.

Baker, A. T., "Light and Loneliness". Time. Vol.98. September 27, 1971.

Breuning, Margaret, "The Whitney Hails Edward Hopper". The Art Digest. Vol. 24. February 15, 1950.

Burchfield, Charles, "Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry". Art News. Vol.49. March, 1950.

Burrey,Suzanne, "Edward Hopper: The Emptying Spaces". Art Digest. Vol. 29. April 1, 1955.

Campbell, Lawrence, "Hopper: Painter of 'thou shalt not'". Art News. Vol. 63, ^6. October, 1964.

, "Edward Hopper, and the Melancholy of Robinson Crusoe". Art News. Vol. 70, *6. October, 1971. 128

Casy, John, "Testimony and Demeanor". The New Yorker. June 19, 1971.

Getlein, Frank, "American Light: Edward Hopper". The New Republic. Vol. 152. January 9, 1965.

Gillies, Jean, "The Timeless Space of Edward Hopper". Art Journal. Vol XXXI, ^4. Summer 1972.

Gregory, Horace, "A Note On Hopper". The New Republic. Vol. 77. December 13, 1933.

Jones, Gerald, "Onward and Upward With The Arts (Science Fiction)". The New Yorker. July 29, 1972.

Mellow, James R., "The World of Edward Hopper". The New York Times Magazine. September 5, 1971.

Morse, John, "Edward Hopper: An Interview". Art In America. Vol.48. April, 1960.

Mumford, Lewis. "Two Americans". The New Yorker. Vol. 34, November 11, 1933.

Natanson, Maurice, "The Fabric of Expression". The Review of Metaphysics. Vol. XXI. No. 3. March 1968. "

O'Doherty, Brian, "Portrait: Edward Hopper". Art in America. Vol. 52. December, 1964.

, "The Hopper Bequest at the Whitney". Art in America. Vol. 59. September/October, 1971.

Pelc, Jerzy, "On the Concept of Narration". Semiotica, Vol. Ill, 1971.

Robertson, Bryan, "Hopper's Theater". The New York Review of Books. Vol. XVII, ^10.

Smith, Jack, "Alone in an Automat". Seattle Times. Saturday, April 8, 1972.

Soby, James Thrall, "Arrested Time by Edward Hopper". Saturday Review. Vol. 33. March 4, 1950.

. Squirrie, Rafael, "Edward Hopper". Americas. Vol. 17, May, 1965.

Strand, Mark, "Crossing the Tracks to Hopper's World". The New York Times. October 17, 1971.

Time, Vol. 51, "Art: Travelling Man", pp. 59-60, January 19, 1948.

, Vol. 55, "By Transcription", p. 60. February 20, 1950.

, Vol.65, "Gold for Gold", pp. 72-73. May 30, 1955.

, Vol. 65, "The Silent Witness", pp. 28-29, December 24, 1956. Tyler, Parker, "Edward Hopper: Alienation by Light", Magazine of Art, Vol. 41, Vol. 41, pp. 290-295, December, 1948.

, "The Loneliness of the Crowd and The Loneliness of the Universe: An Antiphonal". Art News Annual. Vol. 26. pp. 86-107. 1957.

Watson, Forbes, "A Note on Edward Hopper", Vanity Fair, Vol. 31. pp. 64, 78, 107. February, 1929.

Unpublished Papers

Bledsoe, James. "Edward Hopper".

Silvers, Ronald J. "Letting Go in the Classroom." Presented at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association Meetings in St. John's, Newfoundland, June, 1971.