Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The Making of the Painting or How to Be a Stranger in Your Own Land
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. The Artist
Edward Hopper began Nighthawks in December 1941, shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. How difficult to imagine: like photographing a flower garden on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, not because a flower garden expressed certain feelings about the cataclysmic events of that morning, but because photographing flower gardens is your thing, is what you would have done anyway. While the country as a whole, pretty much overnight, committed itself to total war, "Ed," as his wife, Josephine "Jo" Hopper, recorded in her journal, "refused to take any interest in our very likely prospect of being bombed ... He's doing a new canvas and simply can't be interrupted."
Come what may, devotion to a self-imposed task evokes the archetypal American hero: Think of John Wayne in John Ford's 1956 classic western, The Searchers, striding across an arid Texas landscape for seven long years in quest of Scar, the Comanche who kidnapped and ravished his niece. He has put all else aside, cares only about doing what he knows is one absolutely right thing to do. Or think of Raymond Chandler's obstinately moral private detective, Philip Marlowe, who takes on cases with little chance of payment---he may even refuse payment because he cannot be bought, committed as he is to the interests of his client (even when that so-called client hasn't actually hired him or attempts to halt his investigation). He gets a job done and done well because it is his duty, however ridiculous he seems when everyone else is for sale because that's the best way to get by. So the fifty-nine-year-old Hopper, World War or no World War, meticulously developed a scene based on a Greenwich Avenue restaurant that he spotted during one of his meandering strolls through lower Manhattan.
He had labored in obscurity for some two decades following his graduation from the New York School of Art in 1906, supporting himself by illustrating advertisements, magazine articles, and movie posters. He despised this work and refused to do it more than three days per week to save time for his more personal artistic endeavors, but received scant attention for the few group shows he participated in. He was invited to contribute to the "Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Contemporary American Artists" in 1908, along with such up-and-comers as George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. But while the other artists displayed American views, Hopper---somewhat perversely, given the exhibition's stated theme---chose to display paintings inspired by a recent sojourn in Europe (mainly Paris), where he had traveled to visit museums and round out his education. He was duly ignored by the press. Not quite unjustly: The work was too derivative of French impressionism, which he greatly admired. Perhaps he needed the failure, the ensuing isolation, to keep to his own course, mature his style, and find his artistic identity.
He made some notable breakthroughs. The massive (36;dp ;ts 72;dp near-masterpiece, Soir Bleu (1914), which portrays a voluptuous, heavily made-up prostitute surveying the customers in a Parisian café‚ through narrowed eyes. She might be a demon searching for a soul worth stealing, and presages Hopper's career-long fascination with the enticements of very shapely women. New York Corner (1913) shows a group of faceless men in black hats and overcoats milling in front of a corner saloon on a gray, wintry day, the ice blue silhouette of a factory in the distance. At once ordinary and desolate, the painting won him some early praise when exhibited in 1915.
Wider recognition did not come until 1923, when he exhibited a series of brilliant watercolors at the Brooklyn Museum, done in and around the picturesque town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. These paintings dovetailed nicely with critics' increasing interest in often idealized American settings done in a plainly realistic (i.e., not avant-garde, not European, and hold the flourishes) style. Now in his forties, Hopper suddenly achieved renown as a portrayer of the "American scene." In 1930, the Whitney Museum of American Art paid the then-impressive sum of $3,000 for Early Sunday Morning (1930). This aggressively mundane, if sunny, depiction of a block-long redbrick row building with a barber pole, fire hydrant, and a strip of pale blue sky above but no people in sight, makes for a vision so silent and still it suggests some mysterious vitality, the existence of which we are but latently aware and cannot name.
Hopper's reputation grew. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art hosted his first retrospective. But recognition, even on this scale, did not compromise what critic Lloyd Goodrich called Hopper's "unwavering integrity" and "consistency," his almost defiant sense of himself as cleaving to a singular vocation, however propitious (or not) the trends might be. He would not give in to the art market any more than he gave in to the market for commercial illustration, which he would never again resort to. He continued to work slowly, completing only a few oils per year, always waiting until he was certain he had a fresh idea and would not be repeating himself. And he continued to spend a long time on each canvas, thinking a project through thoroughly before stubbornly painting and repainting, until he got precisely the intended effect (he liked working in oil, he said, because it facilitated "corrections and changes"). As the Great Depression continued, sales dropped off, and he faced financial strain, Hopper seemed to become even more selective, more afraid of simply coasting, of having nothing left to say.
When Hopper did get going again, it was 1940, the war in Europe took up much of the public's attention---Germany conquered France in June of that year---but he was entering arguably the most powerful phase of his career. Six weeks after Pearl Harbor, he completed what critics often point to as his most accomplished painting, one the artist himself counted as a favorite. Nighthawks, unlike many twentieth-century masterpieces, has won admiration from those who champion the often inaccessible experiments that make up much of modern art as well as those that do not. This is in many respects a deeply cold and alien work, despite its immediately recognizable subject matter: a nameless, nondescript diner late at night.
Copyright © 2006 by Gordon Theisen
