An essay by artist Cary Smith

Edward Hopper lived through one of the richest periods of evolution and transformation in the history of visual art. He was born in Nyack New York on July 22, 1882, when French impressionism was in full swing and lived until May 15, 1967, during the pop art movement.

Hopper showed a strong interest in drawing by the age of five and was provided instructional magazines and illustrated books while in grade school. Early on he learned the importance of the examination of light and shadow, something that stayed with him throughout his career. He inherited his mother’s artistic tendencies and his father’s intellectual curiosity. His parents were encouraging, well-off, conservative, and religious.

After high school, Hopper went to the New York School of Art, where he met and studied with realist painters William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. Hopper was particularly influenced by Chase, as well as by the work of Edouard Manet and Edward Degas. Henri also had a profound impact on Hopper’s early development and is known for his advice to students: "Forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you in life.”

After art school, Hopper made three trips to check out the art scene in Europe, where he primarily focused on realist painting such as Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Of the iconic work, Hopper said: "the most wonderful thing of his I have seen; it's past belief in its reality.”

After returning from abroad, he rented a studio in New York City in 1912. He was slow to define his own work. His friend the illustrator Walter Tittle describes Hopper’s depressed emotional state: "suffering . . . from long periods of unconquerable inertia, sitting for days at a time before his easel in helpless unhappiness, unable to raise a hand to break the spell." One can only imagine what it must have been like for such a gifted, yet conservatively minded talent during the evolution of cubism and other subsequent art movements. I find this emotional conundrum to be at the core of the tension in Hopper’s work. To be so out of step with the most critically acclaimed art of your time, while having a deeply original personal vision.

In 1923 Hopper met Josephine Nivison, also one of Robert Henri's former students, whom he would marry the following year. Unlike Edward, who was tall (6’5”), introspective, shy, secretive, and conservative, Jo was short, open, liberal, gregarious, and sociable. Despite also being an artist, Jo subordinated her career to manage his career and interviews, living a reclusive life together. She became his primary model. They remained life-long partners, although their marriage was complex, and not without struggle.

Hopper's personal and professional lives were filled with contrasting realities. I see this as a possible, and partial, impetus for the profound life force of his paintings. Although he often painted seemingly banal scenes of American everyday life, the paintings are brimming with pure visual intensity that were created in a slow, determined manner; every part deeply considered. Almost no other realist painter, to my eye, has ever created so much weighty coloristic visual poetry in his work. Hopper had a kind of supernatural ability to mix and create original color harmonies. I have long thought, when standing in front of a great Hopper painting, you can feel the color viscerally in your body. Hopper, by the relatively conservative nature of his imagery can be easily overlooked. His technique is not flashy, but more plodding. He liked to fully work out his compositions before beginning to paint. In some cases he’d make as many as fifty preparatory drawings. His use of geometric underpinnings in his compositions, combined with his use of tonality and temperature to create visual rhythms, lead your eye in a workman-like, yet effortless, balanced dance around his surfaces. His use of lead white gave a luminosity to his subtle and vivid color choices, creating a poetic visual experience that, as he said about Rembrandt, is “past belief in its reality.”

This is what I personally look for in painting. Paint that transcends and becomes more real than reality itself. All paintings are just a bunch of marks. They are all abstractions first. It’s always about the quality of invention for me. Hopper was one of the best visual inventors that has ever lived. I have the experience at concerts, too, when I feel a direct transmission from the musicians into my being. I’m in the music, and the musicians are beyond playing notes.

Room in New York, 1932, in the collection of Sheldon Museum of Art is a particularly superb example of Hopper’s mature work. It is essentially an abstract masterpiece. Tightly knit, but ever so relaxed at the same time. The numerous shades of mixed greens and mixed reds, set off by the color of the back of the newspaper the man is reading and the intensity of the subtle blue of his tie. And the quiet gentleness of the reflection of the woman’s arm resting on the table and the blue light on the edge of the doily created by the shadow from the newspaper. The range of clarity of the various parts of the painting, from the loosely painted column and window and front of the building with it’s cool and warm temperatures and dark-to-light-to-dark rhythms. The relative carefulness and opacity of the figures themselves. Then back to the washy brushy gestural quality of the alizarin and blue-gray landscape above the man. The variety of ways the door is painted in different areas. The dark rectangle at the top of the door to keep the tonal rhythms alive throughout the composition. The varied slightly darker green walls to the left and right, giving a central glow behind and on the figures. The intense compact organization of shapes and colors in and around the woman at the piano, separating it from how the man is articulated. All the perfect, but hard won variety of parts, every one meaningful, everywhere you look.

I suggest listening to the clues found in Hopper’s own words about the meaning in his works. He said he was more interested in the light, shadows and forms, than in any sort of symbolism. I find this kind of honesty refreshing. When his wife Jo remarked about his painting Cape Cod Morning, a personal favorite of his, "It's a woman looking out to see if the weather's good enough to hang out her wash," Hopper retorted, "Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view, she's just looking out the window.” In an interview in which he was being somewhat critical of many of his earlier paintings, Hopper said that he still enjoyed Cape Cod Morning and that it was “nearer to my thought about things.” I believe Hopper was basically painting his own personal vision, never to be fully understood by others. This is why the truth in them rings so profoundly clear.