Anything but Still Lives:
The Worlds of Edward Hopper
a collection of painterly prose
by
Anne Gambling
Copyright 2006 Anne Gambling
https://www.nestedfishes.org
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Contents
Introducing Mr Hopper
Lady Luck Blues
The White Light of Nothing
Laughing at Clouds
A Dime Spared
One Day, the Singing Bird
Perfectly Fine
Season’s Shift
Rosie the Riveter
The Canvas of Innocence
References and Citations
Introducing Mr Hopper
American realist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was principally a painter of landscapes and cityscapes. Through iconic and oft-reproduced works such as Nighthawks (1942), Hopper gained widespread recognition as the artist who gave visual form to the anonymity, isolation and (perhaps) boredom, loneliness and stagnation of twentieth century American life.
This was something new in art, to reflect the sense of human hopelessness which began during the Great Depression, yet continued as an overarching leitmotiv until his death. Throughout, however, Hopper tried to remain immune from the cultural statements his works influenced: ‘I don't think I ever tried to paint the American scene,’ he said in a 1956 interview. ‘I'm trying to paint myself.'
According to art academic Brian O’Doherty (2004), Hopper paintings are presented with a neutrality which invites contradictory readings. Sheena Wagstaff (2004) also describes how his work has been ‘subjected – through different levels of expertise – to feminist, Marxist, Freudian and semiological analyses, as well as cultural studies of social history, power and gender relations and film theory’.
Nevertheless Hopper himself refused to be pigeonholed. At its simplest, he described his motivation as being informed by Johann von Goethe, a quote of whose he always carried around in his wallet: ‘The beginning and the end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, moulded and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner’ (cited in Wagstaff, 2004).
Of course, Hopper saw his role as achieving this via the medium of visual art rather than through literature. Yet in reflecting the interconnectivity of all aesthetic pursuits – those informed by, and resulting in, for example, written, painted, filmed or composed forms of creativity – I have enjoyed the opportunity to spin the wheel one more time and contribute to the notion of what constitutes ‘art’ with this simple collection of painterly prose, inspired by Hopper’s paintings, and where the introduction of song lyrics into these stories represents an attempt to conjoin disparate narrative art forms into a single holistic framework.
Easy come, easy go. As Elvis Presley sang in the 1967 movie of the same name (sailor beware, take it slow …), the motifs Hopper presents are likewise transitory, yet suggestive of solidity, urging the viewer to be mindful or cautious in their ‘reading’ of a particular scene. Hopper’s images may be brief flashes, at most specious moments ‘frozen’ in time. But they sear the retina, sing the melancholy blues, last in one’s memory long after the last riff has faded.
Fusing individual narratives on the one hand with the cultural layers that produce them on the other, I have worked to tease out fictions which are as representative of historical time and place as the everyman or woman perspectives of the actors at their core. Thus guided by the America of Hopper’s palette, nine of his canvases provide the contextual, cultural and temporal backdrop to this suite of stories.
Narrative understatement
In that selfsame 1956 interview, Hopper was drawn to comment at one point that if you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. Yet the point of all creative expression is to give external voice to the inner landscape of the artist – no matter what their form of artistic endeavour – be it literary, painterly, musical, filmic or one of the myriad other truths that reside in each individual’s consciousness.
For Hopper, it had come down to this, writes O’Doherty (2004): ‘Some two-score master-images, stamped into the popular imagination. Their iconic status, to which the work offers a mild and steady resistance, is reinforced with each generation. Hopper’s images now voyage across decades, cultures and geographies, as if each were accompanied by passport and visa. (They) have become coin of the imagination, easily accessible referents that frequently project themselves on everyday experience.’
In his paintings, Hopper revealed the ‘truth’ of everyday life, confronting viewers with the interior life of ordinary people. His challenge, successfully mastered, lay in his inherent ability to convey such authenticity of vision (Wagstaff, 2004). As the artist himself described in 1933, ‘my aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature’. Such was his interpretation of the Goethe quote which accompanied him everywhere, resulting in, as Margaret Iversen (2004) holds, ‘masterpieces of narrative understatement’.
The interconnectivity between Hopper’s art and other narrative forms has also been noted by the likes of Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton (2002): ‘In 1906, at the age of 24, Hopper went to Paris and discovered the poetry of (Charles) Baudelaire, whose work he was to read and recite throughout his life. The attraction is not hard to understand: there was a shared interest in solitude, in city life, in modernity, in the solace of the night and in the places of travel.’ He describes how Hopper found his artistic ‘poetry’ in ‘ignored, often derided landscapes … sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific ‘poets’’.
Needless to say, Hopper’s paintings have inspired words and stories long before my humble collection was conceived. The Whitney Museum, for example, commissioned new fiction about Hopper for its catalogue of a 1995 retrospective, deeming the resulting anthology ‘Hopperesque’. John Updike, however, in the New York Review of Books that same year, characterized the spare prose of the volume more ‘Hemingwayesque’ with its clear intent to produce narratives honouring Hopper’s deliberate honing of expressive understatement.
According to art historian Gail Levin (2000): ‘That Hopper’s pictures have inspired fiction should not surprise us, for he and his wife were always reading, even reading fiction aloud to one another. Hopper and his wife Jo liked to name the characters in his paintings and spin fantasies about them.’ That his paintings have likewise inspired filmmakers and photographers is also no coincidence. Themes of urban alienation or existential loneliness are classic expressions of ‘Hopper film noir’, the stage-feel of his paintings, with their stark use of light and shadow, oft-repeated in films and photographs throughout the last century. What captures the imagination of writers, it seems, is the same quality film director Sam Mendes described in a 2002 interview: ‘Compositionally, Hopper constantly ensures that your imaginary eye is guided off the frame of the picture. You begin to imagine what’s on either side of the frame. In other words, what’s important is what is off-camera.’
Wollen (2004) cites filmmaker Wim Wenders’ view that Hopper paintings could be expanded into imaginary sequences as the viewer imagines a before and an after to each still scene: ‘Hopper’s tableaux thus contain a temporal
dimension which, in each viewer’s mind, could be vitalised and set in motion,’ a technique which Hopper described in 1939 as follows: ‘Carrying the main horizontal lines of the design with little interruption to the edges of the picture is to make one conscious of the spaces and elements beyond the limits of the scene itself.’
And so we are drawn to wondering, and wondering leads us into the realms of our own imagination where, as a simple matter-of-course, narratives develop beyond these ‘frozen moments’, regardless of our preferred means of creativity.
‘Silence is so accurate’
The lack of action in a Hopper painting could be likened to the pauses in a play by Harold Pinter. Spaces, silences, what is left unsaid (or in Hopper’s case, unpainted) is the action, filled with meaning, with inscrutability. As American abstractionist Mark Rothko mused on Hopper’s rendering of the American experience in 1958: ‘Silence is so accurate.’
Most Hopper commentators focus on his perceived themes of melancholy, pensive inflection, loneliness, estrangement, or impersonality. But as David Anfam (2004) describes, a ubiquitous common denominator uniting