Lecture at City University of New York, in conjunction with the Edward Hopper Exhibition of the Whitney Museum, New York (September 1995)
In Hopper's case, the dangers are especially acute. Will any accumulation of biographical and cultural facts explicate the characteristic buildings and people that occupy Hopper's distinctive, downright eccentric, fictive world? His long life was utterly uneventful. He had little to say about his art, and what he did say was (let us be frank) not steadily enlightening. He lived for decades in New York, but he remained resolutely on the margins of the city's life. His paintings have profound affiliations with the urban scenes they represent, but the relationship is typically oblique and even enigmatic.
Familiar and at the same time elusive, Hopper's work is probably best illuminated not by scholarly monographs, but by the paintings, sculpture, photographs, stories and poems of other artists who have followed in his mysterious wake.
Having said all that, and having thus virtually disqualified myself for the assignment in advance, I want none the less to make a few suggestions about the sources and significance of Hopper's characteristic New York scenes.
To begin with, I propose what scientists call a thought experiment. Imagine yourself seeing Hopper's New York paintings for the first time -- a difficult undertaking, to be sure. Then imagine that you have been asked to deduce the facts of American urban life exclusively from those images. The project is doomed. Almost everything that actually characterizes daily life in New York is missing: the soaring skyscrapers, the crush of traffic, the crowded sidewalks, the frantic pace and twitchy rhythms, the noise.
Hopper's city scenes, on the contrary, are thinly peopled: in Hopper's world, apparently, one is company and two is a crowd. In place of New York's ethnic diversity, Hopper's men and women wear a series of uniformly white masks. (The only black face in a Hopper painting is that of a woman in Carolina.) Skyscrapers, New York's signature building style, almost never appear. Even a single car is a rare sight and traffic jams are non-existent. Finally, while it is admittedly fatuous to talk about the "silence" of any painting, in some accurate if metaphorical sense Hopper's paintings are as quiet as the tomb.
This catalog of absences could be extended. Yet the fact remains that Hopper's images, which leave out so much, at the same time manage to include an indispensable portion of urban experience. His method was subtractive, and his subtractions bristle with significance.
Henry James, a supreme connoisseur of absence, offers a useful perspective. In a little book called English Hours (1905), James recalls walking along the Norfolk coast and meditating on the vanished village of Dunwich. As he gazed on what wasn't there, James concluded: "The source of the distinction is the very visibility of the mutilation. Such at any rate is the case for a mind that can positively brood. There is a presence in what is missing -- there is history in there being so little."
I want to identify the presence in what is missing in Edward Hopper's city paintings. To do so, I need to locate Hopper inside the broad outlines of America's turn-of-the-century culture, and specifically inside the debates that attended America's growth into an urban society. My sources will be primarily literary and artistic, and my references will reach from Sherwood Anderson to Jacob Riis to Theodore Dreiser.
My initial points of reference, however, are two government documents, the United States census reports of 1890 and 1920. Even in this deconstructive, post-canonical age, most of us would probably not describe these reports as literary texts (especially those of us who have actually read them). Nevertheless, their closely-printed columns of figures do make up a kind of narrative, a story of national metamorphosis in which Americans moved away from the loosely-peopled agrarian world of the nineteenth-century and entered the crowded twentieth-century city.
Put briefly: the census of 1890 famously announced the closing of the frontier; and the almost equally-celebrated 1920 census declared that, for the first time, the majority of Americans now lived in cities. In the years between those two reports, the years that saw the rise of a new realism in literature and painting, the years of Edward Hopper's artistic and intellectual formation -- he was born, as you recall, in 1882 -- modern America took shape as an irretrievably industrial, urban culture.
The changes were felt everywhere. Writing from America's mythic heartland, in the little town of Winesburg, Ohio -- and writing, not coincidentally, in about 1920 - Sherwood Anderson said that it will be difficult "for the men and women of a later day to understand" how profound the alterations of the previous generation had been.
In the thirty years before the First World War, Anderson wrote, "a vast change [had] taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution [had] in fact taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities" -- all of this, Anderson wrote, "has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people."
The plain facts support Anderson's excited impressions, in particular the facts about what he rather mildly calls "the growth of cities." In 1890 there was just one American city, New York, with a million inhabitants; by 1910, with the addition of Philadelphia and Chicago, there were three; and a fourth (Detroit) was approaching that figure in 1920. Perhaps more significantly, the twenty-five cities of 100,000 or more in 1890 had doubled by 1910 and nearly tripled by 1920.
These demographic developments had immense cultural repercussions. Historians frequently refer to the "grand narratives" that have governed the writing of the past -- the overarching, synthesizing structures that give shape and meaning to the welter of events. For nineteenth-century Americans, that grand narrative was progress, and its image was the frontier. In 1890, when the frontier officially closed, the facts of America's history disrupted the mythic pattern in which the nation's history was conceived.
Just three years later, in a famous lecture at a meeting of the American Historical Association at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner analyzed the meaning of the newly-closed frontier. He proposed that the country's several centuries of western expansion had been the determining condition of virtually every characteristic American institution and habit, from politics and philosophy to architecture and clothing styles.
Ironically, in short, Turner offered the classic interpretation of the frontier even as he wrote the frontier's epitaph. The frontier had vanished as a geographical fact, overtaken and superseded by the fact and symbol of the city. In fiction and poetry, painting and photography, the city moved to the center of the nation's cultural concerns.
The rapidly growing cities, and their large immigrant populations, became the scene of a fierce debate, in which past and future faced each other in a contest over the definition of America.
Many Americans felt a prideful sense of national accomplishment as they contemplated the sheer size and scale of their new cities. Countless ordinary inhabitants regarded the growth of the nation's cities with enthusiasm, and some took an almost frivolous delight in the noise and pace and nightlife.
Beginning in 1896, for example, Moses King celebrated the city in his
Views of New York, an extraordinary photographic survey that
chronicled the changing streets and skylines of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
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| from Moses King, Views of New York (1896) |
King enumerated New York's preeminence in a breathless catalogue, a display of Whitmanian spretzatura, which I cannot resist quoting:
In great lofty structures, in commercial activity, in financial affairs, in international relations, in polyglotical representation, in gigantic enterprises, in notable scientific and engineering achievements, in colossal individual aggrandizements, in mammoth corporate wealth, in maritime commerce, in absolute freedom of citizens, and in the aggregation of civil, social, philanthropic, and religious associations, New York stands unsurpassed anywhere on the globe. .... [End of splendiferous quote.]King's Views was an immensely popular book, and its sales and subsequent editions are a measure of the ready audience it found.
More significantly, progressives and socialists -- men and women I have called urban ideologists -- believed that the city represented the future and democracy. In 1905, the sociologist Frederick Howe published his important study, The City, the Hope of Democracy, which became a textbook for a generation of urban reformers. "To the city," Howe wrote, "we are to look for a rebirth of democracy," and many of his fellow progressives agreed. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, also welcomed the urban and democratic future in her lectures and articles.
In fact, however, the urban optimism of Addams and Howe and Moses King comprised a minority report. Most writers represented the burgeoning urban scene as an arena of suffering and sin -- the city of dreadful night, to invoke the phrase of a British writer which many Americans would have accepted. These were the great days of muckraking newspapers and magazines, and most of the scandals that the muckrakers worked so energetically to expose were rooted in the greed and graft that flourished in the turbulent urban culture of the turn of the century.
Upton Sinclair's best-selling expose of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle (1906), was also a disturbing revelation of life as it was lived at the bottom of the new Chicago. Lincoln Steffens unmasked the corruption of the new machine politics in a volume called The Shame of the Cities (1902). The title captured the belief shared by many ordinary citizens that cities and shame were virtually synonymous.
Jacob Riis, who earned his living for many years as a police reporter, forced his middle-class readers into closer contact than they had ever had with the festering slums of Bottle Alley, Five Points, and Mulberry Bend. His first book, How the Other Half Lives, published in that decisive year of 1890, marked an epoch.
The lurid scenes of Riis's urban journalism found their fictional counterpart just a few years later, in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). John Berryman said that this book, a combination of documentary and impressionist nightmare, "initiated modern American writing."
Jacob Riis and Stephen Crane, reporting on lower-class life in America's largest city, invented what I am tempted to call the proletarian picturesque. Like appalled but frankly titillated tourists, both men wrote as if they were sending back ethnographic accounts from an exotic savage outpost to readers in some civilized country. Riis and Crane were obviously sympathetic, but they kept a nervous, fastidious distance from what they saw.
Henry James had a much less generous response to the city. The American Scene (1907), the record of his final visit to America, is a dense and massive monument to James's hatred of the modern metropolis. James returned to New York, after a twenty-year absence, in 1905 -- the same year that Frederick Howe declared his allegiance to the city and its democratic future. James, on the contrary, was immediately revolted by everything he found: the new skyscrapers, the new hotels, the new streetcars, the new immigrants. His contempt was universal: he despised the upper classes and the lower classes alike.
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