back to title page

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. King's themes are nationalist and competitive. He used picture and text to congratulate New York for rushing to a leading place among the cities of the world.

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.]

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.

These few contrasting examples -- Jacob Riis and Moses King, Stephen Crane and Frederick Howe, Henry James and Jane Addams -- illustrate the contest over the meaning of the city, which lay at the center of American self-awareness at the turn of the century. Where to locate Edward Hopper among these competing attitudes? Let me respond by returning to 1893 and the Columbian Exposition, where Frederick Turner gave that lecture on the frontier.

Several million visitors attended the fair in the six months it was open, dividing their time between the highminded exhibits in the main buildings and the earthier pleasures of the midway carnival. (The latter included Sam Jack's "Creole Show," and exotic dancer Little Egypt.) At a large display of recent American painting, fairgoers were asked to choose their favorite picture, and they selected Thomas Hovenden's Breaking Home Ties, painted in that climactic year, 1890.

Awash in sentiment, Hovenden's picture is a revealing artifact in the history of taste. More important for our purposes, Breaking Home Ties commemorates the moment that the frontier ended and the city began. A traditional genre scene, obviously set in a modest rural homestead, the painting prophecies the move to the city. The young man at the center of the composition is going to seek his fortune . . . which means that he is necessarily going to the city. The young man is the Hopper subject in the making: leaving the multigenerational, affectionate, protective circle of the family to join the lonely crowds of Chicago or New York.

Everything that defines this young man is going to be stripped away. In short, by the sort of subtraction I referred to earlier, the painting's content anticipates Hopper. So also does its narrative technique, the relationship it implies between its subject and its audience. In a word, the story told in Hovenden's painting is easy to read, while Hopper's paintings resist and even cancel narrative.

For example, I wager that every one of us standing in front of a painting like Hotel Room (1931) has invented a story to answer our own questions. Is the letter in the woman's hand good news or bad? Has she just received it, or has she written it? Is it a letter at all? Is she packing or unpacking?

But the point of Hopper's presentation is precisely that there are no answers to those perfectly ordinary questions. The picture's imagery is suspended stubbornly outside of narrative time, arousing expectations that are deliberately left unfulfilled. (It is not surprising that Hopper produced only two history pictures in over half a century of painting.) The title itself, Hotel Room, like Automat, Room in New York, Chop Suey, and half-a-dozen other Hopper paintings, willfully directs our interpretative energies away from the human subjects toward the settings in which they are contained.

Resisting movement in either time or space, Hopper's paintings simultaneously invite their viewers and frustrate them. The principal indicators of this ambivalence are the ubiquitous windows in Hopper's work. [ROOM IN BROOKLYN (1932), CHOP SUEY (1929), ROOM IN NEW YORK (1932)] There is a visual but only surface likeness between Hopper's glass-enclosed settings and the great department stores that created a new consumer culture at the turn of the century. Massing acres of goods under one roof, Macy's and Gimbels and the other new stores tempted browsers to look and to want and perhaps to buy. Their elaborate display windows, which alternated with open doors, promised the satisfaction of possession.

Moses King exulted that the blocks and blocks of shop windows were uniformly "fascinating, alluring, irresistible," a "magnificent panorama of mercantile display." And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser created fiction's most famous windowshopper, a young woman whose whole destiny is permanently fixed with her first glance into a department store window display.

Hopper's transparent but impenetrable windows, on the other hand, are emblems at once of desire and separation. Sometimes dismissed as a mere mannerism, Hopper's windows are central to his understanding of life in the modern city. Where the window displays of the department stores stir up fantasies of intimacy, Hopper's subjects remain permanently inaccessible, unapproachable, even unreadable.

Consequently, Hopper's audience is reduced to an uncomfortable voyeurism -- and this is true regardless of whether the figures in a given painting are dressed or undressed. (Though I am obliged to add, parenthetically, a question my wife asked after visiting the Hopper exhibition last month: "Why do the men get to be lonely with their clothes on, but so many of the women have to be lonely naked?") [ELEVEN A.M. (1926)]

Hotel Room is one of at least four Hopper paintings with "hotel" or "motel" in its title, and a dozen others are set in bedrooms that have the look and feel of nondescript hotels or boarding houses. For Hopper, the hotel is the setting and symbol of modern dislocation, the place where anonymous, interchangeable people pause briefly on their unknowable journeys.

Henry James had preceded Hopper in the conclusion that the hotel was the supremely representative twentieth-century American building. In The American Scene, James called the hotel "a synonym" for a collapsed civilization, and he went on to ask if "the hotel spirit may not just be the American spirit, most seeking and most finding itself."

The hotel symbolized for James the very stuff of human restlessness, defying any margin of personal stability. A similar theme is at work in Hopper's pictures. To return for a moment to Thomas Hovenden's painting, Breaking Home Ties, Hopper's hotels and rented rooms are the antonyms and antitheses of such homes: home ties, once broken, are not repaired.

Culturally resonant, Hopper's choice of the hotel as subject also had quite personal sources, in the bitter years he spent as a commercial illustrator. His most dependable commissions came from a magazine called Hotel Management, for which he produced a whole series of colorful covers. Carefree, lively, and affluent, the laughing men and women who play golf, drive fast cars, and dance across these covers have almost nothing in common with the haunting and haunted characters who inhabit Hopper's paintings. They are, in short, icons of fake happiness, produced on salary to suit the demands of various employers.

The truncated, claustrophobic interiors of Hopper's most distinctive pictures express his revenge on his own earlier work. He answered his peppy drawings, which had held out the promise of abundance, with images of diminishment, loss, and deprivation. It is not that the people in Hopper's city paintings seem actually poor. But their spiritual vacancy testifies to an impoverishment that transcends matters of class.

Hopper's underfurnished, spooky rooms are also a strategy of control, a way of managing urban turmoil by denying it. The recurrent keynote of nineteenth-century landscape painting had been the horizon, stretching as far as the eye could see. The horizon, emblem of limitless space and unprecedented mobility, survived at least in shrunken form even in the cityscapes of Hopper's predecessors, in the work of John Sloan, whom Hopper admired [JEFFERSON MARKET], and of George Bellows, whom he considered a rival [LONE TENEMENT].

In Hopper's typical city paintings, on the contrary, the horizon has disappeared, and its absence signals the collapse of the grand narrative for which it served as metaphor. Hopper's point of view is usually horizontal [EARLY SUNDAY MORNING (1930); APPROACHING A CITY (1946)] or downlooking [THE CITY (1927); TWO ON THE AISLE (1927); BRIDLE PATH (1939); AUTOMAT (1927); MAIN STREET (19xx); OFFICE AT NIGHT (1940)].

In Hopper's city paintings, we rarely look up. The horizon, which could serve as a symbol of individual freedom in rural America (and which appears repeatedly in Hopper's own paintings of Cape Cod and the Southwest) is blotted out from Hopper's New York sky.

The city defeats the eye's reach. Circle Theatre(1936) makes the case explicitly; it could be argued that this is the quintessential Hopper painting. With obvious deliberation, Hopper has chosen a subject which he does not let us see. The theater and its entrance and its name are hidden. Indeed, the elaborate, painstaking manufacture of concealment is the painting's most notable achievement. Furthermore, the object that interrupts our view is a subway kiosk, a stairway whose entry we also cannot see, and which leads -- significantly -- not up, but down.

With perfect logic, Hopper hated skyscrapers. From the Woolworth and Singer buildings that went up before the First World War, to the Chrysler and Empire State buildings of the early 1930s, a collaboration of pride, technology, and money changed the face of New York almost daily. And, as Ann Douglas reminds us, most New Yorkers thought that the skyscrapers would be as transient as the structures that had been torn down to make way for them (Terrible Honesty,p. 437). Hopper simply erased them, and with them the restless energy they symbolized.

Along with the skyscrapers, he rejected virtually every hallmark of modern urban experience: its acceleration and disorder, its irredeemable transience. The men and women in Hopper's paintings are carved in the granite of their solitude. They are, quite obviously, going nowhere, anchored to their spaces, permanently motionless. They are immobilized, not just as a consequence of Hopper's static medium but as the definition of their very being. If there are windows, there are few doors. In Hopper's pictures, doors are conspicuously missing even when they ought to be present, as in House by the Railroad. And in at least one famous case, Chair Car (1965), a door without a handle turns what ought to be an opening into a blank wall.

The mood persists even when there is no one in the picture at all. Commenting on Dawn in Pennsylvania, Mark Strand has shrewdly identified the paradox, enforced by the painting's geometry, that "we feel trapped in a place whose purpose has to do with travel"(Hopper, p. 10). Through images like this, Hopper mastered -- or at least evaded -- the terrible flux of modern urban life.

In his book Invisible Cities Italo Calvino wrote that it is with cities as it is with dreams: "everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears." Few works of the imagination demonstrate Calvino's observation more convincingly than Edward Hopper's city paintings, which are pervaded by longing and dread. Indeed, in an important sense, Hopper's desires and his fears are synonymous.

In the end, the sources of his art are unsearchable, unreachable. His peculiar vision, which avoided everything about the city and yet defined it, could surprise even himself. He said of one of his paintings, one of his hotel paintings in fact: "Lonely? Yes, I guess it's lonelier than I planned it, really" (Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, p. 506).

We end where we began. Hopper was born in one America and grew up in another, witness to the most far-reaching changes in the nation's history. What he included in his pictures, and perhaps even more what he left out, make them an idiosyncratic, unexplainable, but necessary record of the nation's transformation.