The current Edward Hopper retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American is entitled “Edward Hopper’s New York” and it’s worth the effort to leave the safety of Nassau County and brave the traffic of the LIE to experience the show. Hopper is widely known as one of America’s greatest painters and his “Early Sunday Morning,” “House by the Railroad,” and “Nighthawks” are recognized and cherished by most Americans.
Hopper is widely known for his realistic, austere paintings of scary-looking Gothic houses, his voyeuristic paintings of New York apartments occupied by lonely inhabitants and his paintings of desolate New York streets bordered by low-lying, three-story brick tenements. But after having seen these painting up close and personal, I have come to conclude that the art critics who have written about him have missed the most obvious point of these works. They uniformly describe his work as simple, austere, figurative, bleak, nostalgic, and American-like along the vein of Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton as opposed to Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock.
All that may be true, but if one looks closely at his paintings, you can see an abiding conflict between what is stationary and what is moving. His “House by the Railroad” is so unsettling that Alfred Hitchcock used it as a model for the Bates Hotel in “Psycho.” The house is so uncanny, foreboding and isolated that it’s easy to overlook the fact that in the foreground is a railroad track as a means of escape.
He has painted many a naked woman sitting passively on a bed or standing alone in a room (“Morning in a City”) that it’s easy to overlook the fact that she is looking longingly out the window in hope that she will escape. He is noted for his paintings of hotel rooms, but again in “Hotel by a Railroad” this painting includes a man who is standing at a window looking out at the railroad tracks.
In the painting “Room in New York,” we peer into an apartment in Manhattan and get to see a bored man reading a newspaper and his wife on the far side of the room tinkering listlessly on a piano. In “New York Movie” we witness a bored-looking usherette standing with arms folded and not bothering to watch a movie she has probably seen 20 times already.
These images serve as clues to his central message that the quotidian life we lead can be wearing, tedious, mundane and claustrophobic. Thus, like all great artists, he provides us with a way to escape this tedium by incorporating images of escape, including railroads, hotels, motels and bridges. His work has been compared to a secular annunciation but without theology or hope or promise of rebirth.
His painting “Soir Bleu” with its sad-looking clown painted in white face reminds me of the bleak, impersonal and tragicomic work of Samuel Beckett whose “Waiting for Godot” is considered by some to be the most important play of the 20th century.
Edward Hopper’s work also reminds me of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of existentialism and author of “Nausea,” whose philosophy revealed that we are all “condemned to be free.” Except that in Hopper’s case, his characters would rather stay stuck rather than catch the next train out of town. Perhaps their nature is the result of Hopper’s Puritan values, which seemed to have produced a depression that he suffered with in his later years.
However, I do not mean to criticize him in any way. His work is invariably transcendent and poignant and profound. He is truly a master painter who devoted his life to the canvas. One of the greatest of American painters. And if you are in any way interested in why we seem to suffer with boredom and despair and how great artists try to deal with this existential dilemma, then get in your car and brave the LIE to see the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
