June 8 & 15, 2020 Issue

Okay, here’s a question. Peter Schjeldahl has written five pieces on Edward Hopper, including his new “Apart,” in this week’s issue. Which one’s the best?

His first “Hopper,” titled “Edward Hopper,” appeared in the September 27, 1989, issue of the Manhattan magazine 7 Days, and is collected in his The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990 (1990). In it, he calls Hopper “a towering original,” “a majestic poet in the painterly equivalent of plain prose.” He says of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, “This is a picture to look at until you are exhausted, your attention burned to a fine ash. Then look some more.” He describes this great painting beautifully:

It is a dead-on view of cheap two-story buildings, with storefronts, raked by the light of sunrise. The colors bring it off: reds, greens, and yellows laid light-over-dark to yield a glowering brightness (punctuated with black rectangles), a buttery effulgence good enough to eat. The tacky shops, for which humble would be too fulsome a compliment, are transfigured by the colors and by a play of highlights and shadows as clever as the fingering of a virtuoso guitarist. A barber pole, leaning as if the sunlight were a gale trying to flatten it, concentrates in its incongruous gaudiness – so it seemed to me the other day, looking at it – the whole doomed human will to beauty.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930)

Schjeldahl also refers to Hopper’s preparatory drawings:

These aren’t “studies,” in the usual sense, so much as conceptualizations that recall sketches with which certain great directors – Einstein, Hitchcock, Sirk – planned their shots. They show the elements of a painting like MoMA’s New York Movie (my own favorite Hopper) being worked out in advance with a fierce eye for exactly the right effect. Every detail in a good Hopper is specific, none is extraneous, and everything sings.

He also notes that Hopper “rarely let a painting alone until it had been packed to creaking with bleak, explosive libido.”

Schjeldahl’s first piece on Hopper is brilliant. Most critics would be content to leave it at that. But Schjeldahl is just warming up.

His next “Hopper” is titled “Hopperesque,” which originally appeared in the exhibition catalogue Edward Hopper: Light Years (1988), and is included in his 1991 collection The Hydrogen Jukebox. “Hopperesque” is loaded with memorable observations. For example:

Hopper is more a naturalist than a realist, and a symbolist above all.

Hopper’s nonrealism is clinched by the sketches and studies for his paintings. These are the work not of an observer of the visible world but of an imagination-powered metteur en scène, a stage or film director blocking in the vision of a final effect to be reached through cunning labor. Each drawing considers one or more of the decisions that will accumulate to dictate the picture.

A psychoanalyst might adduce a neurotic pattern from the unenterableness of most Hopper buildings: we rarely see a door clearly, and when we do it rarely looks operable, let alone inviting. All the life of the buildings is in their glaring windows.

Any sense of isolation in Hopper is always defiantly upbeat: not loneliness, but solitude.

 Like Hopper’s houses, his people are invariably caught in the act of seeing.

In my own favorite Hopper painting, New York Movie, an orchestration of ferociously sensual effects pivots in the reverie of the tired usherette. (She overwhelms me: sister, daughter, lover, victim, goddess all in one, caught in the movie palace that is a modern philosophical realization of Plato’s Cave.)

You attain Hopper’s wavelength when you register how the subjectivity of his places and people is subsumed to the whole picture.

A Hopper painting is a window turned inside out. You don’t look into it. It looks out at you, a cyclopean glance that rivets and penetrates.

Like “Kafkaesque,” “Hopperesque” names not a style but a particular face of reality – which we would feel even if Hopper had never lived, though more obscurely.

A supreme masterpiece like the Whitney Museum’s Early Sunday Morning, with its light-transfigured row of dumpy storefronts, may ravish us, but not in a way apt to remind us of Raphael. A poignance of imperfection unites the painting with its subject, producing a naked factuality as lethal to idealism as DDT is to gnats.

Nor is a sentimental formula like “beauty in the ordinary” called for. What Hopper does in paintings of the mundane is far more devastating: he annihilates “the ordinary” along with “the beautiful” and every other conceivable category of aesthetic experience.

Hopper plainly was comfortable with the voyeuristic impulse, which informs so much of his art directly and just about all of it indirectly – along a Platonic sliding scale from the grossest to the most transcendent knowledge, from the intrusive glance of Night Windows to the metaphysical mystery of Light in an Empty Room.

I submit that a polymorphous sexual alertness – “adhesiveness,” in Walt Whitman’s wonderful term – informed Hopper’s perception of the whole world.

He is excited by the unguarded moment, the exposed innocence, of a person, a building, a place – anything at all, though certain things and situations (generally involving windows) pique him more than others.

If one of the purposes of criticism is to suggest fresh perspectives and interesting ways of looking at a particular subject, as I believe it is, Schjeldahl’s passionate “Hopperesque” succeeds magnificently.

Schjeldahl’s third “Hopper” piece is “Ordinary People” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2007), a review of the 2007 Hopper retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In his previous two pieces Schjeldahl mentions that New York Movie is his favorite Hopper. In “Ordinary People” he describes this painting in loving detail:

Consider his second-most-powerful image, after “Nighthawks”: “New York Movie” (1939). In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. 

That “Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality” is inspired. It reprises the “Plato’s Cave” reference in “Hopperesque,” but this time Schjeldahl redesigns it to maximize its punch. “Where are we? I think we’re in Plato’s Cave” makes me smile every time I read it.

Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939)

“Ordinary People” contains another memorable painting description. Schjeldahl says of Hopper’s Office at Night:

There are Hoppers that don’t work, while others, in instructive ways, work somewhat too well. I have in mind “Office at Night” (1940), in which a preposterously voluptuous secretary at a filing cabinet eyes a piece of paper on the floor as her handsome boss reads a document at his desk. The light denotes sunset. A summer wind disturbs the shade at an open window. For me, the dancing pull cord of the shade is one of the choicest details in art history, as an objective correlative, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, of “memory and desire.” Seen from an elevated point of view, the wonderfully articulated lines and contents of the space cant toward the window. I just wish the office were empty. What will happen between the characters touched by the melancholy and erotic breeze? I don’t care. They are types from central casting in an overly explicit cinematic narrative, such as Hopper commonly subsumed to his vision.

Schjeldahl’s notice (and interpretation) of that “dancing pull cord” is superb – one of my favourite details in all his writing.

Edward Hopper, Office at Night (1940)

Schjeldahl’s fourth “Hopper” is “Between the Lines,” a brief review of the Whitney’s 2013 exhibition “Hopper Drawing” that appeared in The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town.” Here it is in its entirety:

The exhibition “Hopper Drawing,” at the Whitney, lets us into the factory of hand and mind that created “Nighthawks,” “New York Movie,” “Early Sunday Morning,” “Office at Night,” and other touchstones for which “iconic” is praise too faint. Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge. Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role. The show explains the power of Edward Hopper’s compositions but leaves their spiritual pang mysterious. What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him. Also on view are masses of early work which establish Hopper’s talents, developed in Paris, as a master sketcher and an apt emulator of Post-Impressionism—gifts that he plowed under to achieve a mature style, which confronts the world not as a reflection but as a précis of soul-testing melancholy and life-saving glints of grace. 

In this short piece, Schjeldahl emphasizes a couple of points he’s made before: (1) that Hopper’s compositions evolve from preliminary sketches and drawings (“Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role”); and (2) that Hopper isn’t a realist (“Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge”). For me, the outstanding line here is “What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him.” That “slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life” is marvellously fine – a perfect description of Hopper’s best pictures.

Schjeldahl’s fifth “Hopper” piece, “Apart,” appears in this week’s New Yorker. It’s both a reflection on Hopper’s relevance right now in this time of containment (“The visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness, a maudlin projection—speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance”) and on his art, using the catalogue of the Beyeler Foundation’s current show “Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape” as a departure point. In a line that sums up a lifetime of looking at Hoppers, Schjeldahl writes, “Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind’s eye.”  

Schjeldahl loves Hopper. And so do I. His “Hopper” quintet is delectable. Which of the five is the best? I’m slightly partial to “Ordinary People,” mainly for its inspired noticing of that “dancing pull cord.”