The Art or the Life: On Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930)

Christopher Benfey, in his recent “Buildings Come to Life,” The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2023), tells me something about Edward Hopper I didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t want to know. He says, “A life-long conservative Republican, he was vehemently opposed to the New Deal.” According to Benfey, he called FDR a “jackass.” I’m a fan of Hopper’s paintings. I’m also a fan of FDR. For me, the New Deal was the greatest government program of the twentieth century. It saved millions of people from the trauma of being out of work during the Great Depression. John Updike said of FDR,

Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by. [“Laissez-Faire is More,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007].

I totally agree. So where does that leave me, now that I know that Hopper, one of my favorite painters, “vehemently opposed the New Deal,” and considered FDR a “jackass”? Is it possible to continue loving his work knowing that he held such wretched anti-humanistic views? 

This raises that old vexing question – can you separate the art from the artist? Can you separate Faulkner’s racism from his Light in August? Can you separate Eliot’s anti-Semitism from his The Wasteland ? Can you separate Naipaul’s violence against his wife from his A Bend in the River? 

I don’t have the answer. I know Flaubert’s position: only the work matters; the life doesn’t. Nevertheless, once I know certain aspects of the life, I find it hard to forget them. Looking at Hopper’s wonderful Early Sunday Morning (1930), with its sunlight on the flat and ruddy brick, I find myself wondering how a guy with such a mean, narrow outlook could paint something so ravishing? Benfey, in his piece, offers a clue. He points out the absence of people in many of Hopper’s pictures. He says, “What Hopper discovered was that when people are gone, the buildings come to life.” Hopper, unlike, say, FDR, wasn’t a humanist. And this is reflected in his paintings. Maybe in this way, at least, his life and art are reconcilable. If he wasn’t the way he was, he wouldn’t have painted the way he did. Still, in light of Benfey’s revelations, I find myself looking at Hoppers slightly differently now. My love has been shaken.