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. 

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #6 Jed Perl's "Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn"

Richard Diebenkorn, Window (1967)

I’m in a jam. Picks one through five are set. Only slot #6 is open. There are four possible choices to fill it: Richard Dorment’s “Journey from Nebraska” (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2006), on the Museum of Modern Art’s Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective; Jed Perl’s “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn” (The New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017), on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Matisse/Diebenkorn; Marina Warner’s “At the V&A” (London Review of Books, June 4, 2015), on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Savage Beauty; and Christopher Benfey’s “Wyeth and the ‘Pursuit of Strangeness’ ” (The New York Review of Books, June 19, 2014), on the National Gallery of Art’s Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In.

Oh god, this isn’t going to be easy. I love these pieces. They brim with wonderful descriptions. For example:

Once again, after you marvel at the elegance of Marden’s palette of khaki-green, dark gray, and mauve, you step close to examine the brushed surface of each canvas. Once again, the bottom edges are left unpainted so that you see the layer of white under the field of green, a splash of black under gray, scarlet under mauve. The value and intensity of each final color is carefully judged so that no one color is more powerful than any other, creating a sense of classical stability and equilibrium. But that’s only on the surface. For all the painting’s aesthetic decorum, when you walk around to its side you discover smears of scarlet paint on the edge where the canvas is tacked over the stretcher. Like a flash of red petticoat under a haute couture dress, it affords us a glimpse of the emotions the artist concealed, damped down, kept out of sight. [Richard Dorment, “Journey from Nebraska”]

Two of his finest paintings in “Matisse/Diebenkorn,” Interior with Doorway (1962) and Window (1967), feature the humblest of folding chairs. There’s something almost aggressively American about making a folding chair the subject of a large painting. At “Matisse/Diebenkorn,” the Californian’s dark-toned Interior with Doorway is juxtaposed with Matisse’s equally dramatic Interior with a Violin (1918). Matisse, who played the violin, offers a glancing reference to another great tradition – to classical music. I admire Diebenkorn for trading the Old world comforts of Matisse’s violin, its lustrous wooden form set ever so snugly in a velvet-lined case, for the blunt, no nonsense power of an inexpensive folding chair. That folding chair, so Diebenkorn seems to be telling us, is all he has to work with. And damned if he doesn’t make it work. [Jed Perl, “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkoen”]

The word ‘deportment’ seems to have vanished along with aspidistras and parlours, but the concept hasn’t: Alexander McQueen’s designs, spectacularly displayed at the V&A in Savage Beauty (until 2 August), changed the way you walked, and not just because you were raised up on jewelled chopines like a Venetian courtesan in a period of acqua alta, or forced to balance like a tightrope walker on feet encased in hulking armadillo shoes, which did for his runway models what pointe shoes did for ballerinas after Marie Taglioni first stuffed her ballet slippers. But while Taglioni became an ethereal fairy, the armadillo shoes and fabric sheaths printed with snakeskins of the last, astonishing McQueen collection, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ (2010), turned their wearers into aliens, creatures of the deep and outer space, something computer-generated from the film Avatar. [Marina Warner, “At the V&A”]

Wind from the Sea was among the first paintings in which he tried to express some of those things. A partially opened window, with billowing curtains decorated with crocheted birds momentarily in flight, almost fills the frame, revealing – through the frayed and disintegrating lace – a view of a field traversed by a curving dirt road, a narrow line of evergreens on the horizon, and a silvery sliver of the sea. The mood of this monochromatic painting, all grayish greens giving way to greenish grays, is timeworn and melancholy, even if we don’t know that among the distant evergreens is a family graveyard, the same one in which Wyeth himself is now buried. [Christopher Benfey, “Wyeth and the ‘Pursuit of Strangeness’ ”]

How to decide? Well, art is in the details (my favorite maxim). That bit about “the blunt, no nonsense power of an inexpensive folding chair” in Perl’s piece is inspired. In a close contest, it’s the difference-maker. Perl’s “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn” is my #6.