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The greatest works of art are inevitably turned into kitsch, their fame exploited to sell the most banal products. Guernica adorns T shirts, the Mona Lisa is woven into welcome mats, Sunflowers brightens up your morning coffee mug. Edward Hopper's Nighthawks has suffered the same fate. Prints of the iconic 1942 painting of a gloomy diner have shown up in several generations of American college dorms — there's even a mouse pad. Has reproduction robbed the image of its morose power and reduced Hopper, one of America's greatest artists, to the ranks of the one-hit wonders?
Not on your life. Walk into the Hopper show opening this week at London's Tate Modern and the real thing hits you, a powerful and astonishingly new experience. Here are the well-known images — most of them larger than you expect. Nighthawks has a room almost to itself. Details like the salt shakers on the counter pop out at you; the window frame is vivid green, the interior a heartless yellow. The background is rich: an empty shop front emerges from the blue depths. But "Edward Hopper" — Britain's first big show of his work in more than 20 years, with around 70 drawings and paintings — demonstrates that Hopper's vision extends far beyond that lonely diner. The show, which travels to Cologne's Museum Ludwig in October, is a reminder of Hopper's gift for finding mystery and beauty in the mundane.
Face to face, of course, you can appreciate these works as paintings. The brushwork is sometimes fluid and smudgy, sometimes tight and careful; elsewhere surfaces are built up with thick layers. It's all meant to create an impact from a distance, though, and Tate Modern provides plenty of space for this to happen.
When talking of Hopper's work, admirers and experts invariably use words like melancholy and alienation. Certainly, most of his paintings project isolation and ennui. Even when his subjects are meant to be cheery, like his beach scenes, the sun is shining but it casts deep shadows. Many of his motifs are infused with a sense of solitariness: single people in rooms, lone houses by roads or railroads. House by a Road (1940) has windows like the eyes of a skull, filled in with pure black, and a thick wood huddles around it. The windows in House at Dusk (1935) are shaded or give onto rooms that are lighted but empty — except for one, where a woman looks out. Who is lonelier, the woman or the watcher looking at her? And what gives his work its unmistakable haunting atmosphere?
Hopper himself wasn't much of a guide. He was somewhat reclusive, and discussed his work only in the most general way. He wrote in the catalog for his 1933 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan: "My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." Nor was he particularly illuminating when he told TIME in 1948: "You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling."
Certainly, many of his pictures have the poignancy of scenes glimpsed from a car or train. He never traveled very far, though. Apart from making the Paris trips expected of art students in the early 1900s, he mainly divided his time between New York City and New England, seeking out the unfashionable architecture and empty countryside that appealed to him.
Having trained and worked as a commercial artist, Hopper had a methodical approach which may explain the deadpan air of his works. He didn't take an easel and paint out in the open, but went on the road looking for subjects and making sketches. His pictures were carefully composed back in the studio. But his juxtaposition of elements was sometimes odd: urban buildings and their inhabitants seem set down in fields, or surrounded by forests. His figures can be stiff, and his scenes are deliberately devoid of drama. These people are strangers — we don't know their stories. They're not about to tell.
As the end of his life approached (he died in 1967 at 84), the themes continued almost unchanged, but it's hard to resist trying to weave them into a story. The women in Hotel Window (1955) and Intermission (1963) have aged, and have an air of waiting. In a late picture, Sun in an Empty Room (1963), the occupants have moved out, taking their fixtures and fittings. His last picture, Two Comedians (1966), is a formal farewell. He and his wife, dressed as Pierrots, stand on a stage taking their last bow. The trees are still there, but as painted scenery. Behind the couple is the ever-present darkness.
- LUCY FISHER | London
- Edward Hopper's gloomy masterpieces