the Armory Show on 17 February 1913 tore into the staid American art scene with 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by more than 300 European and American artists. From Marcel Duchamps’ Nude Descending a Staircase to the realist works of the American “Ash Can” School, there were no limits or boundaries. Critics rushed about seeking the high ground, moral, or creative, or both, but mostly followed the popular line, or as one critic wrote: “It was a good show… but don’t do it again.” For a new broad segment of the public, the show brought to light the American artists who also practised this lurid internalised alchemy of paint and canvas, or stone and chisel.
During the selection process, the Domestic Exhibition Committee was chaired by William Glackens, belonging to Henri’s circle, who took part in the “Eight” show, and contributed regularly to the ongoing MacDowell hangings. This committee managed to offend almost everybody by its original invitations for admission requiring originality and a “personal note” in each artist’s work as part of the committee’s guidelines. Hopper was not automatically invited to submit as in the past.
A backlash among American artists finally wedged open the door to submissions by uninvited artists. Hopper, hat in hand and no longer one of the favoured Henri clique, brought two of his 1911 oils, Sailing and Blackwell’s Island. Only Sailing, the jaunty little sailboat, was allowed to be hung.
Unprecedented crowds shouldered their way into the Armory hall. Guffaws of laughter, gasps, and curses punctuated the rumbling murmur of the crowd as they passed works by Kandinsky, Picabia, Matisse, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Brancusi, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. The walls were alight with colour and movement.
Like many of the American artists, Hopper surreptitiously hung about near his painting, looking for reactions, listening for comments. From the crowds trudging past, pointing, and whispering behind their hands, stepped a textile manufacturer from Manhattan named Thomas F. Victor. He liked the picture of the sailboat, noted its price was $300, and being a successful manufacturer, offered $250. Hopper accepted and a show official affixed a “sold” ticket to the picture’s frame.
Finally, Hopper had sold a painting, something created from his memory and imagination. The $250 sale price is approximately $6,000 in today’s economy. This is significant money and a jubilant and revitalised Edward Hopper took the train home to Nyack to show his parents that he was finally on the fine art track to success. The legendary Armory Show closed on 15 March. Garrett Hopper, always lingering at the edge of frail health, died on 18 September 1913. Edward had vindicated himself in his father’s eyes, and considering the latter’s own fruitless struggle for success, must have been very pleased for his son.
Edward Hopper had to take stock of his life at this juncture. Realistically, his sale of a painting was more a symbol of the door cracking open than an arrival, a confirmation of his long sought after success as a fine artist. He was past thirty years of age and had developed a facility with the painting medium that obeyed what he chose to place on the canvas. Abstraction and “modernism”, as featured in the Armory Show, held no thrall for him. He had committed himself to realism and the painter’s ability to translate his personality to the selection, presentation, addition, and subtraction of elements in a given scene. Now he needed to flush away the past struggle and move on. To begin with, in November 1913, he began documenting his sales in an account book, carefully noting each acquisition of cash, no matter the source. In doing so he came to grips with the illustrative work that he needed to support his painting. His creative vocabulary was in hand and each canvas sold trimmed time from the purgatory of commercial illustration.
In December 1913 Hopper sought out a new and larger studio. He discovered Washington Square in Greenwich Village and a run-down Greek Revival style building at Three Washington Square North facing the park. It had been built in the 1830s and rehabilitated in 1884 for conversion to artists’ studios. Hopper’s neighbours were artists of various stripes and one of them, Walter Tittle, had been a former Chase student with Hopper. Their friendship was rekindled and Tittle helped Hopper find illustration jobs. Like it or not, Hopper was dragged into the Bohemian artist scene that had infiltrated the Italian and Irish Greenwich Village neighbourhood, The Washington North building often rang with simultaneous parties that Hopper visited by simply climbing or descending the stairs. He had shunned the riotous behaviour of the Left Bank-Montmartre crowd in Paris, but the proximity and vitality of Greenwich Village gave him some relief from work if it did not inspire him.
He was far from the most successful and hardly a gregarious yarn-spinner. His work had been juried out of their shows or accepted grudgingly. He worked in their shadows, but rarely in their company. He seemed to be seeking a key to their success in the location of their subject matter. “The American Scene” had many possibilities to draw from, and yet Hopper chose to dog the tracks of these artists and then produced works that drew no reviews from critics and did not sell. In the growing vitality of the American art landscape he became the 6ft, 5in invisible man.
And yet he continued to be a fixture in their society. If he was disconcerted, he didn’t show it, as he maintained a placid exterior. There was a dogged certainty about him that seemed to be supported by the brilliant technique he had demonstrated in Henri’s classes and in the casual skills he so disdainfully showed off in his illustrations. His friends and supporters remained loyal throughout his life.
New York Corner (Corner Saloon), 1913.
Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Station, 1908.
Oil on canvas, 51.3 × 74.3 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
World War I arrived in Europe and soon the United States was giving lip service to victory for the French and England as British war propaganda films were shown in big city movie palaces and nickelodeons. Hopper found variety from the magazine fiction he illustrated after having to read some of the mediocre text. The U. S. Printing and Litho Company churned out movie posters and each one paid Hopper $10 (equivalent to $230 in 2012). He was also paid to sit through the silent melodramas, which he preferred to the pulp fiction of the time. Movies became a fascination for him that lasted the rest of his life. Even the free movies did not calm his irritation over the theatre marketing people who demanded changes in his drawings when his realistic renderings did not conform to the stereotypes the film moguls thought the public would accept.
After building up his relative wealth into the black, Hopper needed to blow off steam. An artist acquaintance, Bernard Karfiol, recommended the Maine seaport village of Ogunquit, a popular nesting place for New York artists who descended on it each summer like a flock of seagulls. For eight dollars a week, Hopper became a guest at the Shore Road boarding house favoured by the artist population and sat down with them to a communal supper table where he met a fellow resident, a short redhead named Josephine Nivison whom he had seen in Henri’s classes. The instructor had, in fact, painted a full-length portrait of her costumed in paint smock gripping her palette and brushes entitled Art Student. The village became a gathering place for many of Hopper’s schoolmates and all the old stories blossomed to life around the dinner table and afterwards.
He plunged into a series of paintings in his usual 29 × 24 inch canvases that again demonstrated his ability to make so much out of so little apparent effort. The coastal coves are revealed under a bright sun that bathes the bays creating deep shadows and flat blue seas beneath the anchored brush-swipe dories. Two paintings distinguish themselves from the sea-washed cliffs and coves.
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