Thomas Eakins, Augustus St Gaudins and William Glackens. He moved into the fourth floor at the top of seventy-four steps into a crude lodging that had no private bathroom or central heating. A coal stove sat in one corner and a glorious skylight lit up the room and leaked during rainstorms.
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.
31. New York Corner (Corner Saloon), 1913. Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund.
32. The El Station, 1908. Oil on canvas, 51.3 × 74.3 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
33. Railroad Train, 1908. Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, gift of Dr. Fred T. Murphy.
34. Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 81.5 cm. Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation, Saint Louis.
It is curious that Hopper, usually the tall man in the rear of the photograph separate from the crowd, continued to be sought out by his contemporaries. 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 churned inside, 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. During these early days, they seemed to be either patiently waiting for his eventual eruption into fame and recognition, or obtained some relief over the frail condition of their own groping livelihoods through Schadenfreude, watching the self-possessed Hopper fail repeatedly.
Hopper drew on their company, seeking if not approval then acceptance as he had received all his life from his mother and father, Jammes in Paris, Enid Saies, his instructors William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, from his supporter Guy du Bois and from Thomas F. Victor, the Manhattan cloth maker who had liked his painting of the sailboat at the Armory Show. As an actor needs applause, an artist needs acceptance. Every rejection is a rebuke, a dismissal not just of the object but also of the personality behind the interpretation of the subject. During this period from 1913 to 1923, Hopper’s apparent stoicism masked his fear of failure and baffled his contemporaries. At some point, something had to give and everyone wanted to be around when it happened.
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 some variety from the magazine fiction he illustrated after having to read some of the mediocre text. The U. S. Printing and Litho Company cranked out movie posters and each one paid Hopper $10 ($200 in 2006 dollars). 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 titled 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” size 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.
35. Railroad Sunset, 1929. Oil on canvas, 74.3 × 121.9 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
One is Rocks and Houses that sits beneath a stratus-cloud sky. In the somewhat flatter light, the houses with their deep eaves and gambrel roofs crouch behind an enormous rock, rounded with age and festooned with shrubbery at its base. The feeling is one of compression and melancholy. The houses are intruders on an ancient landscape. Another painting is Road in Maine, the simple view of a rural road winding back in an S-curve behind a rocky outcropping. Only the top part of the curve is visible as it disappears around the corner, its shoulder punctured by two utility poles. The light is sunny, the sky is clear, and yet the mood suggests something has just passed this way or is approaching. The theme would return later in his work.
Returning from Ogunquit he had quite a lot to show for his time away from the illustration trenches. Once back, he found different trenches waiting. His magazine clients had lined up a number of projects including imagined World War I scenes from Everybody’s Magazine showing bloody and brutal combat action of which he knew nothing.
The Montross Gallery on Fifth Avenue above 49th Street proposed a show and Edward was invited. Full of optimism, he offered up his latest work, Road in Maine. Guy du Bois placed four of his own works and singled out his old chum Hopper’s piece for comment in Arts and Decoration Magazine – of which he was editor. He used the terms: “austerity and baldness”, citing elimination of detail in the extreme, the “wireless” telephone poles, the “bleak” country and pointing out the “barren” road. Sounding almost like a slap, du Bois saved the review at the end with the “warmth and colour that ring with sincerity and truth” and a parting pat on the back: “This is where the painter has returned more than he has taken away.”
The left-handed effusiveness aside, du Bois’ mention comes close to getting inside Hopper’s head and seeing in its infancy what would become a primary drive in the artist’s choice and rendering of future subjects.
Hopper did not find the experience amusing. He failed to sell the painting. He was also keenly aware of a previous show of Maine paintings by George Bellows who was singled out as “…following in Winslow Homer’s footsteps…like Rockwell Kent.”[14] Many of his former schoolmates
Gail Levin,
