a minimalist skill confidently displayed. His jumble of angles and forms gracing magazine covers in dynamic display are absent from the conceit exercised in his simple oil compositions.
20. Macomb’s Dam Bridge, 1935. Oil on canvas, 88.9 × 152.9 cm. The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, bequest of Mary T. Crockcroft.
21. Blackwell’s Island, 1911. Oil on canvas, 62.1 × 75.6 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
22. James Abbott Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold-Old Battersea Bridge, c.1872–1875. Oil on canvas, 68.3 × 51.2 cm. Tate Britain, London.
Hopper had become a master of painting and drawing and now searched for his voice.
Eventually, lack of money and overabundance of bad weather shortened his second visit to the City of Light and eliminated any further European exploration. He departed on 31 July aboard the Holland-American Line steamship Ryndam and arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey on 9 August 1909.
Once back in New York, Hopper drew from his memory and imagination three compositions he probably carried with him in his head from the French shores. Gail Levin in her seminal biography on Hopper[9] seizes a telling parallel between Hopper’s Valley of the Seine and Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow, an elevated view of the Hudson River where it loops back on itself forming a peninsula in the valley. In Cole’s painting – shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1908 – a very detailed foreground of shrubbery and a moss-overgrown and lightning-shattered tree blend with an approaching storm that holds the eye in check. Beyond the brooding foreground and storm clouds, the bend in the river seen far below lies revealed in sunlight. Hopper grew up along the Hudson River and probably saw Cole’s painting.
His Valley of the Seine is almost an homage, but he reverses the effect. Hopper plants a brilliantly sun-lit white railroad bridge opposite a wall of dark woods not unlike the Hudson’s palisades. Behind the tall woods is a small town suggested by a scribble of brushwork that becomes roofs and walls. In the far distance, the Seine bends back upon itself recalling the looping Hudson in The Oxbow. To appreciate Hopper’s masterly rendition of this scene, the viewer need only look closely at the canvas and realise how few brush strokes created all the central details. Hopper seems to be performing here, challenging academic and old world pastoralists on their own turf.
Le Bistrot, another post-Paris painting, captures a moment in time much as the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists accomplished. Seurat, Degas, Renoir all captured moments in lives, moments framed. This painting resembles a photograph, a “decisive moment” captured decades later by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, or Alfred Eisenstaedt, all of whom studied the great painters. Huddled at an outdoor table like extras on a stage set, two women share a bottle of beer. Beyond them, a lemon-yellow bridge and walkway beneath four dry wind-bent cypress trees look more like a backdrop about to be rolled up. Called from his imagination and memory, Le Bistrot remains a mythical place.
Summer Interior, also painted in 1909 in New York, is a near abstraction. A half-dressed nude sprawls next to an unmade bed. She’s not anchored to the floor, but floats along with colour shapes representing a fireplace, a wall or shuttered door, the pale green carpet with a hot rectangle of window light pinned to it. The brown of the bed frame recedes, but all the other planes come forward giving the room a restless, unfinished appearance. The disconsolate girl is a leftover from an event having taken place in a lonely dreamscape. Like the couple in Le Bistrot, she has no identity. They are all symbols, the first in a long line of Hopper’s haunted subjects.
Once again, Robert Henri’s Ash Can artists organised a show to run from 1–27 April 1910 in a former warehouse on West 35th Street. This Exhibition of Independent Artists not only flew in the face of New York’s art academia, it overlapped with the dates of a show at the National Academy of Design. The exhibition offered wall space to artists for a fee of $10 for one painting and – such a deal – only $18 for two. This bargain basement chance to show with some of the most well known of the Ash Can artists lured 344 entries. Among them was Edward Hopper.
Again, his pinch-penny existence limited him to a single entry and he chose Le Louvre et la Seine, an early French painting with its shimmering impressionist palette from 1907. Dragging out this retro work was almost an act of self-destruction. Almost any of his 1909 canvases would have at least showed his move towards a more personal aesthetic.
The show was well-reviewed and, once again, he remained invisible to the critics. Stubborn to the end, Hopper nursed his pennies and churned out commercial illustrations to earn cash for yet another expedition to Paris.
The RMS Adriatic docked at Plymouth, England on 11 May 1910, and a sober Edward Hopper disembarked knowing he had only his own finances and references to fall back upon. Once in Paris, he took a cheap room at the Hôtel des Ecoles in the Latin Quarter. But he remained only a week before following in Robert Henri’s footsteps of the previous year and boarding the train to Madrid. He played the tourist, wandering through the sights and sounds, writing home and attending a “sickening” bullfight, of which one scene ended up considerably later in an etching.
The thrall of Europe had faded. The delights of Paris had diminished and his final trip abroad ended in departure from Cherbourg on 1 July aboard the Cincinnati, a steamer of the Hamburg-American Line. He had not found the financial and worldly success in foreign travel that Henri had discovered. The trips abroad had actually changed his life for ever, but, in 1910, facing a return to the rigour of New York, the endless grind of commercial illustration and hunting for an outlet for his brilliant skills as a painter, young Edward had no clue as to his future.
On his Terms
In the New York City Directory of 1911, Edward Hopper listed his occupation as “Salesman”.[10] His contemporaries – fellow students and pals – were achieving success. As cash loosened up after the Bank Panic of 1907, even these relative unknowns were selling paintings and getting free ink in the press – favourable free ink from art critics looking for the next hot trend. Hopper, on the other hand, couldn’t get arrested. He was “reduced” to trudging from one art and advertising agency to another with his portfolio, trying to peddle his skills as an illustrator to art directors he considered for the most part to be Philistines.
He thought this work to be demeaning and beneath him. The illustrator’s market in the early twentieth century consisted of hundreds of popular magazines, niche market magazines, trade journals, advertisements, story illustrations and posters. New photographic printing processes gave the illustrators a wide range of tools with which to create evocative and dynamic renderings. However, the improvement in mechanics lagged behind the “rules” that governed subject matter and its presentation.
Youth ruled, stereotyped characters were expected for instant reader identification. Content was dictated as was composition to allow for logotypes, titles and products. Art directors had the option to treat his finished art as they pleased. They reversed pictures, removed beards, added moustaches, toned down backgrounds, added products and cropped out elements they considered superfluous. These were trespasses on his creative concepts, further rejections of his hard work at even this low level. Nevertheless, they paid the rent, bought oil paints and brushes and put food – such as it was – on the table.
One major problem confronted Hopper in this market-place. He was a very good illustrator. If he had wished to give up getting recognition as a fine artist, he might have eventually ranked with Gibson, Leyendecker, James Montgomery Flagg and N. C. Wyeth. As it was, even with his disgust at prostituting
Gail Levin,
