Still life

High show illuminates the evolution of Hopper’s distinctive style



There is a quality to Edward Hopper’s paintings that imbues America with a dark, melancholy glamour. His images are inherently seductive without losing sight of the banality and desperation beneath their hypnotic compositions.

Hopper’s painterly signature is unmistakable. The matte, somber colors, the buildings and people devoid of fussy detail. The stark, desolate buildings on wind-licked plains looking like lifeboats floating in an endless sea of prairie and solitude. City or country, depopulated or populated, the Hopper landscape is famously, consistently his own undeniably melancholy creation.

The features of Hopper’s landscape may change, from the rural South that spawned the defiant African-American woman framed against an expanse of open land in “South Carolina Morning,” (1955) to the row of lonely shop fronts in “Early Sunday Morning” (1930). But the lonely timbre of Hopper’s output endures, cutting across time and place.

Both images are featured in the High Museum’s A Matter of Time: Edward Hopper from the Whitney Museum of American Art, an exhibition of 17 works, including brooding, exquisite paintings like “Second Story Sunlight,” which exemplify the sexual malaise that infected so many of his images. All but one of the works have been borrowed from the Whitney, where the artist received his first solo show, in January 1920 at the ripe age of 37. The museum is also where Hopper’s widow Josephine ultimately bequeathed her husband’s estate.

For many, the 10 paintings and seven watercolors (several of which add little to the Hopper mystique) on display will feel disappointingly meager.

Hopper’s painterly legacy — the isolation that infects his work — is best glimpsed when the work is presented en masse and the consistency of his vision can be truly appreciated. Despite a paucity of work, Matter of Time manages to at least touch upon the various ways Hopper expressed those themes; by painting buildings as if they were animate, living things, and people as one-step-away from granite gargoyles, frozen in lonely contemplation.

The value of a show like A Matter of Time is not in displaying the Hopper imprint in numerous examples. Instead, this show demonstrates the unique features of Hopper’s style by offering several examples of works where it is not in evidence.

On one hand, for instance, there are pretty but inert watercolors like the 1929 work “The Battery” done of a Charleston, S.C., park lined with benches and a row of palm trees. Though the image demonstrates Hopper’s interest in depopulated spaces, there is none of the brooding emptiness of later works like his famous “Early Sunday Morning.” “Cabin” (1929), another watercolor of a keening wooden shack, shows that primitive structure surrounded by trees and vegetation. The work is shocking for its unexceptional qualities, so bland and anonymous it could be the work of any Sunday painter.

But images like “Cabin” become meaningful when one sees the nascent Hopper touch in another watercolor hung nearby, “Automobile near a Cabin,” also from 1929. In that image, the top of a black car can be glimpsed in the distance behind a brown house. Unlike the primitive cabin enveloped by wild growth, this building seems to float in a sea of nothingness, with no trees, shrubs or soil to anchor it. The black car bespeaks a human presence but none is visible. A dramatic leap is evident, from a simple, accurate rendition of a building to a mood-drenched, conceptual image.

Hopper used innocuous elements of modern life — clapboard farmhouses, a woman sunbathing, a row of storefronts — to suggest something profoundly disquieting about the American landscape. The artist’s wide-open spaces are not majestic and powerful in the exuberantly patriotic John Ford and Ansel Adams sense, but consuming and alienating. Was Hopper’s goal to capture a physical landscape as it actually appeared, or did he merely use the act of painting to capture an unwavering mood?

While some images in Matter of Time attest to the astounding magic of a great artist developing his signature style, other images are simply interesting for what they reveal about the artist at different stages of his career.

Two self-portraits, for instance, are like night and day in what they show of the artist’s ripening temperament. The first, done between 1904 and 1906 when the artist was still a student at the New York School of Art, shows a serious young man whose stern features are emphasized by the painting’s enveloping black background.

Across the gallery is a shockingly different view of Hopper, now in his 40s, in a 1925-1930 self-portrait of a pleasant, but ordinary-looking man in a brown fedora. Gone is the inflated self-seriousness of youth. The grave black backdrop of a both epic and unsure future in the first portrait has given way to something more grounded. In the second portrait, Hopper has transformed into a man firmly anchored by the place he lived for 54 years, standing in a Greenwich Village apartment hallway. Hopper’s face is now the kindly, almost bland face of a well-fed American man.

Perhaps Hopper realized that a seemingly ordinary image could convey far more depth and gravity than the self-conscious scowl and moody chiaroscuro of his earlier self-portrait. It’s a discovery that has left us with a body of work that is profound, not in spite of but because of its haunting simplicity.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com