Clapboard houses, solitary diners and gloomy offices - Edward Hopper's paintings have come to represent the loneliness of 20th-century American life. But what is it that makes his work truly great, asks the novelist Maggie Gee
My new novel, The Flood, features a well-known painting by Edward Hopper, Morning Sun. It shows a sturdy woman sitting alone on a wide bed, knees raised, bare-legged in a hitched-up pale pink shift, facing, as if stunned with pleasure, a flood of sunlight from a large bare window that makes her look small. I pretend that the picture is owned by a rich, middle-aged art history student, Lottie Lucas; coveted by her cleaner Faith; and finally received as stolen goods by the cleaner's daughter, the 15-year-old school drop-out Kilda who also, surprisingly, loves it. There is an element of truth in this fantasy. Hopper is one of those painters who, rarely for the 20th century, is esteemed by critics and the general public to almost equal degree.
So what makes Hopper's American scenes, his clapboard houses and brownstones, main streets and cornfields, so hauntingly good, so much better - and deeper - than those of other, not dissimilar painters? Why do his range and grasp exceed those of Charles Burchfield, Andrew Wyeth or Thomas Hart Benton?
A lot of it is to do with the angle and the edges of Hopper's paintings. Sometimes criticised for the "woodenness" of his human subjects, Hopper is in fact a painter who deliberately shows his people from outside, at unguarded moments, bored or dreamy, rarely engaging with the painter's gaze. They are caught flatly, as in the photographic moment, with all the mystery of their thoughts intact, avoiding the layered intrusion of portraiture. More importantly, they are merely small components of a bigger picture. What really interests Hopper, and what makes him a great painter, is his wider subject - not individuals but the human species, perching here on the immensity of earth. Hopper is a painter who shows us how we look in the perspective of the wide, inhuman spaces beyond our inhabited thresholds. And his ordinary people (like the sunlight-worshipping woman in Morning Sun) are caught looking out from their little lives at the beyond, just as he does.
Tension between the familiar and the vast unknown infuses all his pictures, even the most apparently domestic, with excitement. In Office at Night, it is not just the erotically curving hips of the secretary or her sideways, contemplative glance towards her male boss, sitting blankly staring at his work, that makes for drama, it is also the open window on the right through which the warm night wind blows, suggestively bulging the blind.
Thresholds fascinate Hopper. See how many of his pictures make a central feature of verges, doors, porches and, above all, windows. His windows are never neutral. When he views them from the inside, they show more than they ever would in life, as if the scene outside were lit up for a film. The smart, hatted young woman travelling by train and reading what is perhaps a romantic magazine in Compartment C, Car 193 (1938) misses what the window rather improbably frames: an alluring pink sunset, bridge and river that her train is rushing past. Again, in A Woman in the Sun (1962), the naked woman stands in a long rectangle of sunlight from one window while, unseen by her but calling to the viewer, another window reveals a glorious, improbably bright green-and-gold vista of hills that makes everything else inside the room look faded.
When, on the other hand, Hopper is outside the window (and thus, so is the viewer), the people inside are like actors in a sharply illuminated tableau vivant. It is no accident that the picture space surrounding the human drama is usually much bigger than most painters would make it. When magazines reproduce one of his best-known works, Nighthawks, a 1942 picture of a cafe at night, they habitually crop the image, so that it shows only the cafe itself, thus half-destroying the point of Hopper's picture. In the original painting, the lit-up cafe, seen from outside, holding a raddled couple, a waiter and a solitary single man, is made mythic by the oppressive expanse of darkness outside it. Like the bar in Ernest Hemingway's 1933 story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", Hopper (who admired Hemingway) makes his cafe a tiny refuge from the night outside, where there is "nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada", nothing and then nothing, and nothing and then nothing.
Hopper often shows spaces where human needs and wishes are nothing, bearing down on the little places we control. In daylight, he shows waves of fierce golden grass and behind them dark green forests, flowing towards the red petrol pumps of Gas (1940) or the white timber house of Cape Cod Evening (1939), with its pensive couple on the step. The balance between the human and non-human parts of his paintings seems to show that our artifices are fragile, perhaps not here to stay. A startling feature of his paintings adds to this impression: in not one of more than 170 excellent and varied reproductions in Ivo Kranzfelder's Hopper (Taschen) are there any children. Hopper married another painter, Jo Nivison, relatively late, aged nearly 42; they stayed married until he died, but had no children. In this respect also, his pictures seem modern, for the relative scarcity of children is part of the human condition in the developed world in the 21st century.
Hopper is fascinated by cinema and theatre, drawing attention, like Walter Sickert, to the artificial nature of both life and the artist's enterprise. Typically, he is just as interested in the frame that marks the threshold of illusion - the auditorium, the usherettes, the seating itself - as he is in the central spectacle. In Intermission (1963), he shows a woman, waiting for the performance to begin again, pitilessly lit in a row of identical empty seats. New York Movie (1939) focuses on the solitary blonde usherette, dreaming her own story near the exit as a film plays in the dimmed cinema.
In 1964 Hopper became ill and for a while was unable to paint. The following year, with a characteristic sense of formal closure, he painted his last picture, Two Comedians, a theatrical scene that is at once melancholy, in its evocation of mortality, and triumphant because Hopper succeeds in providing a deliberate coda to his life as a painter. It shows two figures taking a bow as they leave the stage, perhaps slightly diffident, the man at the front, pulling the woman forward, the woman indicating him as the principal player. Their faces, though mask-like and with something of the characteristics of a blown-up photograph, are those of the young Jo and Edward Hopper. Within two years, Hopper died in his studio, followed, less than ten months later, by his wife.
Hopper is a great modern painter precisely because, although he admired Rembrandt's effects of light, he abjures the spiritual warmth and intimacy of Rembrandt's portraits. Instead, he portrays the citizens of a cooler, alienated and scientific century, where touching depictions of the nobility of the individual no longer inspire belief. In their place Hopper provides us with an unearthly kind of beauty, the beauty of light on briefly frozen forms, leaving us to imagine both the inner lives of his people, and their stories before and after his still images. "Maybe I am slightly inhuman . . . all I ever wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house," he once said.
Painting sunlight is just what he did in two of his late and, to my mind, greatest paintings, capturing the effect of the sun on a human space from which the human inhabitants have vanished. The earlier work, Rooms by the Sea (1951), shows sunshine flooding into an empty seaside building through a door that opens on to only sea and sky; the second, even more minimal, Sun in an Empty Room (1963), shows two rhomboids of sunlight on an interior wall, with light entering the room through the twin vacancies of a sash window. It is tempting to read the painting, completed four years before Jo and Edward Hopper died, as a haunting visual anticipation of their absence. In returning the human stage to emptiness, Hopper consummated his lifelong vision.
"Edward Hopper" is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 (020 7887 8008) from 27 May to 5 September
Maggie Gee's The Flood is published by Saqi Books (£12.99)
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