Introvert Edward Hopper’s Love Affair with New York City

The Whitney’s new exhibition shows that he found plenty of raw material in this most extroverted of cities.

E dward Hopper’s New York, now at the Whitney Museum, is as frank and rich an exhibition as can be had on an artist so swathed in ambiguity. Hopper (1882–1967) is still the cryptic eminence among American painters. His death was headline news, and news packed with reverence. From the ’30s, he was famous mostly for his New York scenes, with pure, unpopulated cityscapes, and city interiors with one or two people in isolated contemplation. His pictures were, and still are, icons absorbed into the American head.

The Whitney sits on dozens of Hopper’s best paintings, hundreds of his drawings, and ephemera saved by the pack-rat Hoppers, husband and wife. The museum has the curatorial talent, too, to tell — for the first time — the story of Hopper’s life in New York City, his home for nearly 60 years. The Whitney got superb loans, too.

As a man, and the show is partly biographical, Hopper was dour, pithy, and inscrutable, but so are his paintings. He ought not to make the stuff of spectacle, but this exhibition is spectacular and should be seen. So much has been written about Hopper. It’s hard for new scholarship to startle. His New York is so different from the place we experience today. What can his art tell us today?

Hopper was born in Nyack, about 30 miles north of the city, to prosperous but not rich parents, proper Victorians focused on family, education, and culture. Hopper wanted to be an artist from his teens. He and his parents agreed that, as a career move, this meant commercial art. He moved to the city in 1908. He studied illustration but also painting with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at the New York School of Art.

From 1913 to 1967 he lived at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, first in a tiny apartment-studio, then, after his 1924 marriage to fellow artist Josephine (Jo) Nivison, to a not-much-bigger apartment in the same building. There they stayed. The couple had no children.

Hopper worked as a freelance illustrator well into the ’20s — his 40s. He made enough money to support a painting career that took years to leave the runway.

Two on the Aisle sold for $1,500 in 1927. Stephen Clark became an assiduous patron. Clark was a Singer sewing-machine heir whose art came to include a dozen paintings by Matisse, Van Gogh’s Night Café, and an idiosyncratic collection of work by Eakins, Homer, Picasso, and Manet as well as American folk art.

Clark later chaired the board of MoMA. His bought a Hopper painting for MoMA in 1926 when the museum was new and bleeding-edge. In 1933, MoMA gave Hopper a retrospective. Early Sunday Morning came to the Whitney in 1931, purchased with money from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the museum’s founder. Other museums soon followed suit.

Hopper’s New York is organized both chronologically and by theme. I’d quibble with First Impressions, a long wall of Hopper drawings and paintings that I’d call juvenile work, all owned by the Whitney. They’re from the late 1890s to around 1911: two or three drawings of figures, a Hopper self-portrait from around 1906, and the substantial Tugboat with Black Smokestack, from 1908, and Blackwell’s Island, from 1911. As a young man, Hopper visited Paris three times, with his first trip, in 1908, lasting a year. The long wall leads to a gallery with Le Bistro, from 1909, a Paris picture, and a space devoted to Hopper’s magazine illustrations. These date from around 1907 to 1920.

This is an immense amount of space to give to very modest things making good but basic points. Hopper, we see, was a capable teenage draughtsman. His early paintings are good Ash Can responses to Robert Henri’s views of New York. Hopper focuses on mundane city motifs and already, at least in his paintings, zones the human figure out of the story more often than not. In Paris, he lightens his palette and condenses it to a minimum. I would have put First Impressions, the Paris art, and Hopper’s letters from Paris in one small space and situated Hopper in the context of his Ash Can elders.

Hopper on paper, as a commercial illustrator and etcher, is next. There are lots of Hopper front covers for Morse’s Dial, a snazzy periodical produced by a New York ship-repair company as a house organ for employees. Though Hopper became the lead designer, the Dial had a signature style: abstracted backgrounds, saturated though flat colors, odd angles, and unnerving heights. Ships, after all, bob and weave. The Queen Mary is one thing. It’s a floating palace. Cargo ships have less luxe interiors and travel to and from a harbor’s least elegant neighborhoods. In magazine illustration, less is more. Hopper learned how to delete to reach essential though nuanced points.

Renown first arrived via his etchings. About a dozen are in the exhibition, made between 1918 and 1922. It’s odd to look at these — eerie, cryptic, black-and-white, and landlocked — and the bright magazine covers, in the same space. It’s a smart, though unmelodious contrast. In etching, Hopper found his aesthetic. The Open Window, East Side Interior, and Evening Wind, are three etchings, all with harsh contrasts of black and white, depicting women alone, looking outside, and both enraptured and unsettled. The figures are taut and solid.

Hopper learned a lot about making figures in his illustration work. He also found a sense of the pregnant moment that worked for him. Night Shadows, from 1921, is probably his signature etching. A single figure walks at night in a modest city neighborhood. We’re looking down, steeply. Shadows — intangible, but we see them — have a supernatural force, as does simple architecture.

A section on windows and one on Hopper’s horizontal architecture show us, finally, some heavy-hitter paintings. I know Manhattan Bridge Loop, from 1928, since it belongs to the Addison Gallery, where I was director. It was a gift from Stephen Clark, who so admired Hopper that he bought work by him to place in important public collections.

Hopper did so many horizontal cityscapes because he preferred to suggest infinite lateral space rather than longitudinal space. Though he lived in an age of New York’s skyscrapers, he never depicted them. Until the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and the Chrysler Building, New York wasn’t a place that aimed for the heights. Chicago was. Hopper liked the squares and rectangles of buildings he could see from sidewalk to cornice.

In From Williamsburg Bridge, from 1928, the cornice, entablature, and roof ornaments of even a modest building, four windows across, create an elegant, grand look, like the prow of a ship. There’s something quaint about it, and about the Whitney’s Early Sunday Morning. They’re real places Hopper studied closely during his near-constant walks around Manhattan, but they’re heavy with nostalgia, in part because people are either few and far between or absent altogether.

The Open Window is more intriguing, or titillating, since Hopper turns voyeur and intruder in private places. Of course, it cuts both ways. Hopper’s disembodied, all-seeing eye might be looking in, but in House at Dusk, from 1935, and Approaching a City, from 1946, both exteriors of buildings with rows of anonymous windows, it’s not unreasonable to think people are inside looking out, at us.

Hopper pushes the theme of the exposed interior in paintings from the ’40s into the ’60s. His work from the etchings in the early ’20s through the ’30s is part of a new movement, in literature, film, and painting, to take us from Park Avenue salons and drawing-room drama to what might be happening behind slummier windows and doors. Hopper was, after all, part of the zeitgeist that gave us the ’30s play and, later, movies such as Dead End and Golden Boy.

A section called “Reality and Fantasy” explores Hopper’s figure interiors that seem set in surreal space, almost stage sets, with a solitary woman looking out the window. Morning Sun, from 1952, modeled by his wife, sitting on a bed, a rectangle of sunlight hitting her, is one. Some of these paintings, such as Morning in a City, from 1944, are among the largest he painted and look like scenes on a movie screen. Even works such as Intermission, set in a theater, convey the single figure — a seated woman — as lonely, if not trapped.

Critics, art historians, and collectors tend to look at Hopper as a painter whose basic vocabulary dates to the Depression. Depressions are depressing, as is isolation, and isolation and loneliness slide into alienation. These figures aren’t only women. Office in a Small City is set in New York, a city truncated by a male office worker’s placement in a white box-of-an-office with big windows. Hopper in New York doesn’t go with conventional thinking. It lets us do our own thinking.

All of these figures, men and women, seem trapped. Hopper’s New York isn’t gone but vastly truncated. His empty streets and rooms with single figures have a new power from the Covid lockdowns. His work from the ’30s has an Old Master look. Often the buildings date from the late 19th century. The Age of Covid, built on lockdowns and forced isolation, gives his later work a contemporary twist.

“Great art is the outward expression of the inner life of the artist,” Hopper wrote in 1953. “No amount of skillful invention can replace the inner life of the imagination.” As enigmas go, this is a relief, since we’re not psychic, or at least I’m not. Hopper put his own world at our disposal to fashion according to our own. Hopper’s New York encourages us to take advantage of this freedom.

There are so many other things I loved about the exhibition. Hopper was thought to be humorless to the point of seeming weaned on a pickle, as Alice Longworth did not say about Calvin Coolidge. Hopper actually had a dry sense of humor. He must have had a chuckle when he painted Drug Store, a great painting from 1928 at the MFA in Boston. A modest pharmacy advertises prescriptions, drugs, and, in movie-premiere lighting, Ex-Lax. The window’s decorated and lit to look like a burlesque stage.

New archives plumb the Hoppers’ fight with New York University, which tried to evict them from their apartment in 1947 so it could build a new law school. The couple at that point had lived and worked there for nearly 25 years. The city was happy to agree. Hopper was a conservative Republican his entire life. I’m delighted he fought and won, beating no less than Robert Moses. I like it when David beats Goliath.

Two Comedians, Hopper’s last painting, depicts two figures, a man and woman, dressed as harlequins as they take a bow on stage. Hopper finished it in 1966 and claimed it depicts him and his wife. I’ve always adored it. I wrote about it a few years ago when Barney Ebsworth’s estate sold it at auction. It’s rarely seen. Frank Sinatra once owned it, and now it’s in a private collection. Jo Hopper died a few months after Hopper. It’s nice to see Hopper’s gesture of acknowledgement, even gratitude.

I enjoyed the catalogue. Kim Conaty, one of the curators, wrote a good essay surveying Hopper’s career and how he navigated New York. Kirsty Bell’s essay examined Hopper’s art depicting Washington Square. Darby English’s essay is more impressionistic but important in parsing Hopper’s economical but revealing comments on his own work. Shorter essays looking at Hopper and the theater and other sections in the show are good, too.

I saw the big Hopper retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris ten or 15 years ago. The French, of course, tried to nab him, at least aesthetically. Hopper’s New York rights the ship and beautifully complements the Whitney’s own Hopper’s Drawings show, done a few years ago.