Edward Hopper's Secret WorldHis classic American scenes hint at dark emotions.

Remarks from the Fray:

Edward Hopper was the quiet poet of understatement and misdirection. No one ever composed his pictures with such seemingly effortless craftiness.

Take Nighthawks, for instance. Notice the way Hopper achieves his effects. There is a difference between the painting's Nodal Point (the point where the lines of the painting converge) and the Focal Point (the place where the eye is finally drawn to). The long insistent diagonal of the cafeteria crosses with the diagonal of the street on the left side of the painting. Normally X marks the spot, and that intersection where the planes collide is where the eye would typically be directed, but Hopper grabs the attention away from the left of the picture and pulls the eye to the extreme right via the acid yellow lighting and the lady in the red dress. One of the reasons he can mute the focus on the streetcorner is that he cheats on the perspective, making the sidewalk impossibly wide and the street impossibly narrow. The vamp is definitely the Focal Point of the painting, but her distance from the visual center helps make her isolation more pronounced.

So too do our eyes follow the diagonal trail of reflected in the Automat's window. However, the lights lead to nowhere, a black void, and so our eye drops down to the girl framed in shadow drinking coffee alone; the night is cold enough that she's still wearing one glove (note the tiny radiator trying to heat the big room with plate glass windows). Again, this distance between the Nodal Point and the Focal Point helps reinforce the subjects loneliness and alienation.

In Night Shadows, the Nodal Point of the drawing is actually out of the picture frame. It is the invisible streetlamp, which we only know by the way it illuminates the streetcorner.

Hopper has a way of revealing his secrets discreetly. What looks to be an offhand detail is actually a finely wrought piece of pictorial construction. In the Mansard Roof, it's the way the yellowing windowshade is framed by blue shadows and bookended by red chimneys. It's the way the fluid watercolors capture the fluttering awnings. Hopper's masterpiece Easter Sunday Morning (not shown in this slide show, sadly) is a veritable instruction manual on how to compose a painting.

Mr. Benfey mentions a connection to Hemingway in the Nighthawks, and I think the comparison is apt. Both the writer and the painter shared an economy of style, clean and uncluttered, with a sense of deeper meanings lurking below the surface. But I think he pins Nighthawks on the wrong story. I always likened it to Hemingway's short story a "A Clean, Well Lighted Place." I've always read the diner as offering a kind of sanctuary for these lonely city dwellers. These are not barflies, after all. Its a testament to how important it is to have a nice quiet place to go late at night when things are tough and you just need a cup of coffee. The beauty of Hopper is that he's open to varius interpretations, so much so that plays have been written about what is transpiring in that diner.

--Utek1

(To reply, click here.)

The links that the author attempts to draw between surrealism and Hopper seem a little questionable to me. If Hopper is indeed interested in "synthesizing dream and reality", he errs much farther on the side of reality than any surrealist, opting for subtle touches. He is painting a realistic world where the dream world lurks just under the surface, rather than a dream world in which reality is jumbled and recombined. Further, given how carefully composed Hopper's Automat is, I fail to see any connection to automatic writing.

De Chirico is NOT a surrealist; he's a metaphysical painter […] De Chirico's most famous paintings were all made before there was such a thing as Surrealism. Breton and the surrealists loved this early work, made him a member, and then excommunicated him almost immediately, when they saw his work of the 1920s. For his part, de Chirico thought the surrealists grossly misinterpreted his paintings, and he was right.

That said, there are some interesting parallels between de Chirico and Hopper, but they need to be pointed out cautiously and interrogated a little more, because de Chirico and Hopper are doing very different things with similar devices. They include the play with frames within frames, the transformation of cityscape into heavy, mute, empty stagesets, and the use of objects as empty signifiers. Yet, its also important to see the divergences, particularly the way Hopper avoids the raking, disorienting perspective of de Chirico, puts real people into his isolating world, rather than automaton dress dummies, etc.

--sanstelos

(To reply, click here.)

(5/11)