Everyone knows what an Edward Hopper painting is about. He didn’t. A new biography says he was an unreliable narrator of his own work; the account books in the Whitney say he was hardly the narrator at all.
Why we’re pointing you there
Louis Shadwick’s Edward Hopper: A Life came out from Yale this week, the first full biography in thirty-one years, and its claim is that the solitary American original was a career-long act of self-invention. Intellicurean takes the claim seriously and then goes somewhere the biography doesn’t: to five dime-store account books in which Hopper drew each finished picture beside its price while his wife, Josephine, wrote down what it was about, naming the figures and inventing their evenings. From there the essay follows the caption outward: to the one letter in Hopper’s own hand that uses the word “lonely,” and what he used it of; to a tweet in the first week of lockdown that turned four sunlit pictures into images of confinement; and to the image models that will now produce “a Hopper” on request and always make it sad.
What we liked most is the patience of the looking. The essay takes three famous canvases and reads them with the margins cut off, asking what is actually in the paint and what has been written beside it for ninety years, and it treats the painter’s own shrug, that the loneliness thing is overdone, not as evasion but as the most honest thing an artist can say about meaning. Where it ends, with what became of the account books and of the woman who kept them, we’ll leave to the essay.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
Edward Hopper’s world-famous, instantly recognizable paintings articulate an idiosyncratic view of modern life, unfolding in a world of lonely lighthouses, gas stations, movie theaters, bars and hotel rooms. With his impressive subjects, independent pictorial vocabulary and virtuoso play of colors, Hopper’s work continues to this day to color our memory and imaginary of the United States in the first half of the 20th century.
oil paintings. These paintings testify to the artist’s great interest in the effects of color and his mastery in depicting light and shadow, at work whether the artist was painting alienated figures in dreamlike interiors or desolate American landscapes.
Isolation was a persistent theme in Hopper’s art and life. Was he dogged by isolation or did he pursue it? ‘Did anybody really know this silent, non-communicative man?’ asked Raphael Soyer in a 1981 interview, 14 years after Hopper’s death. His friends recollected a cynical and taciturn artist, self-doubting, introspective and distrustful of fame. But before Hopper became the painter of lonely figures in all-night diners, he was the illustrator of raucous party scenes and smiling couples waltzing together at summer fêtes.
