Edward Hopper. Gerry Souter
green carpet with a hot rectangle of window light pinned to it. The brown of the bed frame recedes, but all the other planes come forward giving the room a restless, unfinished appearance. The disconsolate girl is a leftover from an event having taken place in a lonely dreamscape. Like the couple in Le Bistrot, she has no identity. They are all symbols, the first in a long line of Hopper’s haunted subjects.
Once again, Robert Henri’s “Ash Can” artists organised a show to run from 1–27 April 1910 in a former warehouse on West 35th Street. This Exhibition of Independent Artists not only flew in the face of New York’s art academia, it overlapped with the dates of a show at the National Academy of Design. The exhibition offered wall space to artists for a fee of $10 for one painting and a bargain $18 for two. This reduced price opportunity to show with some of the most well known of the “Ash Can” artists lured in 344 entries. Among them was Edward Hopper.
Again, his pinch-penny existence limited him to a single entry and he chose Le Louvre et la Seine, an early French painting with its shimmering impressionist palette from 1907. Dragging out this retro work was almost an act of self-destruction. Almost any of his 1909 canvases would have at least showed his move towards a more personal aesthetic.
The show was well-reviewed and, once again, he remained invisible to the critics. Stubborn to the end, Hopper nursed his pennies and churned out commercial illustrations to earn cash for yet another expedition to Paris.
The RMS Adriatic docked at Plymouth, England on 11 May 1910, and a sober Edward Hopper disembarked knowing he had only his own finances and references to fall back upon. Once in Paris, he took a cheap room at the Hôtel des Ecoles in the Latin Quarter. But he remained only a week before following in Robert Henri’s footsteps of the previous year and boarding the train to Madrid. He played the tourist, wandering through the sights and sounds, writing home and attending a “sickening” bullfight, of which one scene ended up considerably later in an etching.
The thrall of Europe had faded. The delights of Paris had diminished and his final trip abroad ended in departure from Cherbourg on 1 July aboard the Cincinnati, a steamer of the Hamburg-American Line. He had not found the financial and worldly success in foreign travel that Henri had discovered. The trips abroad had actually changed his life for ever, but, in 1910, facing a return to the rigour of New York, the endless grind of commercial illustration and hunting for an outlet for his brilliant skills as a painter, young Edward had no clue as to his future.
On his Terms
Hopper had a lot on his plate. He was “reduced” to trudging from one art and advertising agency to another with his portfolio, trying to peddle his skills as an illustrator to art directors he considered, for the most part, to be Philistines.
He thought this work to be demeaning and beneath him. The illustrator’s market in the early 20th century consisted of hundreds of popular magazines, niche market magazines, trade journals, advertisements, story illustrations, and posters.
Illustrating for cash was also a thief of time. Normally a slow starter under any circumstances, Hopper’s output of paintings dwindled to two in 1911. The oil Sailing (opposite) depicts a “Knockabout sloop rig – jib and mainsail taking up most of the canvas…”, in Hopper’s description. It is a subject painted from memory of his early days on the Hudson River. Again, using a minimum of strokes, the open cockpit sailboat is leaning hard over to port with its sails full, leaving a pale wake on an almost opaque sea. The sails and sky are heavily painted, covering a self-portrait that just peeps through to the naked eye if you are looking for it.
The other painting, Blackwell’s Island, is a dark and moody affair with a composition that recalls Le Bistrot, but with the opposite effect. Its provenance demonstrates Hopper’s desire to crack the code and step into the limelight. Robert Henri had arrived triumphant from Europe in 1901 to settle in New York. From the window of his apartment on East 58th Street, he had a view of Blackwell’s Island in the East River and painted a picture postcard winter scene complete with ice floes. In 1909, George Bellows, one of Henri’s anointed stars, chose the island, highlighting the Queensborough Bridge with the busy Manhattan waterfront in the foreground. In 1910, Julius Golz – another Henri favourite – won critical praise at the Independents’ Exhibition for his stab at Blackwell’s Island.
Sailing, 1911.
Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm.
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Yonkers, 1916.
Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 73.9 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
Having moved from his studio among the prostitutes on 14th Street, Hopper found space at 53 East 59th Street very near Robert Henri’s studio. Henri and two of his acolytes had found success with Blackwell’s Island and so, it appears, might Hopper. He was aware of James MacNeil Whistler, whose pictures were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1910, and chose an approach to the island that reflected Whistler’s Aestheticism.
Whistler’s moody tonalism was in direct opposition to the Impressionists. In fact, Whistler’s apparent move to the past, the Nocturnes, are closer in spirit to modern art than is Impressionism. The concentration in the Nocturnes on purely formal values of colour and line traces a direct descent to the development of abstraction in the early 20th century. His use of thinned oil paints applied spontaneously to create images from his memory must have especially appealed to Hopper.
In Hopper’s Blackwell’s Island, the scene is moonlit and composed in the manner of Le Bistrot with the bridge span occupying the left side of the canvas. A tug boat chugs in midstream beneath the Queensborough Bridge and lights wink on in houses scattered along both banks. A few stabs of zinc white create a single reflection of moonlight, grabbing the painting’s almost geographic centre. It was with paintings such as Blackwell’s Island as well as many of Hopper’s later works that abstract painters acknowledged a kinship in use of colour, line, and planes.
If Edward had entertained the idea that the much-painted Blackwell’s Island would be his entry into the more successful company of his former schoolmates, he missed his chance. Robert Henri decided to pick up the Independent Artists concept one more time and produced a series of unjuried shows at the MacDowell Club at 108 West 59th Street. He designed his new programme around exhibits of eight to twelve artists showing for two weeks at a time. The series of shows began in November 1911, and Hopper’s turn to exhibit was scheduled for 22 February to 5 March 1912. The artists showing with him were Guy du Bois (Hopper’s personal champion), George Bellows, Leon Kroll, Mountford Coolidge, Randall Davey, May Wilson Preston, and Rufus J. Dryer. Hopper brought five oils to the exhibit’s bare walls: River Boat, Valley of the Seine, Le Bistrot (with an Americanised title: The Wine Shop), British Steamer and – the only piece of “American” art – the jaunty little sloop, Sailing.
Guy du Bois, who must have invested quite a bit of personal vouching for Hopper to get him in after the last French debacle, was most likely stunned.
Once again, Hopper sold nothing and was rendered invisible by the critics. Once again, he trudged back home with his shopworn French pictures and began looking for illustration work. How is it possible for an intelligent, gifted person to keep pushing a product that nobody wants? He had already followed Henri’s footsteps across Europe three times. He moved his studio to an address just down the street from Henri. He even painted the same subject as Henri. He had great friends and supporters among his former schoolmates. Moreover, the idea of lugging his portfolio of illustration samples door to door hunting for jobs drawing pictures of suspenders, straw hats, debutantes, polo matches, deskbound bosses, and muscular stevedores was anathema to him.
Edward Hopper wanted success but it had to come on his terms. After being the hero for the first twenty years of his life – the perfect son, the star pupil, the best prankster, the gifted technician – he needed to maintain that level of applauded accomplishment. The voice he had developed so far was one of minimals, of impressions. He joked