Edward Hopper. Light and Dark. Gerry Souter
Avenue in the cavernous hall of the 69th Regiment Armory. The 1913 Armory Show would turn the art world on its head and Edward Hopper desperately wanted be a part of the excitement.
The opening of the Armory Show on 17 February 1913 tore into the staid American art scene with 1,250 paintings sculptures and decorative works by more than 300 European and American artists. From Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase to the realist works of the American Ash Can School, there were no limits or boundaries. Critics rushed about seeking the high ground, moral, or creative or both, but mostly followed the popular line, or as one critic wrote:
“It was a good show…but don’t do it again.”
Newspaper cartoonists had a field day with the abstract works.
Following a series of independent art shows in France, England, Germany and Italy, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors International Exhibition of Modern Art suddenly brought the works of “those people across the Atlantic” to the creatively constipated, conservatively conformist art scene that had dominated the United States for decades. It brought to light for a new broad segment of the public those American artists who also practised this lurid internalised alchemy of paint and canvas, or stone and chisel.
During the selection process, the Domestic Exhibition Committee was chaired by William Glackens, one of Henri’s circle, part of the “Eight” show, who contributed regularly to the on-going MacDowell hangings. This committee managed to offend almost everybody by its original invitations for admission requiring originality and a “personal note” in each artist’s work as part of the committee’s guidelines. Hopper was not automatically invited to submit as in the past.
A backlash among American artists finally wedged open the door to submissions by uninvited artists. Hopper, hat in hand and no longer one of the favoured Henri clique, brought two of his 1911 oils, Sailing and Blackwell’s Island. Only Sailing, the jaunty little sailboat, was allowed to be hung.
Unprecedented crowds shouldered their way into the Armory hall. Guffaws of laughter, gasps and curses punctuated the rumbling murmur of the crowd as they passed works by Kandinsky, Picabia, Matisse, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Brancusi, Everett Shinn, John Sloan. The walls were alight with colour and movement.
Like many of the American artists, Hopper surreptitiously hung about near his painting, looking for reactions, listening for comments. Nearby, his old instructor and leader among the classical Realists, William Merritt Chase, huffed and puffed aloud over the “rubbish” on exhibit. From the crowds trudging past, pointing and whispering behind their hands, stepped a textile manufacturer from Manhattan named Thomas F. Victor. He liked the picture of the sailboat, noted its price was $300, and being a successful manufacturer, offered $250. Hopper accepted and a show official affixed a “sold” ticket to the picture’s frame.
Finally, Hopper had sold a painting, something created from his memory and imagination. The $250 sale price is equivalent to $5,000 in 2006 dollars.[13] This is significant money and a jubilant and revitalised Edward Hopper took the train home to Nyack to show his parents that he was finally on the fine art track to success. The legendary Armory Show closed on 15 March. Garrett Hopper, always lingering at the edge of frail health, died on 18 September 1913. Edward had vindicated himself to his father who, considering his own fruitless struggle for success, must have been very pleased for his son.
Edward Hopper had to take stock of his life at this juncture. Realistically, his sale of a painting was more a symbol of the door cracking open than an arrival, a confirmation of his long sought after success as a fine artist. He was past thirty years of age and had developed a facility with the painting medium that obeyed what he chose to place on the canvas. Abstraction and “modernism,” as featured in the Armory Show, held no thrall for him. He had committed himself to realism and the painter’s ability to translate his personality to the selection, presentation, addition and subtraction of elements in a given scene. Now he needed to flush away the past struggle and move on. To begin with, in November 1913, he began documenting his sales in an account book, carefully noting each acquisition of cash, no matter the source. In doing so he came to grips with the illustrative work that he needed to support his painting. His creative vocabulary was in hand and each canvas sold trimmed time from the purgatory of commercial illustration.
In December 1913 Hopper sought out a new and larger studio. He discovered Washington Square in Greenwich Village and a run-down Greek Revival style building at Three Washington Square North facing the park. It had been built in the 1830s and rehabilitated in 1884 for conversion to artists’ studios. Previous artist tenants had included Thomas Eakins, Augustus St Gaudins and William Glackens. He moved into the fourth floor at the top of seventy-four steps into a crude lodging that had no private bathroom or central heating. A coal stove sat in one corner and a glorious skylight lit up the room and leaked during rainstorms.
Hopper’s neighbours were artists of various stripes and one of them, Walter Tittle, had been a former Chase student with Hopper. Their friendship was rekindled and Tittle helped Hopper find illustration jobs. Like it or not, Hopper was dragged into the Bohemian artist scene that had infiltrated the Italian and Irish Greenwich Village neighbourhood, The Washington North building often rang with simultaneous parties that Hopper visited by simply climbing or descending the stairs. He had shunned the riotous behaviour of the Left Bank-Montmartre crowd in Paris, but the proximity and vitality of Greenwich Village gave him some relief from work if it did not inspire him.
31. New York Corner (Corner Saloon), 1913. Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund.
32. The El Station, 1908. Oil on canvas, 51.3 × 74.3 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
33. Railroad Train, 1908. Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, gift of Dr. Fred T. Murphy.
34. Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, 1931. Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 81.5 cm. Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation, Saint Louis.
It is curious that Hopper, usually the tall man in the rear of the photograph separate from the crowd, continued to be sought out by his contemporaries. He was far from the most successful and hardly a gregarious yarn-spinner. His work had been juried out of their shows, or accepted grudgingly. He worked in their shadows, but rarely in their company. He seemed to be seeking a key to their success in the location of their subject matter. “The American Scene” had many possibilities to draw from, and yet Hopper chose to dog the tracks of these artists and then produced works that drew no reviews from critics and did not sell. In the growing vitality of the American art landscape he became the 6ft 5in invisible man.
And yet he continued to be a fixture in their society. If he churned inside, he maintained a placid exterior. There was a dogged certainty about him that seemed to be supported by the brilliant technique he had demonstrated in Henri’s classes and in the casual skills he so disdainfully showed off in his illustrations. His friends and supporters remained loyal throughout his life. During these early days, they seemed to be either patiently waiting for his eventual eruption into fame and recognition, or obtained some relief over the frail condition of their own groping livelihoods through Schadenfreude, watching the self-possessed Hopper fail repeatedly.
Hopper drew on their company, seeking if not approval then acceptance as he had received all his life from his mother and father, Jammes in Paris, Enid Saies, his instructors William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, from his supporter Guy du Bois and from Thomas F. Victor, the Manhattan cloth maker who had liked his painting of the sailboat at the Armory Show. As an actor needs applause, an artist needs acceptance. Every rejection is a rebuke, a dismissal not just of the object but also of the personality behind the interpretation of the subject. During this period from 1913 to 1923, Hopper’s apparent stoicism masked his fear of failure and baffled his contemporaries. At some point, something had
American Institute of Economic Research calculation, http://www.aier.org/index.html