Edward Hopper: an American Love Story is a January 2024 documentary shown on the PBS American Masters series. It's an interesting program, proceeding in cautious public TV style diachronically: it starts with Hopper's birth in Nyack, New York and proceeds longitudinally, organized around places where the artist spent time: Paris, Gloucester, Massachusetts, New York, and, at last, Cape Cod. The show's emphasis is on the fraught relationship between Hopper and his talented, loquacious wife Jo Nivenson (Nivenson was also Hopper's lifelong model). The program checks all the boxes currently de riguer, albeit in a tasteful, low-key manner. PBS is committed to telling the stories of people of color; Hopper, a huge, soft Caucasian man (he was 6'5"), was, to quote, Procol Harum, "a paler shade of white" -- he's the whitest White man you can imagine. So issues as to the great migration of Blacks from the South, Civil Rights and the like are. as far as PBS is concerned, present by their absence: someone notes, a couple times, that Hopper seemingly had no interest in social justice or race relations. It's a bit like saying that because Hopper didn't paint elephants, he had no interest in elephants -- this is probably true enough but could be expanded to an indefinite number of things that Hopper chose not to paint or rather never thought to paint. There's a faint gesture toward issues of gender now fashionable: an image of a disconsolate half-nude woman sprawled next to a bed is said to represent Hopper in the guise of a young woman. (This seems implausible to me, but it's a nice try.) The show implies, and, indeed, sometimes, tells us explicitly that Jo essentially sacrificed her talent and much of her life on the altar of the Great Man's solitary egoism. This is a mundane observation but, probably, a fair one. Hopper was undoubtedly a difficult man and ended his career in a period in which it was virtually impossible for the art world cognoscenti to appreciate his work -- the galleries and museums in 1965 were filled with other enormous monuments to masculine ego, the heroically sized abstractions of artists like Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clifford Still, and others. That said, Hopper will outlast those artists in fame and popular appeal. This is because his work is deliberately and, even, sometimes oppressively ambiguous. Take, as an example, Hopper's famous "Nighthawks", the people seated in a strangely enclosed diner on an empty city street, apparently long after midnight. Viewed in one light, the painting depicts loneliness and the isolation of people in the very midst of the teeming city; the picture can be thought of depicting the existential crisis that beset certain intellectuals, mostly French, in the post-War period. But viewed in another light, the group of people on display in the diner window form a small community -- they have come together in what Hemingway called in his famous story "a clean, well-lighted place" and together they make a sort of stand against the encroaching darkness. The weird-looking counter man, bending down next to two enormous silver coffee canisters shaped like bombs, is either a hundred years old or fourteen -- he's a wizened pygmy stooping to serve the people at the counter. Is this an image of despair or fortitude or, even, defiance? Of course, it is all of these things.
Hopper's great paintings are like frames from a movie. A narrative is always implied. We know that Hopper, who suffered from what might now be called clinical depression, treated his melancholy by spending hours and days, even, weeks watching movies. The effect of some of his pictures is like that of Cindy Sherman's series of photographs "Untitled Film Stills" -- we are seeing a fragment of a story, but one with a plot that can't exactly be inferred from this single frame. In many of his pictures, there is a strong subcurrent of voyeurism, also, of course, an aspect of film-going: we are privy to things that really aren't supposed to be seen. (Hopper says that he walked the city glimpsing people in their rooms framed by the darkness or riding the El train past lit dwellings, kitchens and living rooms and bed chambers.) The theme of voyeurism is made thematic in many pictures -- Hopper likes to show people gazing out of windows which take the form of rectangular perspectives that are themselves like movie screens or painted canvases. For some reason, most of Hopper's female figures give the impression of being prostitutes -- they have hardened masculine features and voluptuous figures, often clad in form-fitting garments. Again, we have the impression of seeing something forbidden. The esthetic is derived from the Kodak snapshot and its antecedents. His compositions, often, have an arbitrary character. In this respect, he follows in the footsteps of Degas, a painter whose works sometimes seem to have the capricious framing of a photograph covertly taken. (Hopper studied in Paris and was intimately familiar with the work of the great Impressionists.) Curiously, Hopper's rather gaunt-looking Victorian houses and buildings with their curious mansard roofs are more expressive than the isolated people that he portrays. Each house or structure is a sort of self-portrait with dark staring eyes and a desolate weathered visage. In all of his empty paintings, the viewer has the sense that something dramatic has just happened or is about to happen. Hopper was a versatile artist and, in fact, the range of things that he depicts in his paintings is quite impressive. In his last canvas, "The Comedians", he depicts a couple dressed in the manner of commedia dell'arte figures, a man and woman acting the role of either Harlequin or Pierrot and Columbine. This is an ancient subject harkening back to Callot and Watteau's paintings. (One of Watteau's last pictures, his 1719 image of the jester, Pierrot, is a precursor to Hopper's painting; Max Beckmann's spooky "Columbine", also a very late painting, explores the commedia subject through it's female protagonist). The PBS documentary interprets the two figures as representing Hopper and the long-suffering Jo, a plausible explication of this enigmatic image that seems to show the two jesters making a final curtain call. It's valedictory, an adieux to painting and to life as well and demonstrates that Hopper works within the mainstream of European figurative art. There are several excellent and very moving lectures on Hopper by the great art critic and historian Alexander Nemerov. Nemerov interprets a berserk painting by Hopper showing several riders astride horses galloping at full-tilt into a strange shadowy tunnel in Central Park. In the same lecture, Nemerov explicates a sailing painting from 1939, "The Groulnd Swell" (also featured in the PBS show), as an ominous commentary on the imminent war in Europe. Nemerov's lectures are at the opposite pole to the rather staid and academic PBS documentary -- Nemerov lectures like Emerson; he's an exemplar of the ecstatic truth, favoring bald declaration over proof or argumentation. But he provides an excellent counterpoint to the PBS documentary. You can find his lectures on Hopper on You-Tube.
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