MODERN ART intertwines a life-long battle between four mavericks of the art world, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty, and the preciousness of life. Based on the writings of Peter Fuller, adapted by his son.
Before the shut down MODERN ART had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time! In consideration of social isolation it may be a good time to revisit Peter Fuller’s essay Edward Hopper: The Loneliness Thing.
EDWARD HOPPER: THE LONELINESS THINGs
By Peter Fuller, 1981
Edward Hopper, a large man as taciturn as the figures in many of his paintings, used to grumble that those who talked about his paintings overdid ‘the loneliness thing.’ Nonetheless, his best pictures seem to depict the experience of isolation: Hopper’s people are lost within themselves even when they are in the presence of others.
Hopper did not like being called ‘an American scene painter’ either: and there it is easier to go along with him. His famous pictures of a man standing by a row of petrol pumps outside a rural filling station, or of shop facades in Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, on a Sunday morning are as concerned with a certain ‘structure of feeling’ as with topography. But that ‘structure of feeling’ is ‘the loneliness thing.’
You feel it in Hopper’s masterpieces, like Nighthawks, with its four jaded figures in the illuminated interior of an all-night cafe, and in many of the pictures of office workers, travellers, hotel guests and theatre people. You can hardly avoid it, either, in the compelling studies of anonymous women glimpsed dressing, or undressing, in the cold but intimate spaces of brilliantly lit bedrooms. It even pervades the pictures of isolated buildings by railroads or the later images of empty rooms in which no men or women appear at all. These too seem somehow dominated by the absence of the figure.
It would, in fact, be hard to say anything convincing about Hopper without stressing ‘the loneliness thing.’ His paintings are so conspicuously about the vacuity, sadness, futility, emptiness and, yes, experience of alienation on the fringes of ‘the American dream.’ But how does this relate to the qualities of his work and to his stature as an artist?
According to many contemporary American critics, Hopper has been crippled by his preoccupations. For example, a standard text on American art, declares that ‘pictorially’ Hopper was as ‘limited, average, and undistinguished as the humiliated landscape, the dilapidated and gloomily picturesque architecture and the drab urban scenes’ that he made the ‘stock-in-trade’ of his subject matter.
Hopper is an embarrassment to American partisans of modernism and avantgardism. Their art history books and the lay-out of their modern art museums are designed to prove that all that is of value in recent art has been created by handing down the torch of stylistic innovation first ignited by Cezanne. They assume this was borne aloft in a triumphant, historicist progression through the early European modernist movements and on, into the achievements of American abstract expressionism and its successors. But it was just this development Hopper refused. He objected to the ‘papery qualities’ of Cezanne, and was not significantly affected by anything that happened later. And yet Hopper clearly could not be dismissed as some hill-billy regionalist or dumb ‘primitive’.
When Henry Geldzahler organized his massive 1970 exhibition of American art since 1940 at the Metropolitan Museum, Hopper was the only outsider at the modernist garden party. But he was hardly a welcome guest. Not one of the copious critical essays in the catalogue so much as mentioned his name.
More recently, however, even the art institutions have begun to acknowledge that modernism is in crisis. What once looked like Hopper’s weaknesses are now acclaimed as his strengths. He is praised as the painter of ‘modern life,’ par excellence. Alternatively, he is interpreted as a great, neutral ‘realist’ who refused style altogether, and simply transcribed, exactly, the appearance of contemporary reality.
But these estimates of Hopper won’t stand up either. There are many bad paintings about ‘modern life.’ Hopper himself painted some of them: he is, in fact, a very uneven artist. Not more than fifteen of his pictures are wholly convincing, and there are works in this exhibition so second-rate that it is hard to believe they were made by the man who produced, say, Nighthawks. But those Hoppers which approach the condition of masterpieces are certainly not the ones in which he most faithfully transcribes appearances. The working drawings included in this exhibition demonstrate how carefully his best paintings were constituted-, all sorts of disparate observed elements are used to construct a single picture. The artist’s role is anything but ‘neutral.’ The case of Edward Hopper appears more complex than either the modernists or their opponents allow.
Hopper was taught by Robert Henri, a turn-of-the-century American artist with a deep admiration for Velasquez, Hals, Goya, Daumier and the pre-impressionist pictures of Manet and Degas. Henri wanted an art saturated in ‘modern life’: but he tried to realize this through physiognomy—the expressions of his subjects. He was a versatile portraitist of men and women in every condition. Henri opposed aestheticism and revived the concerns of earlier nineteenth century American painters, like the great Thomas Eakins, who had tried to root their art in the scientific study of the body. Hopper thought Eakins greater than Manet. Under Henri, Hopper learned to draw the figure; the transformations of its expressions and poses were the first expressive language he mastered.
But in 1906 Hopper went to Paris and encountered impressionism. All he had learned led him to resist the dissolution of concrete forms into hazes of light. Nonetheless, in his painting he began to rely not just on the body (and the world) as objects of perception, but also upon elements drawn from the processes of perception themselves. In particular, transformations of luminosity and of depicted space joined
Edward Hopper, Automat, 1926, Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa those of the figure as part of the material upon which he drew to make his pictures.
After 1910, Hopper never crossed the Atlantic again. But it took him a long time to integrate what he had learned during his American apprenticeship with the discoveries of his visits to Paris. For a time, he stopped painting and found work as an illustrator. But he complained that he never felt satisfied drawing people ‘grimacing and posturing.’ He longed to ‘paint sunlight on the side of a house.’ Of course, he did not just wish to record it: Hopper was contemptuous of painting which tried to short-circuit imagination. ‘Great art,’ he once wrote, ‘is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.’
In the 1920s, when he was in his forties, Hopper finally found a way of working in which the expressive potentialities of the figure, perceived space, and light were combined together under the directing force of the imagination to create convincing pictures. Through these painterly means he could, when he wished, say something about those ‘structures of feeling’ characteristic of ‘modern life.’
Take Automat of 1926. A woman is seated at a circular table near the door of the automat. The chair in front of her is empty. Beneath the dome of her hat, her eyes are downcast. She has just taken a sip of coffee. Perhaps she is thinking about someone who is not there. Behind her, on the sill, is a bowl of fruit. The round lights of the interior, reflected in the window, run out into the night and are swallowed up by it: she is framed by a great pane of emptiness and silence. She is alone.
Why is this such an effective picture? In part, it is because of the handling of the figure itself. She is comprised of very simple forms: yet everything about her—eyes, lips, hands and legs—is expressive of those emotions Hopper wishes to communicate. But the play of lights and colours, particularly the contrast between the uncomfortable luminosity of the cafe and the undispersable darkness of the night outside, serve the same purpose. These elements, however, acquire their expressive strength within the compositional structure of the picture.
This is not, of course, a transcription of a given scene, or anything like it. The forceful geometry of the painting has been built up through Hopper’s self-conscious choices and simplifications—for example, in the way he plays off the circular forms of the woman’s hat, coffee cup, table, fruit bowl and lights against the rectangular shapes of this corner of the room. Above all, Hopper has carefully framed the woman against that potentially engulfing plane of blackness. This is intended to tell us more about her emotional state than about his empirical observations.
The content of this painting is thus certainly ‘the loneliness thing.’ But it is not this, on its own, which makes it effective. James Joyce once said, ‘Sentimentality is unearned emotion.’ It is easy to imagine a sentimental picture on the theme Hopper depicts here. But the emotion in Automat has been earned by the way in which the artist brings it to cohere in all aspects of his expressive practice (including those to do with figure, light and structure) and further unifies all these elements into a convincing compositional whole.
And this is why I think both the modernists (with their insistence that only new styles can be of value in painting) and their opponents (with their vague appeals to ‘modern life,’ or the need faithfully to record appearances) are both missing the point about Hopper’s best work. Indeed, Hopper reminds me strongly of Mark Rothko, who was perhaps the best of America’s ‘abstract expressionist’ painters. Stylistically, of course, they have nothing in common. Yet the area of experience which Rothko expressed, through his chosen pictorial conventions, was peculiarly close to Hopper’s.
Rothko, at first a figure painter, turned to wholly abstract works of glowing colour fields through which he chronicled his struggle against depression, alienation and despair. Eventually, a billowing black cloud of negative space began to appear ever more frequently in his work: visually, it looked not unlike the purplish, subsuming plane'm Automat. Finally, it engulfed not just his pictures, but Rothko himself.
Hopper’s work seems to follow a similar, though less dramatically extreme, development. As he grew older, Hopper seemed to become less and less comfortable with the presence of figures in his paintings. Sometimes, his later works seem cluttered, as if he was throwing in as many forms as he could to cover that nothingness glimpsed in Automat. In other works, the figures are so badly drawn and proportioned that one feels Hopper would have been happier leaving them out altogether. Indeed, the most successful of his later interiors are those of the walls of empty rooms. In these, the proximities to Rothko’s concerns are self-evident. It is as if Hopper no longer wished the figures of others, in the world, to impinge upon that expressive space which he was trying to construct in his pictures.
To some, this comparison between Hopper and Rothko may sound forced, or fanciful. But Hopper himself once said, ‘To me, form, colour and design are merely means to an end, the tools I work with, and they do not interest me greatly for their own sake. I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation.’ Similarly Rothko, protesting against those who called his works ‘abstracts,’ wrote, ‘It is not [my paintings’] intention either to create or to emphasize a formal colour-space arrangement. They depart from natural representation only to intensify the expression of the subject implied in the title—not to dilute or efface it.’
The painterly means Hopper and Rothko used may have been very different: but the areas of experience and sensation which they each so effectively expressed were, in fact, very similar.
1981