The Francophile Edward Hopper

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The theatricality of many of Edward Hopper’s paintings and his love of Paris are the most striking features of the current exhibition in Paris, says Alette Rye Scales

This is an ambitious retrospective and a ‘must’ for anyone attracted to the frequently unsettling paintings of Edward Hopper.  It consists of 126 works: oil paintings, watercolours, etchings and illustrations that are presented chronologically and interspersed with relevant works by other artists.  Organized in two main parts, the first covers Hopper’s formative years (1900–24) and the second part looks at the art of his mature years.

The exhibition opens in a small, darkened room, dominated by a wall-to-wall screen, onto which early 20th-century footage of Manhattan is projected.  If that isn’t enough to establish the time and place of the origin of Hopper’s art, the adjoining wall is adorned with Walt Whitman quotations.  Round the corner the first, small gallery is devoted to works by Hopper and fellow students in the studio of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art.  Of particular interest here are two small Hopper paintings, carried out in a dark, almost monochrome palette. Young Woman in a Studio (1901–2) and Solitary Figure in a Theatre (1903–4) both represent subjects that the artist continued to paint throughout his life. 

Next are the galleries covering Hopper’s three sojourns in Paris, where he arrived in the autumn of 1906 and stayed until the following summer.  He came again on shorter visits in 1909 and 1910, explaining later that it took him ten years to get over Paris.  He loved the city for its beauty and elegance and was attracted to French culture generally.  ‘Unusually for an American at the time’, the painter, Pène du Bois, wrote, ‘he learnt the language and read its literature’. 

Indeed, among the most poignant works from Hopper’s Paris periods are his illustrations for Victor Hugo’s L’Annee Terrible, 1870–1871 (1900–9), a number of which are shown here.  Also shown are some of his earliest paintings of Parisian subjects, revealing the gradual change in his palette to one of more warmth and light.  In particular, the last of these, Le Pavillon de Flore (1909), suggests the influence of Impressionism with its gentler, visible brush strokes and warm sunlight.  The series of watercolour studies of Parisian types that Hopper observed in the streets fill a small side gallery: Couple Drinking  (1906–7) is a fine example of his skills as an observer and draughtsman. 

Hopper’s work as an illustrator is dealt with in the next gallery, where three floor-to-ceiling screens show his magazine illustrations of office life, rural life and leisure pursuits.  These themes will reappear in his mature paintings, although by then frequently metamorphosed into images of alienation and unease.  This sense of unease already characterizes his large painting Soir Bleu (1914), often interpreted as the artist’s farewell to Paris.  The title is from a poem by the Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, and the wide, frieze-like composition is pregnant with symbolism.  It is a strange and theatrical representation of the artist – symbolized by the clown sitting at the central of three tables – surrounded by Parisian types, notably a heavily made up prostitute.

The year after painting this, Hopper began etching.  On show here are the 26 etchings that he produced between 1915 and 1928.  These reveal an artist who was fascinated not only by the effects of darkness and light, but also by what he saw around him in America.  Many of the images exude a sense of enigma or foreboding, which looks forward to his mature paintings. For example Night Shadows (1921), which appears like a stage set, seen from above, with a lonely walker in a deserted street at night, carried out with strong contrasts of darkness and light.

Hopper himself said later: ‘My painting seemed to crystalize when I began to etch’.   Indeed it was during this time that his painting career took off.  In 1924, encouraged by his future wife, the painter Josephine Nivison, Hopper exhibited a series of watercolours, which won him longed-for commercial and critical success. This gave him the confidence to give up his work as an illustrator and devote all his time to his art. 

Throughout his career, Hopper produced paintings of anonymous interiors with a single female figure or several figures, which give expression to the isolation and alienation of modern life, but his mature paintings are by no means always unsettling.  In the second part of the exhibition there are many large paintings that are more like glimpses into the myths of American modernity, composed from unusual viewpoints.  There are New England landscapes and boating scenes, cityscapes and paintings of buildings, like the painting From Williamsburg Bridge (1928), in which Hopper has used a device he used frequently, of composing the view from a low viewpoint, in this case from behind a parapet, which lends the image a sense of theatricality.

Many paintings here are familiar from reproductions, such as Nighthawks (1942), which has been chosen for the exhibition poster and catalogue frontispiece.  It is thought to be an illustration of Hemingway’s novel, The Killers.  The panoramic format is unusual in Hopper’s oeuvre and, here again, there is an air of theatricality about the composition.  Theatricality characterizes many of his paintings, but nowhere more directly that in the exhibition’s last painting,  ‘Two Comedians’  (1966) in which the artist has represented himself and his wife, partner and sole model, Jo, as clowns on a stage, taking the final curtain.   

After his death, interest in Hopper waned. In recent years, however, his painting has experienced a revival and exhibitions of his work always attract large audiences.  So it is with this exhibition. With its slight shift of focus and emphasis on the Paris sojourns, it is informative and revealing of Hopper’s versatility, although it is in danger of overwhelming with too much information and too many visual aids.