Hopper the draughtsman returns to the Whitney

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The rich illustrations, keen insight and multi-levelled perspective of this volume makes it a book to please everyone, as David Ecclestone reveals

Hopper Drawings edited by Carter E. Foster

This copiously illustrated, large format book accompanies the current exhibition at the Whitney in New York (23 May – 6 October 2013), which itself was assembled around material from the bequest of over 2,500 drawings by Edward Hopper’s widow, Jo.  The extensive nature of this material provides a remarkably comprehensive overview of Hopper’s career and enables an understanding of the artist’s meticulous working methods.  It is a reminder that Hopper’s association with the Whitney predates the founding of the Museum: between 1920 and 1925, he religiously attended the Whitney Studio Club’s life classes and generated a large body of works on paper almost exclusively dealing with the female nude.

A particularly keen insight to Hopper’s mining of his memory as a source of paintings is the richly illustrated chapter by Carter E. Foster on the genesis of the canvas Soir Bleu.  This was painted in 1914, several years after he had last been in Paris.  Two of the figures are identifiable in the fluent, confident drawings that Hopper produced in Paris, and the catalogue gives us a large selection of the water colour and ink or graphite studies of Parisians.  The images have a freshness and a facility for capturing personality through posture and gesture that suggests not merely artistic skills but psychological insight.

In another chapter, Foster treats two of Hopper’s most important cityscapes, Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks to a detailed and fascinating analysis not only through the preparatory drawings, but also through an examination of contemporary photographic records of the buildings (on Seventh Avenue and the intersection of the Flatiron Building) that inspired the paintings.

Hopper’s engagement with the rural, small-town environment coincided with the purchase of a used Dodge in 1927, and Nicholas Robbins examines the effect of the car not only in its liberating effect, facilitating Edward and Jo’s exploration of North America from Cape Cod to the West, but also its effect on Hopper’s working methods and mind set.  It is a thoughtful account of the car’s framing and constraining influence on the compositions themselves.  He was often assimilating a series of fleeting impressions as the drive progressed and processing them imaginatively until they could be expressed as a single static image that asks the viewer to think about what remains beyond the frame.  Robbins quotes Hopper’s own quotation from Goethe, describing  his method as ‘the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, moulded and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner’.

The application of this method is examined in the book’s chapter on the painting New York Movie of 1930.  There is a painstaking integration of the evolution of the drawing process with biographical details (notably from Jo’s diary) and with contemporary records and photographs of cinema interiors.  This gives a rich and multi-layered perspective that notes, for instance, Hopper’s debt to and admiration for Edgar Degas by the inclusion of the latter’s Interior of 1868 or 1869. This displays the red tonalities that are such a feature of the Hopper canvas.

Hopper’s other great gift was his ability to transmute the numerous drawn studies completely by imaginatively changing the viewpoint to one that has no relationship to where a viewer could possibly be standing.  It is the viewpoint of the disembodied camera, which by its allusion to the movies makes us privileged voyeurs.  This process is analysed in the construction of Office at Night, of 1940.  The drawings and the commentary take us from the rough, initial, ‘ground level’ view through various progressions until we arrive at the richly composed, tonally explicit and beautifully detailed final drawings that represent alternative possible versions of the final painting.  The version chosen has such a high viewpoint that it is beyond the reach of any observer in the room and so has an unsettling quality that is so typical of Hopper’s interiors.

Hopper was reluctant to speak or write about his work and so the inclusion of the typescript of Lloyd Goodrich’s April 1946 interview with the artist is particularly significant.  In speaking about Approaching a City of that same year, Hopper explained both his need to express complex emotions in his paintings and the difficulty of doing so: he wanted to ‘express the feelings of coming into a strange city on a train...interest, curiosity, fear’.  He spoke of the difficulties of expressing fleeting impressions and sensations with a static image.  He did not think he ‘had really succeeded’.

This volume seems destined to please not only the scholar, through the keys it provides to unlocking the mysteries of this most mystic of painters, but also the general reader, through the richness of the illustrations and the imaginative layout.

Hopper Drawings edited by Carter E. Foster is published by Yale University Press. 304pp., fully illustrated. ISBN 978-0300181494