Staring at Hopper

It could be a still-frame from an Alfred Hitchcock movie —a stately lighthouse towering above eyelevel. Were not the blues so beautiful and rich it would be bleak.

Another image, Early Sunday Morning, is enigmatic
—a subtle study of the not so gentle play of early morning rays that rake the broken surface of a row of decaying, urban facades of a shade of burnt sienna so nearly the color of dried blood that we are discomforted. It is a building made surrealistically stark in the sunrise sidelight; we can only wonder —were these buildings ever inhabited?

And finally –a window lit interior reminiscent of Vermeer. But there are no rich tapestries, no virginals, no Sixteenth Century maps.

Just a woman staring blankly out the open window at, we uneasily suspect, nothing at all.

The artist is the quintessential American artist: Edward Hopper. One of his most famous paintings, Night Hawks, depicts a near empty diner in the wee, small hours of the morning. Night Hawks, painted in 1942, is a tour-de-force of American "film noir". The man in the fedora could be Sam Spade; his female companion —a leggy client. [See the detail view of Night Hawks]

It is fitting that this painting is parodied in an image that has become almost as famous as the original. In it, the diner is peopled by Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean. Like these personalities both Hopper and his satirists have captured the essence of American alienation —people in public, together, but alone, and at night. If the street outside is not wet, it should be and will be, soon; if not tonight, some night! And in a black and white movie. Here’s lookin’ at you kid.

Hopper himself claims no such intentions. His purpose was merely to capture the play of light and shade. That he succeeded so brilliantly is undeniable. However, Hopper himself acknowledged viewers’ interpretations even if he did not agree with them. Of one of his paintings, he wrote:

The picture is an attempt to paint sunlight as white, with almost or no yellow pigment in the white. Any psychologic [Sic] idea will have to be supplied by the viewer.

—Edward Hopper

Unlike many another American artist, Hopper never intended to develop an “American” style; he did so in spite of himself. His goal was more modest.

“I guess I'm not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house."

—Edward Hopper

He succeeded admirably. His painting of 1925, House by the Railroad, is a study of sunlight on the side of a house, to be sure, but much more besides.

The low vantage point, like that of his famous lighthouse, is as edgy as the Bates Motel. We are curious but not nearly curious enough to want to go inside. Like his silent, lonely human observers who stare into the void, the façade stares but at you!

Hopper’s compositions are minimalist. But it would be uncharacteristic of Hopper to have done so because he believed in a doctrine like "less is more".

No, Hopper was just being Hopper when in 1951, he returned to the open window to the sea theme. As if to underscore a recurring theme of emptiness, he left out the staring woman. We are left with the emptiness in a bare room.

Stare at a Hopper long enough and you will find yourself in Hopper’s universe beside the young woman staring out the open window, among the anonymous souls together and alone in the diner, like the stately lighthouse which regards a vast but empty ocean. Friedrich Nietzche said that if you stare into the abyss long enough, it will stare back at you.

Is that what it means to be alone?

Americana