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Edward Hopper’s Modernist Metropolis Appears at the Whitney
Aaron Betsky explores the artist's exhibition, "Edward Hopper's New York," which closes on March 5.
To be modern is not a question of choice. It is to find yourself lost in a place made wholly by fellow human beings, wandering through spaces that flow from one into the other around barriers where solidity both confounds and reassures. It is to see other human beings in the same scene and feel a connection to and a distance from them. To be Modernist is to depict that world fully, bringing out the qualities that mark it as this artifice of human life and alienation. Edward Hopper, navigating the streets of New York in the middle of the last century, created some of the most insightful Modernist images, which the Whitney Museum has now collected into an exhibition dedicated to the town where he lived and worked and where the museum is located. Collecting paintings from museums and private holdings around the world, Edward Hopper's New York is open only through March 5. Try not to miss it: You will be astonished by the beauty and the profound sense of being both at home and lost in the quintessentially modern city this showing represents.
What makes Hopper’s Modernism all the more remarkable is that it does not seem radical. It is not abstract and is, on the whole, not made of glass, steel, or concrete. It does not soar up or cantilever out. It is not built around machines and does not involve expanses of office space or vistas down highways. It appears in fragments of an environment still familiar, surrounding and hemming us in. In Hopper’s view, there are almost no cars or trains, no skyscrapers, and no new materials. Instead, there is the way in which houses, diners, and bits and pieces of tunnels and bridges, as well as rooftops and movie theaters, are empty and barren in such a profound way that the few people who find themselves marooned within their uncertain boundaries all stare out into the void, framed by grids, usually with their back turned to you. They are alone.
The exhibition starts with what, to my mind, is the most disturbing view of all, much more wistful and stranger than the famous images of Nighthawks (the empty diner at night) you encounter later in the show, or the often clumsily drawn female figures staring out windows in other spaces. It is a view of the railroad line down Park Avenue where it moves underground or, rather, where the street grid and the apartment blocks on that plane swallow its lines. There is no soaring or plunging, no sense of speeding locomotives, and disjunction. There is no motion here, only the empty train lines disappearing into a tunnel where darkness draws you to the very edge of the canvas, half-dreading what you will find there. A blank wall of uncertain material turns into a bridge over that hole, but there are no railings, fences, lampposts, or electric wires to mark the parts of this overpass. There are certainly no buses or cars. Behind that wall, its top edge just fuzzy enough to hint at solidity and a certain uncertainty at the same time, stand blocks of housing and warehouses. They are recognizable, but not detailed in their depiction. The angles eliminate the cross streets that must run between them. There is only a solid and void, the one bit of escape being a patch of sky touched by clouds appearing over the top of the buildings.
It is what is missing–movement, machines, people, and, above all, a clear point or meaning to the image—that governs this and most of the other paintings and drawings in the exhibition. Hopper does not offer us a view of life. He gives us instead the boxes and voids in which city life is meant to take place. The elements that makeup New York are shown with a certain amount of love and care but in quirky ways. The painter is fascinated, as the exhibition texts point out, by juxtapositions and geometries, rather than by classical compositions. He shows us fragments, rather than full scenes. In the movie theater, we do not see the film or the audience. Whole blocks become swaths of color punctuated by a grid of windows, until one cornice is depicted in detail, hovering over both the mass below it and a solitary woman looking out from her apartment.
For all that emptiness and abstraction, Hopper’s world is fluid. As he does not bother to show glass, unless it is a dark pane that is part of a rhythm marching across a façade, what is inside and what is outside are the same. That also means there is no privacy: His is a profoundly public space, whether the people inside it like it or not. There is also no passage of time, as we have only light or dark. This New York has no morning or evening, no fall colors or winter blanket-softening contours. That means there is also no progress at a larger scale. What was new when Hopper painted it, from the Formica countertops in the cafeterias to the bridges tying together a rapidly expanding New York, comes across as being the same stuff as the brick tenements with their metal-covered cornices.
All this makes Hopper seem conservative, and certainly, he appears to have been in many of his attitudes. The exhibition includes interviews and documents that show his resistance to the new in everything from new and abstract modes of representation to the changes to the Washington Square he overlooked from his home. The images at first seem to have an air of nostalgia about them, which was what many of my fellow exhibition visitors picked up on. They spent their time identifying sites in the paintings and bemoaning how they had changed. I had the same reaction at times, searching for places I had lived or worked, but the more I spent time with these paintings, the more it was clear that I was not actually looking at New York, or at least not the New York that existed at one time and may linger on in our memory. Rather, it is—as the title of the exhibition says (and other critics have noted)—Edward Hopper’s New York, a construct wholly his own.
That New York is built up out of geometric solids that undergird blocks and compositions, the painter manipulated to create his closed views (as a trove of drawings the Whitney acquired recently make clear) and focused not on what might be the most important space or activity, but on quirks and fragments: a wall, a collection of chimneys and vent stacks, or a person who is not a hero of the scene, but an observer like us, lost in its urban compaction.
There is a lesson we can take away from this work. If you feel that any creative work done in our modern age must, first and foremost, represent, but also offer a reworking, reimagination, and critique of what we have made into our contemporary reality, as I believe it must, one of the most effective ways to do so is to mirror and map what is there—what we see every day, and what we know. How you as either a viewer or a maker engage in that reflexive act—how you edit, focus, frame, and confound—is the art or architecture of Modernism.
