work of the month


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Edward Hopper, American (1882-1967)
New York Pavements, 1924
Oil on Canvas, 24 inches x 29 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

Edward Hopper is a major artist in the history of American painting. In looking at one of his early paintings, New York Pavements, can you identify elements in this work which may have made Hopper such a compelling artist for so many people? What aspects of this work draw your attention as a viewer or raise questions for you about what is going on in this picture?

Here are a few questions which may arise as you examine the painting. Why are there so few people on this urban street? Why does the street look so clean, as if recently scrubbed? Who or what is the one figure we do see, and why does she seem to be "cut" in half at the edge of the picture frame? Whatês most important in this picture (its subject)? Why are some of the buildingês windows open, some closed? What time of day is it in this picture?

Hopper is well known for creating paintings that some people feel seem lonely, empty, quiet, frozen. Because so many people have had this experience of the artistês work, scholars, art lovers, and other experts have often debated about how Hopperês art and life should be interpreted. There seems to be little disagreement among these specialists about Hopperês reception as "the major realist painter of mid-twentieth-century America".1 However, the readings of Hopperês paintings, and subsequently his life, as being lonely, alienated, isolated, voyeuristic, and the reasons for his particularly subjective approach to art, have found many varying interpretations. In her 1995 biography on Hopper,2 Gail Levin uses the diaries of Hopperês wife, Josephine, to largely substantiate the readings of Hopper as introspective, detached, ungenerous, self-involved. Countering this reading of Hopper in her review of Levinês book, feminist scholar Barbara Novak notes her personal experiences of Hopper over the last six years of his life as anything but the self-involved, alienated ogre many interpretations on his life and work have taken.3 Other scholars such as Margaret Iverson4 and Michael Lewis5 have attempted to set the artist and his approach to painting within the realm of the Freudian "uncanny" or the criticsê need for emphasizing Hopperês subjectivity to justify his dogged realism in the face of the story of modernism and its glorification of introspection and abstraction. For you as todayês viewer of Hopperês New York Pavements, consider what associations his urban landscape brings forth in you. Do you find a fully realized narrative in this work? Is this a lonely painting? If so, why? Is there anything eerily familiar yet alien about the scene before you? Do you feel the presence of the artist in the work? If so, how would you characterize that presence?

Have you come closer to deciding what is happening in this picture? In Jeff Harrisonês description of the painting, we find some answers to Hopperês approach in his composition: "New York Pavements of 1924 is an important work from this [Hopperês] early period of renewed oil painting. In it a childês nurse, wearing the uniform of an English-trained nanny, briskly wheels a pram past a New York apartment house. The painting is among the first in which Hopper used boldly cropped forms and strong diagonal accentsãthe oblique placement of the building and an elevated "birdês-eye" prospectãto capture the viewerês attention . . . .The stark simplicity of the composition and virtual absence of narrative content are typical of Hopperês art, as are the hard light and shadow that play across the buildingês facade. . ."6

In your examination of this work, did you feel the tilt of the composition or the severe cropping to which Harrison alludes? Did you notice the play of light on the building façade and how it helps Hopper achieve his gradations of light and shade throughout the work? Does this painting feel frozen to you, stilled as if a photograph? How do you think the influences of other painters or art forms may have influenced Hopperês work?

If you said "the movies" or your mind wandered to the closely cropped, often print like qualities of Edgar Degasê compositions, therein may lie more answers about Hopperês formal approaches. Edward Hopper was a "binge" movie-goer. Some days he would see several movies, and during such periods he tended to take off several days from painting to indulge his movie-going uninterrupted.7 The frozen quality found in many pictures throughout Hopperês career have often been likened to the movie still. Similarly, during Hopperês three trips abroad, between 1906 and 1910, he is known to have become interested in the work of the French Impressionists, particularly Degas. Can you see such influence in New York Pavements? Clue: Look at each edge of the picture. Does this look like a picture cut out of a larger one? Do you see angles or diagonals in the way the composition is set up?

In many respects Hopperês pictorial statements remain an enigma to many of his viewers, and this may be one of the aspects of his work that so many have found compelling. Perhaps in his seeming absence of people, detail, activity, we are forced to look more closely, think more deeply, emote more readily in our attempts to find meaning in his eerie yet familiar locales.

– John S. Welch

Works Cited/Resources

1 Gail Levin. Edward Hopper: The Art and The Artist, 1980.

2 Gail Levin. Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 1995.

3 Barbara Novak, "The Posthumous Revenge of Josephine Hopper," Art in America, June 1996.

4 Margaret Iverson, "In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny," Art History, Vol. 21, No.3, September 1998.

5 Michael J. Lewis, "Homer, Hopper & the Critics," The New Criterion, September 1996.

6 Jefferson C. Harrison, The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections, 1991.

7 Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and The Artist, 1980, p.

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