Splendid isolation | 22 September 2007

It is not surprising that Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is an immensely popular artist. His pleasing deployment of colour and easy-going presentation of the paraphernalia of everyday life give his work an immediate warmth and likeability. His muted palette, careful modulation of hues, and soft-edged precision are a recipe for visual charm. Considered simply as aesthetic objects, Hopper’s pictures make few demands: they are, on the contrary, quietly inveigling, almost seductive in their plain-as-day obviousness. And if we’ve never seen diners or drugstores or city streets exactly like the ones that Hopper paints, we’ve seen ones that remind us of them — or vice versa. Hopper seems to give us the very essence of Diner, the graven reality of Pharmacy or Automat, his stylisation communicating an intense period feel that also seems universal, placeless, torn somehow out of time.

Hopper grew up in Nyack, New York, overlooking the Hudson River, and the views from those windows of reflected sunlight formed an indelible library of impressions that served Hopper ever after. From 1900 to 1905 he studied at the New York School of Art, where Robert Henri, doyen of the Ash Can School, and the American impressionist William Merritt Chase were particularly important influences, imparting, in Henri’s case, a fresh involvement with the quotidian realities of urban life, and in Chase’s the seductive lure of visual decorousness. During these student years Hopper made three trips to Paris where he tried on for size and then largely discarded that species of urban weariness and sophistication. Early paintings like ‘Soir Bleu’ (1914) show Hopper conjuring — and conjuring adroitly — with Manet, but such paintings are merely by Hopper, not of Hopper.

It took him until the middle 1920s to effect that metamorphosis. Some hints of the maturation can be found in his bravura watercolours from the period — lighthouses in Maine, rooftops in Gloucester, Massachusetts, city scenes in New York.