"Hopper and His Times' at the Whitney in NY

New York's Whitney Museum can always lead from strength when it puts on a show of Edward Hopper, just as the Guggenheim does with Kandinsky. With some 2,500 of his works, including most of the iconic paintings, prints and watercolors, the Whitney is the Hopper repository. The Museum of Modern Art, a mile to the south, has no single artist with whom it is similarly connected, but its identity is firmly anchored to its collection of American Abstract Expressionists, as its current exhibition of them reminds us.

If we think of these three museums as a collective citadel of modern art, the Whitney appears to be the conservative wing, although it has certainly attempted to make amends in recent decades. Kandinsky is the acknowledged father of Abstract Expressionism, and the New York School of the 1950s was his most direct and impressive heir.

The enormous prestige conferred on abstract art by MOMA and the Guggenheim has, in turn, made abstraction the signature style of modernism, even though figuration has always been the dominant pictorial style, and not in terms of quantity alone. Picasso and Matisse are the acknowledged masters of modern art, yet in careers that spanned more than 130 years between them, neither ever produced a non-figural work, or at least one not based on underlying figuration.

Modern art's dividing line

Nonetheless, no one is apt to confuse Picasso or Matisse with Hopper. Hopper was not merely a figural artist but a representational one, and that characteristic appears to be the true dividing line in modern art.

A figural work can be expressively distorted, and its various elements unmoored or transposed. Picasso's eyes and noses freely migrate in his portraits; Chagall's street musicians fly.

In representational art, by contrast, things appear more or less as they do to ordinary sense perception; they are expressively heightened, but not distorted. Hopper's most famous work, Early Sunday Morning, with its depiction of a row of closed Brooklyn store fronts in the first light of day, contains nothing that a five-year-old child wouldn't instantly recognize, except perhaps the barber pole.

Past the recognition factor

This isn't to say that the painting isn't difficult, or as fully modern as anything else produced in its period. With Hopper, you must get past the recognition factor to appreciate the sophistication and complexity of the work.

Still, it must be a little disconcerting for a temple of modern art to be so closely tied to a painter who seems, at least on first view, so readily accessible. For its most recent exhibition of his work, then, the Whitney did something long overdue: It situated Hopper among his peers, some of whom, in their experiments with Cubism and Expressionism, seemed to be using a more "advanced" expressive language.

This approach was salutary in more ways than one. Because Hopper is so pre-eminently a painter of solitude, we tend to see him as a figure apart, and— because his mature style seemed to undergo so little change— as one who deliberately isolated himself from the evolution of modern art. As the show made clear, these presumptions are quite false.

His friends, the social realists

Hopper was associated with the Ashcan School of social realists in the early years of the 20th Century, as well as the American Scene painters of the 1930s. His work of the '20s reflects clear affinities with such celebrants of industrialization as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, though he never shared their sometimes uncritical enthusiasm for the machine age. He maintained warm and mutually sustaining friendships with William Glackens, Guy Pène du Bois and Charles Burchfield, among others. Seeing him in the full context of his contemporaries, he is clearly one of them and, in many respects, one with them.

And yet, and yet . . . with all the grateful concessions a show such as this one compels one to make, the sense of Hopper's achievement as a lonely pinnacle persists.

Two figures in a painting

Let's go back to Early Sunday Morning. Yes, the framing panels to either side of the clear blue sky show a thoroughly absorbed lesson from Matisse, and the blurred storefront lettering an earlier one from the Impressionists. There's nothing pokey or showy about this technique, because representationalism, like any other style, partakes of the forms and codes of its day.

Hopper wants you to see the street and say, "Yes, that's how it is!" This, circa 1930, is how it would be done. But why, then, does such a sense of desolation arise from the picture— such an all-but Existentialist feeling of abandonment?

When we look more closely, we spy two characters in the picture, or at least stand-ins for characters: the bright barbershop pole and the little fireplug. The symmetrically aligned, identically curtained windows are—what? Spectators? A chorus?

The things Americans make

There's a drama going on here, but— as always in Hopper— an unspecified one. It's the drama of solitude, and so, by definition, it is mute. It doesn't need a human actor, because anything wrought or touched by the hand of man exudes solitude— that is to say, ontological insufficiency— whether it be a city street or a country house or a clock in a window. Things, in Hopper, are actually more solitary than people, because they are silent and motionless, removed from the natural life of elements of which they are made without being given the life of their human creators.

This, we come to see, is where Hopper is so different from his countrymen. Americans are proud, above all, of the things they make. A subject such as the grain elevator of Demuth's My Egypt or the factory of Sheeler's River Rouge Plant (both displayed in the Whitney show) is proudly celebratory, and there is never the least hint that anything is lacking in them, let alone saddening.

Hopper's objects, like his human subjects, exude the pathos of contingency. They are fully finished, faithfully presented and utterly incomplete.

From this vantage point one can see how only a fully representational art could do justice to Hopper's vision. But there is a tertium quid to it: nature itself.

Platonic vision

Nature isn't a backdrop to Hopper's subjects, or the medium in which they are embedded. It isn't, in short, landscape. It's the alternative universe we live beside, a place familiar and yet also separate and estranged. A concrete patio ends, and the living grass and woods begin. Where do they lead? Were we ever a part of them? Can we ever rejoin them?

This vision is intensely Platonic, and Edward Hopper is, I would submit, our great Platonist, for his sense is that nature, too, is finally insufficient, and that reality is unrepresentable as such. We are left with the phenomenal world alone, and the aspiration toward reality that finitude compels.

Is this a religious vision? If so, it's a theologically agnostic one. It's certainly not a materialistic one— and materialism and monotheism are the two presiding deities of American culture.

But perhaps this very fact is the source of our enduring fascination with Hopper. His is an American art that challenges the deepest presuppositions of America itself.