Edward Hopper: An Artist I’ve Always Loved

I love visiting museums. I especially love visiting a museum repeatedly. The museum itself changes with each visit — galleries are rearranged, works cycle into and out of storage — but what changes most is you. Just as you can never put your foot in the same river twice, you can never revisit the same museum. On each visit, you are in a different mood; your knowledge of the art has changed; you might be seeking quiet solace or looking to spend a morning with a friend. You will certainly be in a different physical state. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes about the experience of visiting museums hungry. It is one of my favorite paragraphs; it is just so damn Hemingway.

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought it was possibly only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

I love that last sentence.

One thing that does change with every visit is my feelings for specific artists. There are artists I once adored that I no longer do, and the artists I once barely noticed whose work I now linger over. I’ll eventually write about the artists I once loved — those for whom I’d travel to shows and buy posters — but now actively dislike.

But let me start with something brighter: someone I have always loved.

I have liked Edward Hopper paintings for as long as I can remember; since I museumed with my Mom. I remember a conversation with her about the Hopper work From Williamsburg Bridge at the Met. We sometimes drove over the Williamsburg Bridge when we visited my grandparents in Brooklyn. Looking at the painting, we decided we’d try to catch the view Hopper represents on our next visit. During high school, I repeatedly visited the collection at the old Whitney (to which Hopper's wife, Josephine, bequeathed their joint collection of over 3000 pieces) or MoMA with JW or CS. I stumbled into a great show at the National Gallery in 2007. Sarah and I always linger over the collection at the AIC.

Why do I like Hopper’s paintings so much? Part of it might be familiarity. He was born in Nyack, lived and painted mostly in New York, and visited Gloucester and Maine. Between home, camp, and residency, it felt as though I was prepared to see Hopper paintings as documentation of my life. The paintings feel personal to me. The quiet, peace, and solitude make me feel comfortable. The interiors and landscapes look like places I’d like to be.

I’ll use Sunlight on Brownstones from 1956 as an example. I’m pretty sure I’ve walked by this stoop — maybe in New York, or DC, or Boston, or Philly, or Chicago. He has captured the calm of a summer afternoon. It is the kind of day when I’d take a glass of water outside, sit on the stoop, and read (or maybe write a Substack post).

But not for long. I wouldn’t want to linger because, as is so often the case with his paintings, there is something just slightly off-kilter, peculiar, mysterious. I find surrealism uninteresting, but the dreamlike world of Hopper is different. What is up with this couple, staring blankly, together but separate? And what is with this seemingly otherwise uninhabited city that transitions into country at the end of a block of row houses?

There is a balance between realism and painterliness. Look at the details: the man’s cigarette, the shutters, the banister, the muscles in the woman’s arms. And yet, this is not realism. Hopper disguises brushstrokes but also lets you know you are looking at an oil painting.

His paintings invite you to participate with them. They suggest a narrative but in such a nonspecific way that you are challenged to add a story.

I read a New Yorker article years ago, and one sentence has stuck with me. Carter Foster, the curator of drawing for the Whitney Museum at the time, said of Hopper that “his real process was about memory…”

I think Foster is right, and that is what makes me love Hopper. He captures a memory on canvas. There is a lot that is present, but just as much that is absent, or only suggested. Isn’t this like a real memory? When I think back to important memories, what lingers is a snapshot and a sensation. When Hopper painted, he captured what lingers.