The Slate's Edward Hopper's Secret World by Christopher Benfey (http://www.slate.com/id/2165773/)

When Edward Hopper painted his self-portrait during the late 1920s, he had already perfected his disguise as an ordinary American businessman. He was well into his 40s, finally able to afford to give up commercial illustration, but no props in the picture signal that Hopper is a painter, no easel in the background or paint-stiffened brushes on the floor. Like Wallace Stevens, avant-garde poet disguised as Hartford insurance executive, Hopper depicts himself as just another anonymous contributor to American prosperity. He had waited a long time for financial success; if his contemporaries wanted to place him in an orderly progression of realists—from Thomas Cole and Eakins to Robert Henri and Hopper—he was willing to pass as a blue-eyed chronicler of the American scene, Norman Rockwell with angst. "The critics give you an identity," Hopper wrote. "And sometimes, even, you give it a push." Hopper's push was to paint recognizably American subjects—the all-night cafes, lonely hotel rooms, and aging Victorian houses at the heart of the probing retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—while hinting at a more private, covert emotional landscape.

Edward Hopper, [Self-Portrait], 1925-30. Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. Josephine N. Hopper Bequest © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art; photograph by Robert E. Mates. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Hopper was born in 1882 in the Hudson River town of Nyack, N.Y., at a time when the once-fashionable resort was beginning its long decline. Empty hotels soon lined the river, which Hopper could see from his bedroom window. Trained as a commercial artist in New York, Hopper returned to Nyack on weekends to make some money teaching art. His father ran a dry-goods business; his mother served lemonade to the local kids, including Joseph Cornell's sister, who took Saturday art classes with young Edward. It's weird to think of those two homegrown Surrealists, Hopper and Cornell, growing up in the same sad Gilded Age town, but it makes sense. The hotels and billowing mansions hinted of former lives and passions, and the boats on the river promised flight and exotic travel. Hopper's paintings—portraits, really—of Victorian houses, like this one painted in Gloucester, north of Boston, have a strange interior life, wind wafting the awnings like a breath of inspiration or suppressed desire.

Edward Hopper, The Mansard Roof, 1923. The Brooklyn Museum, N.Y., Museum Collection Fund. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Hopper made three trips to Paris from 1906 to 1910. He knew people who knew Gertrude Stein but said, "I wasn't important enough for her." His Paris wasn't Hemingway's festive moveable feast but the more brooding, lonely existence of Rilke's alter ego, Malte Laurids Brigge, who wandered the empty streets at exactly the same time, "learning to see." I wish some of Hopper's Paris pictures, like his desolate stairway down to the Seine of 1906, were in the Boston exhibition. Summer Interior gives an idea of what he was capable of in those early years. Trying to guess the artist, you might think the painting was by Pierre Bonnard or Édouard Vuillard. There's a tactile quality missing from a lot of Hopper's later works, in the sheet pulled down from the bed—Hopper was the painter of bedsheets—and the woman's toes just touching the thickly painted shaft of light, like another sheet, on the green floor. The abstract yellow and reddish-brown stripes to the right are presumably a Venetian blind, called a jalousie in French. Some theme of sexual jealousy may be at work in this freeze frame from an unknown narrative.

Edward Hopper, Summer Interior, 1909. Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. Josephine N. Hopper Bequest. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

After Paris, Hopper found New York "awfully crude and raw." In 1913, the year of the Armory Show that introduced Modern art to an American audience, Hopper moved into the top floor of 3 Washington Square North, where he lived and worked for the rest of his long life. Sexual tension is at the heart of Hopper's Room in New York, a scenario we peer at through an open window. Home from work, the man reads the sports page. Dressed to go out, the woman plays a single note on the piano, knowing it will annoy him. Their faces are almost as featureless as the blank sheet of music on the piano. Separated by the abstract expanse of the tall brown door, they are literally out of touch. But look a little closer at that fleshy pink armchair.

Edward Hopper, Room in New York, 1932. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. UNL-F. M. Hall Collection © Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

It's a mark of the Surrealist art Hopper saw in New York during the 1930s, by Giorgio de Chirico and others, that the human figures look like things while the inanimate chairs and buildings come to life. Doesn't that pink chair look unsettlingly like a huge hand, a jutting thumb and curled fingers, ready to clutch the unsuspecting man from behind and give him a shake? Is this the woman's fantasy? When André Breton, a French Surrealist in exile in New York, first saw Hopper's pictures, he recognized a kindred spirit, someone who, like the Surrealists, was painting an unnerving synthesis of reality and dream.

Edward Hopper, detail from Room in New York, 1932. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. UNL-F. M. Hall Collection © Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Automat is another example of Hopper pushing toward dream. A woman sits lost in thought in an Art Deco eatery at night, one glove removed to hold her coffee cup. Automats, as curator Carol Troyen points out in the excellent catalog for the Boston show, were "busy, noisy, and anonymous." Despite its title, Hopper's remarkably still picture has none of the paraphernalia of the Jazz Age automat: gleaming coffee urns, seemingly magical vending machines, abundant condiments. Instead, our attention is drawn to those reflected overhead orbs streaming from the woman's cloche hat like thought bubbles in a comic book. Automat could suggest the Surrealist penchant for automatic writing, played out in the dark-gray dream-space of the window.

Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927. Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Permanent Collection. Photo Credit: Michael Tropea, Chicago. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Hopper was known as a brilliant printmaker long before he achieved any success as a painter; it was in his shadowy prints that he worked out for the first time some of the obsessive themes of his later cityscapes. While Hopper deliberately avoided the epic subjects of urban life—the skyscrapers and bridges of New York, as painted by Georgia O'Keeffe or Joseph Stella—he liked the plunging perspective that the tall buildings and elevated trains provided. In Night Shadows, one of his most haunting etchings, he juxtaposes a single nocturnal walker with the massive masonry he loved. The turn around the corner into some dark unknown region became a trademark image for Hopper's later paintings.

Edward Hopper, Night Shadows, 1921. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of William Emerson. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

It was Hopper's best-known work, Nighthawks—which he began painting a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the blackouts that followed—that made that image a trademark. Hopper was a huge fan of Hemingway's story "The Killers," a violent tale built around terse dialogue in a diner, and a similar air of menace hangs over Hopper's indelible film-noir scenario. Hopper's wife, Jo, a fellow artist he met in 1923, modeled for the hard-faced woman, as she did for nearly all Hopper's female subjects. Her fingers almost touch the beak-nosed "hawk" on her right. Hopper was a supreme poet of anticipation. "The street was too empty," Rilke's Malte wrote; "its emptiness was bored." We don't know what's going to happen in Hopper's empty street, but it's easy to imagine the coiled action hurtling around the corner into the surrounding darkness. Around the time he painted Nighthawks, Hopper copied out a passage from French poet and critic Paul Valéry about the challenge of making "expectation, doubt, and concentration … visible things."

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942. The Art Institute of Chicago; Friends of American Art Collection. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

"What I wanted to do," Hopper once wrote, "was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." After the sun came out, the sense of menace remained. The central sunbather in Second Story Sunlight grasps the bedsteadlike balcony; we're meant to feel that this is her "story." There's probably some allegory of aging here, of the unstoppable passage of time, but I'm more interested in those windswept trees to the right and that empty sunlit room to the left, with the yellow patch of light on the inner wall. These constitute a "second story" in which people seem almost extraneous, like expendable props in a more durable setting of light, walls, wind, and trees.

Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight, 1960. Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. Purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art: photograph by Steven Sloman; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Hopper was 81 when he painted Sun in an Empty Room, his last great painting. The original plan for the picture included a human figure, but in the end, the patch of light and the wind-swept trees were enough. "Whether we like it or not," Hopper wrote, "we are all bound to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color, and design." This was meant as a swipe at the Abstract Expressionists working a few blocks north of Washington Square, and yet—as that "by no means" suggests—Hopper's vision was pushing him inexorably toward abstraction. Sun in an Empty Room has the meditative weight of Rothko's saturated canvases as well as something of Richard Diebenkorn's refracted light in his California paintings of the 1960s. Hopper, and American art, had come a long way since Summer Interior, but that patch of light on the floor carries a similar emotional freight. The empty space is not so much unfurnished as cleared of furniture, like a room for rent, or an opening for the unconscious. The room feels inhabited—as Wallace Stevens once wrote—by "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room, 1963. Private Collection. Image courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.