Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time

When Edward Hopper arrived in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, he found himself in the midst of an artistic revolution. A group of realist painters, led by Robert Henri, boldly rejected the refined themes of genteel society promoted by the conservative art academies, which at the time exerted almost complete control over the prospects of a young artist. In 1908, Henri’s group, later known as the Ashcan School or the Eight, held a landmark exhibition where they introduced a new bravura style of painting with loose, impressionistic brushwork as well as an audacious new subject: modern life.

The artists in Henri’s group were enthralled by the vibrant pulse of the city’s parks, nightspots, and street life, as exemplified by John Sloan’s Backyards, Greenwich Village (1914). After Hopper moved to New York in 1900, he took courses with both Henri and Sloan and began exhibiting with the artists in their circle. The lessons Hopper learned from them—especially painting everyday, even mundane subjects and capturing dramatic light effects—were immediately evident in his early paintings, including his self-portrait of 1903–06.
 
Most of the wealthy art patrons of this period looked on the Ashcan artists with disdain. Only Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who went on to found the Whitney Museum in 1931, staked her reputation and fortune on these artists. The portrait that Mrs. Whitney commissioned from Henri portrays her as the model of a “modern” woman. Her reclining pose and her choice to be depicted wearing pants were highly unusual for a portrait of a well-bred woman.

Because Hopper’s vision of modern life is often perceived as distinctly American, it is less well known that artist’s first independent body of work was inspired by three trips to Paris between 1906 and 1910.

Unlike other Americans who journeyed to Paris in this period, Hopper ignored the innovations of the city’s most avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. He was more interested in an earlier generation of French artists: the Impressionists and Edgar Degas. With its bleached sunlight, geometric underpinnings, and cafe subject matter, Hopper’s Le Bistro (1909) reflects these sources while also anticipating later paintings like New York Interior (1921), in which even seemingly banal vignettes are imbued with an understated dramatic force.

The glamour and exhilaration of urban life in the Roaring Twenties is the central theme of paintings by Guy Pène du Bois and George Bellows who, together with Hopper, were students of Robert Henri and continued the realist tradition initiated by the Ashcan School. Pène du Bois and Bellows, together with sculptors such as Gaston Lachaise, departed from the loose brushwork of the Ashcan aesthetic, instead using smooth curves and monumental, tubular forms to depict figures. Purged of anecdotal detail, their compositions strike a balance between the idealized forms of abstraction and the particularities of realism.

Although never as stylized as the work of these artists, Hopper’s paintings of the period share a similar approach. Works like his iconic Early Sunday Morning (1930) are drawn from observed reality yet devoid of characteristic details that would tie them to a specific place and time. Hopper was not interested in the lively social world depicted by many of his colleagues, but he shared their interest in capturing moments of solitude and using bold, simplified forms to infuse his scenes with dramatic monumentality.

Hopper and Pène du Bois shared an especially close friendship and a common interest in depicting themes of emotional estrangement—though Hopper shared little of his friend’s fascination with high-society elegance. Pène du Bois was an early champion of Hopper’s work and helped organize his friend’s first solo exhibition, which took place at the Whitney Studio Club, the predecessor to the Whitney Museum, in 1920.

When Hopper began making prints in 1915, he was advised on the technique of etching by Martin Lewis, one of the great printmakers of the early twentieth century who was famous for his scenes of New York life. In the 1920s, they took drawing classes together at the Whitney Studio Club, the precursor to the Whitney Museum. The two artists shared an interest in capturing the dramatic light effects of the city at night.

During the 1920s, the impact of industrial expansion on the lives of ordinary citizens was so great that people spoke of their era not only as the Jazz Age but as the Machine Age. Artists responded to this phenomenon by creating portraits of American factories, skyscrapers, and machine-made structures in a style often known as Precisionism. Characterized by crisp lines, hard-edged geometric shapes, and flat planes of color, the style embodied the sense of order, logic, and purity often associated with science and the machine. For many of the Precisionists, including Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, this style also reflected a desire to create a distinctly American aesthetic rooted in shared national experience.

Hopper neither counted himself among the Precisionists nor did he share their optimistic embrace of industry and its hard-edged aesthetic. However, his work of the period shares certain affinities with theirs. For Hopper, as for the Precisionists, architecture offered a springboard for exploring formal geometries and light effects. In his paintings of urban scenes and industrial structures, as in those of Demuth and Sheeler, the interaction between abstract diagonal planes and expanses of light is often as much a focal point as the subject itself.

By the end of the 1920s, a number of American artists began retreating to the countryside in search of a reprieve from the commotion and chaos of modern urban life. In 1930, Hopper and his wife, Jo, began spending summers in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he painted the coastal landscape and scenes inspired by the small-town life he observed there. After years of struggling for recognition, his art began to bring him attention and success. A debut show at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in 1924 and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1931 led to a slew of sales, which enabled the Hoppers to build their own house in Cape Cod in 1934.

Together with his close colleague Charles Burchfield, who painted in and around Buffalo, New York, Hopper came to represent the movement known during the 1930s as American Scene painting. Both artists used the vernacular architecture and landscapes of small town America to elicit a sense of longing and nostalgia for a way of life that was rapidly being abandoned as more and more of the population moved to urban centers. For many viewers, Hopper and Burchfield captured the sturdy individualism at the heart of the American ethos, particularly during the hardships of the Great Depression.

For urban dwellers during the 1930s, the despair of the Great Depression was countered by the proliferation of popular entertainment—especially movies, music, and dance halls—which offered distraction and solace from the period’s hardships. Both the vitality and the drama of urban life in the 1930s are captured in the work of the New York painters known as the Social Realists, including Reginald Marsh and Paul Cadmus. At the time, Hopper’s depictions of city life were often associated with those of the Social Realists, but the sensibility of paintings like Barber Shop distinguishes them from the work of his contemporaries. Unlike his peers, whose visions of New York are inseparable from the dynamic interactions of human beings, Hopper uses the city to explore moments of solitude, transforming scenes of everyday life into epic statements about the human condition that continue to resonate with us today.