At Edward Hopper’s Doorstep

You may remember at the very first lecture I mentioned how we were starting a lecture fund an education fund in John's honor and it started out with some very wonderful ample gifts for members of the gallery's board and as of two days ago the total amount of that fund is now surged to be and here I have to find one million one thousand two hundred twenty dollars and this gift is come from a total number of a hundred and fifty one donors so I want to thank all of you as I know John does any of you who have not yet received the John Walsh thank-you brochure and want to make a contribution you can pick one up at the end but this exceeded what we might have hoped and this fund for forevermore will allow us to bring wonderful lectures here for the kinds of work that John's been doing here for so long and provides support of the kind of close looking we do with our education program throughout the gallery so John this is a wonderful tribute to what you've done to benefit this teaching Museum in so so many ways and I want to announce that we've already secured the first for John Walsh lectures and on first one it's gonna be on January 26th and this is particularly appropriate to John's love and expertise in Dutch Golden Age art the first Don Walsh lecture is going to be Taco Tibbets the director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and he'll be giving a wonderful history on the the whole sense of that to that great museum some of which you've seen reference to in all of John's lectures and then February 2nd one of our own great scholar curators Larry Cantor's sitting right here at the front row Larry did the fabulous Frangelico retrospective you might remember the met before we got him here full time and he's going to be given a lecture in search of Frangelico the artist as a young man that will be on February 2nd then just very recently we're still fixing the date and the titles you've all heard about the death of wonderful Vince Scully who's finished his 62 years of teaching in this very auditorium back in 2000 and nine just died there'll be a wonderful memorial service for vincent patel chapel on january 20th and then a reception at the art gallery from 3 to 5:30 all of you were invited to come to that and then in February Paul Goldberger one of vince's greatest students the former architecture critic of the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize winner and now distinguished professor at the new school in New York will deliver a tribute lecture on Vince and his life's work and then we've invited an Timken one of the greatest scholars to come to Yale and study modern and contemporary art who's now the curator of modern art and contemporary painting and sculpture at MoMA and it will deliver a lecture in April so these are my mind you couldn't ask for for more fabulous people to honor you John with some additional lecturing and we're gonna keep it up so come on up here in a second but before 1:00 last night before he does I want to tell you two things John has a kind of important birthday on Saturday and after we go up into the lobby we're gonna have some festivities and john was ass biz wink and a wonderful member of a certain others singing group what would that group me the Whiffenpoofs so john sang for both those groups he has a great love of music so we would need to come forth with a great happy birthday song for John didn't toast him for all he's done for us and again John I just want to thank you so much you've done everything imaginable to support the mission artistically and educationally of this great teaching Museum John Walsh thank you thanks doc thank you all donors and listeners today as Jacque said we end this series with a painting that arrived at Yale when I was just finishing here it teased me and has begged for an explanation ever since so I'm gonna ask us to do what we usually do in these lectures which is to sit still for a few minutes and just look at it on the screen well I said it teased me it seems mischievous to me my summer vacation nice house warm day Beach down there somewhere sunlight on the wall as I looked at more and more pictures by hopper questions about this one grew in my mind along the lines of what's wrong with this picture it's empty and there's the sea but where exactly is it and what am I supposed to think about it well to start with I'm gonna ask some questions that run all through these lectures where does the artist ask his spectator to imagine that he or she is what's our vantage point and did this place that he painted look like this and if Hoffer changed it what for hopper began with a real place of the front door of his house and his studio on Cape Cod which he designed for himself and where he and his wife spent summers starting in 1934 it's lived in now and it hasn't changed very much in 50 years since hoppers death out the door you see a deck that was added later there's some grass and a bit of Cape Cod Bay here's the main room that served as a studio in the summers the door into the bedroom is there which became a parlor in hoppers painting the building sits on a bluff in Truro high above Fisher Beach looking West the living room and studio have an enormous window facing north here you see it on the left in a photograph take a dozen years or so after he painted the Yale picture that summer he was at work on a somewhat different similar composition that we'll look at later behind him is his wife and helper and de-facto manager the painter Josephine Everson looking on she seems a little concerned for what her husband is doing and whether the photographer is tiring him out and perhaps why he isn't picturing her at work painting all hints of the complicated relationship to put it mildly that the hoppers had in the Depression years of the early 30s life had been difficult for them financially they lived and worked in a small fourth floor walk-up on Washington Square they'd been renting a place in Cape Cod for the summers and when Joe inherited some money they built their own house and studio it was here in South true row on the bay side of the Cape where the red arrow points it has three rooms and it was simple very simple it lacked the deck on the bay outside that is there now and had just a step down to the ground outside edward is happy there and in his quiet way Joe was alternately grumpy and witty about being locked up with heed all summer without anybody else around she drew a map of the area where you can see the New York New Haven and Hartford tracks to Provincetown right in the middle those were ripped up long ago and they're facing the bay next to a little hill called camel's hump is hopper house in a blaze of Sunset there was just one other house down the road and there was also a pond and a marsh with nesting birds which Joe labels Swamp rookery of 1,000 squawk and here's the house seen from a satellite showing you that it's quite far back from the beach and showing you its orientation the blue arrow points north the exposure of that huge studio window that you saw the house is it faces west remember that for a few minutes because I'll come back to it it's owned by a couple who rent it every other summer to a painter philipp Koch who made some of the photographs I'll be showing you you won't be surprised that the hopper house here with the arrow has more neighbors now there's a big house to the left on camel's hump and at the right what looks from the air like maybe a military installation but no it's a new house built illicitly but now after several years of hearings in the court case has been allowed to remain in rooms by the sea the painting cup hopper was painting a corner of his own habitat or at least beginning with it and we can look at his drawings to see what he did with it the first was a quick sketch of the open door in the center and just a suggestion at the very far right of that same door open in the opposite direction towards us he turned the paper over and he drew the composition in more detail still seeing it from the point of view of someone's standing but now showing the back room at the left and the sea out the door to the right there's a picture on the wall and next to it faint lines that indicate the door swinging in light pours through the door opening making shapes on the wall and the floor and those scribbled calculations at the bottom by the way ours for scaling up the drawing to the full size of the canvas you might ask well what became of the door he had already in mind to shift it to the other side and so he did the picture on the near wall as you can see is gone and there are other changes as well it's useful actually to look at what Hopper was looking at the actual spot in the house with the other things you see at the upper left the house and if you go clockwise to the first quick sketch you see shows a door that is window above and door below what was actually there the so-called Dutch door you know you see there now in the painting there at the bottom right way over at the wind right edge the door is paneled he's eliminated the window panes in the photograph at the house of the house and the upper left in the backroom you can see a window in the rear wall that hopper barely indicated in the second drawing and then in the painting eliminated entirely in another photograph taken twenty-five years ago you see a deck was been added but see looks very much as hopper saw it he's changed other things though in the painting he made the light slant across the wall much the same as he did in the drawing but he's changed the light on the floor making its near edge parallel to the bottom and the horizon if you look at the photograph you notice that in the back room you can just see a bit of the front window if you yeah there and if you look at the painting now and see whether you think the light of the Sun coming from above through a window of normal height like the one you see in the picture at the left at the top left whether that light could fall on the wall the way it does in the painting to figure that out a couple of years ago Jessica sac and I asked a graduate student in architecture David Burt for some help architects have techniques for studying light and shade inside buildings and he first started with a little model and recently some computer simulations this one shows the geometry of hoppers painting and the patterns of light abstractly simplified this though shows how the building would have to look in order to produce the light mache that we see in the painting Dave David took out the middle walls you see so we can see into the back room so the rear window would have to have been a parallelogram disappearing into the ceiling and the front door frame would need to have a triangular extension to cast a shadow like hoppers so this house would have presented resembled the capita cabinet of dr. Caligari on the Cape and hopper not only changed the details of his own house the door the furniture of the wall the placement of windows and so on but he also suspended the rules of perspective David diagrammed this for us one-point perspective requires that parallel lines converge like railroad tracks to a point on the horizon the vanishing point here they don't even try one more point remember that the house faces West hopper shadows are cast by light that would have come from high in the northwest well the Sun is never in the northwest in our hemisphere in any season or at any time of day hopper put the light source where he needed it to make the picture of work the way he wanted it to and I haven't even mentioned the light in the back room cast by the Bureau that's where the also where hopper water did not actually where any normal source of light could possibly put it these are all minor manipulations though they're part of hoppers working methods you'll see the surprise here is the water outside the door just where are we intended to think it is is it just below the door lapping at the base of the door or far down way down where is a step or a ladder for us and why didn't hopper make this clearer well I think discrepancies like this are intentional I think their ways of four hopper to subvert our expectations and make us uneasy they're expressive devices in other words but expressive of what I'm going to make some suggestions about that later on but right now I want to look at some of the ways that hopper through most of his 60-year career uses composition and light and unexpected vantage points for expressive purposes how he makes ordinary material uncanny the devices I'm talking about our points of view light cropping the horizon emptiness three-part compositions and spatial and big Uwe T we're gonna find hopper using all of these in various combinations we could start here with a familiar picture that Hopper painted a few years after rooms by the sea a man sitting alone as this desk sleeves rolled up tilting back a bit looking out of his window across toward a row of 19th century buildings in the record book of hoppers pictures his wife Joe called it the man in concrete wall he is confined by the cold bare geometry of the building he's in hopper is implying something about the warm old fabric and human scale of the city versus the cool features less featureless ness of the building that the man is in where could that newer building be hopper sets it back behind the swooping front of the much older building so is it an addition that close behind the facade or is the perspective off and where are we spectators supposed to be I think Piper makes it impossible for us to know our uncertainty then influences how we read the situation of the man like an effect less man isolated and lost in thought there's a bigger question for us why paint this subject and why in this way hopper shrank from talking about his motives but when he did he was terse and he was consistent he said about great artists that they have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions any digressions from this large aim leads me to boredom and why does hopper choose some subjects over others but he said they are the best medium for a synthesis of my inner experience so he's guided by his emotions his inner experience the theme of city life life led in stacked up boxes with windows goes back 30 years in hoppers work this picture is about life in close quarters about affluence without elbow room and without nature which is here in the form of a forlorn potted plant in the window across the way may just make it out a red-haired woman in a maid's apron is making the bed most of the picture is building observed from an oblique angle maybe two buildings superimposed maybe just one with an airshaft with just a stripe of blue sky and a sliver of morning light that leaks in turning the shade greenish yellow hitting the sill and the red carpet under the way its feet we've no idea how high this floor is the third twenty third it wouldn't matter much and as to our vantage point that's not clear either probably looking from another box out another window maybe a bit higher the perspective is correct it's the unexpected viewpoint that's so strange together with the banal and banality of what we're observing here are some of the same visual puzzles but more complex and applied to very different goings-on between people hopper creates another oblique perspective structure with two vanishing points in a room whose walls meet at the irregular angles again there's no line that's horizontal parallel to the bottom of the picture that creates instability it makes for uneasiness and it says for something about the relationship of the boss and his secretary as they were called back then she's moved from her typewriter to a file cabinet and her tight dress and her gaze towards the man are not distracting him unless of course he's avoiding looking at her we're left to imagine what if anything has gone on between these two non commuting people communicating people what's so effective here is the zigzag forms in the hard light at night here the fact that again our vantage point is impossible we've got an aerial view we'd have to be standing on a chair to see what hopper shows the whole thing is artifice looking like reality because he observed the details but entirely constructed hopper wrote to the buyer of this painting that he'd had difficulty with the light on the wall that faint parallelogram that connects the two figures and as a preview of the motifs that he'll be using many times over including in the Yale painting few of his pictures got so much rehearsal in drawings as this one six of them and few changed so much in the process here at the top upper left there's just the secretary with her back to us then at the top right a man is added reading and a large patch of light from the window cast on the wall perspective is used to construct the scene as though we were observers were standing across the room then at the lower left we're quite a lot higher the picture has been removed from the wall and the patch of light is smaller in all these changes hopper seems to be responding to different ideas as they occur to him about what might be going on so in 1940 hopper is using perspective and light and a surprising viewpoint to create a setting for an unspecified unspoken relationship between people who don't know we're watching hopper made some comments on the light in the painting and he added any more than this the picture will have to tell but I hope it will not tell us any obvious anecdote for none' is intended the action the picture is mental not physical and it's not for us to know but to speculate about I've taken hopper to mid-career now and Beyond in pursuit of the motifs and the devices in the Yale painting but I haven't even introduced the artist properly so let me do that now Edward Hopper grew up in Nyack New York he at 17 in 1899 enrolled in the New York school of illustrating he had a gift for portraits and caricature that developed in school and strengthened during this day in Europe mostly Paris for a year starting in nineteen six it came back to Paris twice in the next three years he thrived on French literature on Baudelaire on Rambo and Millar May and the symbolist poets and Proust these became a lifelong interest of his unlike John Marin and Joseph Stella he didn't revel in the various European avant-garde move during those years that's prank from Suzanne and Goga and the nobbies and the fove and the Cubist's he loved particularly MANET and Doug ah he certainly learned from interior scenes by Doug I like the one on the left that are emotionally charged but for uncertain reasons and totally enigmatic both artists had a flair for the kind of off-center and oddly cropped composition which you can see in hoppers street scene on the right and in the cafe scene by Duga here at the bottom hopper learned from that too and when he returned to New York as an illustrator once the seven years after he got back he did a big colorful Parisian subject at the top six-foot wide picture at the top recollection of his French infatuations and experiments that he didn't repeat this is what he did do he became an extremely good commercial illustrator he was versatile he did book covers and in an old-timey kind of idiom like the one on the left or illustrations for magazines fixtures in fiction in robust black-and-white that suggests his command of light and shade much later on as well as his pithy way of composing figure groups to get a story across Hopper was a success as an illustrator and he hated it all through the 20s Hopper also succeeded as an edger but there with no clients supplying him with the subjects he was free to pick his own and his choices anticipate the unsettling material he soon going to be painting a nude at a window and a night scene composed in a way that before long is going to influence the detective movies that came to be called film noir and he was making watercolors near during summer trips to popular vacation spots here it's at the top it's Gloucester pictures that sold very well and him and his new wife Josephine in the 1920s hopper was also painting an oil as you've already seen and I want to return to those pictures and and to the etchings for a moment looking for motifs and devices that connect to our main interest the man in the etching here was seen from a surprise point of view from a roof or a high window no place specific just way up and looking steeply down this is a modernist device that's familiar to us and was familiar to hopper from photographs made by his New York contemporaries some of you saw the film mannahatta that Paul strand and Charles sealer made in 1920 when we talked about Joseph Stella a film that had Ruth's rooftop sights shots like this surprising viewpoints are a stock and trade for hopper here the view is sliced off by the double rail that is used to used to protect pedestrians as they walked over the Williamsburg Bridge we get the upper storeys of the buildings too but not the bottom we get the rail but not the bridge as a first glance it seems as careless as a snapshot you have to supply what's missing it's an invitation for you to imagine the neighborhood as it was before the bridge cut through it here's a similar device in a painting Maya hopper a couple of years earlier based on a grand house in French sort of Second Empire style in Haverstraw New York up the road from where he grew up he painted it from below the New York Central Railroad tracks which are put through long after the house was built the house managed somehow to retain a kind of absurd overdressed dignity despite the intrusion the hopper saw a way to suggest the price of progress by putting us below and making the marooned house look even more forlorn by the way this picture was the first painting by anybody to enter the collection of the brand-new Museum of Modern Art in 1930 before they had a building of their own Hopper also plays with far distances here a few years before the Yale painting he recalled a moment when he and Joe were traveling in Charleston South Carolina twenty-five years earlier he saw a woman standing outside who was waiting for her husband and then when he arrived she went quickly inside in the drawing he reconstructed the scene from memory the building is at least partly commercial evidently since it has a prominent display window and there's a broad sidewalk but it's all placed out at the edge of some place that he doesn't show and we could hardly guess at in the painting Hopper puts the woman on the doorstep elegantly dressed in a pose that's not exactly welcoming to strangers that is to spectators the grassy land stretches out beyond the sidewalk far into the distance ending in a blue line on the horizon which must be the sea the right half of the picture is empty there's some kind of sexual charge to this momentary encounter years before and you suspect that it's been building in hopper perhaps in his dreams in his inner experience as you heard him call it so this is not reporting this is recollection a kind of mental event with image attached that often motivates hopper to paint another picture with a combination of enigmatic behavior and an indecipherable setting who are these people they are well-dressed they're behaving like passengers on a cruise ship relaxing a bit stiffly as they take the Sun one man on the Left reads studiously the building is white and cubical like the one that the office worker we saw earlier sits in the surface thereon has no substance that we can identify and ends in what a road and then a field of high dry grass and then a distant row of hills and it's a row all right it's a uniform in height running straight how far away is it well how far away is the sea and the yale painting we lack a scale the bigger picture seems to be about pleasure-seeking slightly comic and it's cast of characters in an impossible place an anonymous building in a locale that hopper makes into something from a Confucius fantasy world that you hope you'll want not going to live to see I welcome back to points of view that help determine the sense of the painting you saw this view from a bridge not a normal kind of scenic view but looking over the rail to the tops of the buildings well hopper rode the elevated railways and he looked out the train window at buildings and threw them to private events inside served up in slices framed by windows a blowing curtain in the middle of the back side of a woman and a pink slip and further over red drapery lifts let it lit up by lamp vignettes seen in a glance by a passenger going by a spectator or wire if you prefer at night the light is perfect for that coming from inside out the opposite of rooms by the sea hopper did not invent this genre the best known practitioner was John Sloan a New York artist that he admired very much apartment house windows at night rooftops in summer and other places not visited by art collectors were for Sloane a source of scenes of daily life that you might never witness otherwise in New York often involving partly undressed women in their daily routines hopper reconstructs quite different situations in these glimpses yes here a busy husband and his withdrawn wife both well-dressed he for the office and she perhaps for the evening he poring over the newspaper she turned away to the piano that she doesn't play but she just picks out we can't tell if they're unconnected miss Rizzo or boredom or what and where are we subject a terse supposed to be presumably on the ground floor just outside there wide open window uncomfortably close to them in the first of his etchings as you saw Hopper created a situation that he returns to often a woman in a room alone and various states of undress is looking out a window it can be daytime it can be night and often light streams in in every case there's something going on that's conveyed by her body language but not her facial expression which is either impassive or invisible her relation with the window and what may be outside seems important in the painting it's late morning she wears shoes but that's all was she waiting as she distracted trying to work out a problem in her mind we tried to imagine what may be going on or has been or will be some story to explain what we're seeing we know it involves a situation inside the room and something outside but our questions hang in the air remember hoppers words of caution about his picture of an office at night he said I hope it will not tell us any obvious anecdote for none is intended the year after he painted rooms and by the sea hopper gives this motif its classic form it's daytime evidently early and the implied situation is entirely different he worked hard at getting it right Joe was his model in this compositional study where he'd set up an equilibrium between the window and the light projected on the wall between the outside and the inside with the woman in the middle as fulcrum she's inside but looking outside in the painting she wears a slip and she sits up straighter and the light on the wall extends out of the frame on the left so the edge doesn't draw attention doesn't pull our attention back rather than forward the day is beginning but we don't get the feeling that she's waiting or that some action has taken place or will the room is bare the window with its glimpse of the red brick world below is set against the warm light that falls on her her expression is neutral what the picture signifies and what it might have to do with hoppers in her life once again we can only guess we've arrived at the subject of equilibrium in hoppers compositions something you can recall and words been rooms by the sea which is also a three part composition like this but which he uses for quite a different purpose as famous painting as a design that does a lot of the work in generating interest in the subject the main actor here is a uniformed sure in this movie theater she's wearing her blonde hair and a sort of movie star do and she stands in a classic pose of pensive absorption she's in the little curtain'd lighted for a separated from the darkened auditorium by a thick wall with an ornate corner we see just two people on the left in the audience separated by a couple of rows and on the screen are some black-and-white forms that we can't decipher so they're two contrasting zones here with a wall between for the audience the movie provides entertainment for the usher it provides a job they see the movie she only hears it they are absorbed in the fantasy world of the film she in the worlds of her own thoughts we're each going to read this picture differently but all of our reactions are bound to take account of these contrasting elements the structure of the composition a triad of movie wall and usher of dim light dark and bright light establishes equilibrium and sometimes it's so prominent and it's that it's got to be charged with significance for what's going on with the people light it up for the woman on the bed light maybe a suggestion of reawakened consciousness and of thoughts entering the mind in the way that light enters the window and enlightens here the art historian in me is feeling guilty if he fails to mention the fact that light entering a room and making a pronounced pattern and stirring the spirit isn't kind of image with a deep history hopper may or may not have realized that Caravaggio and the pictures on the Left picture on the upper left Caravaggio made light slant sharply into the room and fall on Matthew the tax collector to back up Christ's call for conversion and below the next generation in Rome used the motif for Peters miraculously deliverer and says his Morocco's deliverance from prison by an angel my teacher at Yale John Hollander writing about hopper suggested that the famous picture on the right by Adolfo Menzel in a secular vein and closer to hopper painted the gentle visitation of light through curtains and on the floor to suggest another kind of spirit entering the room in this cafeteria light isolates the pensive young woman in a large radiant shape it makes a smaller shape of a kind of almost a kind of afterthought above the head of the man there was a vaguely predatory looking smoker across the room it floods in on her with such abundance and such clarity and seems to light up the whole world of life an opportunity for her that it's a major element in how we see her and how we speculate about whatever relationship between these two might be suggested again there's no story to deduce I think it's our job to accept that the artist intended ambiguity hopper suggests over and over that in pictures as in life uncertainty is the nature of things for 50 years ever since his years in Paris he'd been a great reader of French symbolist poets and they're an admirer of their embrace of vague thoughts tentative emotions elusive relations Hopper copied out a description by Paul Valatie of Millar mais attempt to render the outline of a thought and to make visible expectation doubt and concentration opera can reverse inside and outside here we know in a glance that it's a gas station and likely to be a mom-and-pop business the relation of the ship between the people is more explicit than we expect she has an exasperated expression and says something to him from inside he's immobile in his folding chair not working at the pumps where there aren't any cars anyway and not reacting face set looking toward the low Sun the situation seems unusually close to home of a kind that we can he's easily imagine happening between Joe the practical organizer easily annoyed by her husband and hopper withdrawn into his own thoughts and past and practicing passive resistance the year after room rooms by the sea hopper painted a couple outside a beach cottage sitting on the bench as the Sun declines in the late afternoon she relaxes he leans forward and they are close but they don't make contact despite the pleasant associations with vacation life the scene seems somehow desolate there's a thin layer of clouds and the light that we'd expect to bring warmth is instead cool again the situation of the couple is ambiguous vaguely bleak especially contrasted with a clear sharp solid man-made forms all around them here the feeling of strangeness we may experience we saw is partly introduced by those almost subliminal alterations to spatial logic the manipulations that I pointed out earlier but it's the emptiness of the rooms that strikes anybody first a dozen years later Hopper made a painting out of even less than this just light and empty space he worked in the house on the Cape eighty-one years old then an ailing the picture was a struggle he confessed at the beginning he'd had a figure in the room but he soon painted it out what's left is a window with green leaves and shadow and a bit of sky and through the window comes sunlight that falls on the walls and the floor that's all before we speculate on what this is about let me just mention that I thought to check with our friend the architect of the light and shade software guy David Burt to confirm our submission the hopper once again suspended geometry to create patterns that are satisfying but impossible in real life no surprise when he simulated the condition where light would pass through a window of the shape that he has in the painting the patch did not look like hoppers and when he simulated how the window would have to look in order for the light to fall as Hopper painted it yeah enough said so it's clear that Hopper does what he pleases once again he uses his own logic to produce a satisfying rhythm of voids and solids lights and shades his overall composition balances light and dark but it reverses the usual daytime relationship of light outside dark inside well why would Hopper paint a vague vacant room you think have the people and their furniture vacated the place is it waiting for new people to arrive but there's no clue of that so what is left is it the pleasure of abstract design yeah sure but it's also every inch of painting every seemingly blank surface is rich with a play of tints and varying thicknesses and small changes in design especially the baseboard and the window the artists hand in other words is always there a painting is literally self-conscious to the act of painting is front and center as it is in rooms by the sea you could think of the picture as a demonstration of an embodiment of the visual fiction of hoppers art not long after he painted the picture hopper told the artist and critic Brian of Doherty that he'd been intrigued for years by the idea of painting an empty room I'd already reported that when I asked a question about what he was after in light in an empty room he was silent and on further interrogation responded emphatically and with some exasperation I'm after me well all right why would he say that um I you earlier that Hopper's remarks about his purposes are few and brief and consistent you heard him declare that he was guided by his emotions and his inner experience which might have surprised you considering it comes from an artist whose work looks so objective and unemotional hopper kept a quotation from johann von goethe in his wallet it reads this way the beginning and the end of all artistic activity and here Hopper added for literary substitute artistic it works for that too the end of all artistic liberty activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me all things being grasped related recreated moulded and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner the world that is in me Goethe says that he reconstructs the outer world by means of his inner world which is what Hopper often referred to as personality hopper said his personality was a vast and varied realm hoppers work according to a Dorothy anyway is a search for definition of self in which he fervently believed but of which he had imperfect knowledge and that search to examine and define himself led hopper to portray human situations in a way that amounts to a kind of cumulative self-portrait that self-portrait I would add is a composite of a long series of pictures of various subjects that were trials propositions depicting invented people in places that embody hoppers own situation his work his marriage his conflicts his doubts his fears his pleasures now of course it's a truism as Lola's Leonardo da Vinci that every artist paints himself but Hopper made no secret of the major role that his inner life played in his artistic choices I'm not alone in feeling that light in an empty room conveys Hopper's sense of his own isolation and the joy and perhaps consolation that the act of painting provides for him I want to suggest that rooms by the sea also has this quality of testing hoppers own choices and his situation in the world I'll return to my suggestion but first I want to give you some idea of how differently people have interpreted the picture let me start with Edward and Joe Hopper in the record book that they kept of every painting there are small precise pen copies by hopper of each work and hoppers list of the canvas and the paint and the varnish that he used and his description of the painting the details of the sale and this one by the way sold to Stephen Clark for four thousand dollars and the dealer kept 1/3 of that as his fee and often there are added some witty comments by Joe here here after the title rooms by the sea Joe added alias the jumping-off place she added that the dealer turned that title down as having malign overtones others have taken the hoppers little joke seriously this is a paperback book kind of do-it-yourself guide to dying the sorry the artist Dorian Carter Foster and curator proposes an allegorical reading of the picture in the catalog for his superb exhibition of the hawk hopper drawings at the Whitney four years ago Foster says that the painting suggests an allegory of vision and looking he writes the chamber and the light slanting into it from an opening evoke the mind and eye light taken in and refracted information relayed to and processed by the brain Foster cites Newton and an 18th century diagram of the eye he goes on hopper deepens the symbolism by rhyming the primary polygon of life in the four room with a similarly angled trapezoid in the rear chamber this patch of light indexes an unseen window the other open eye and falls across the picture in a frame the picture on the wall is hoppers self conscious acknowledgment of the role of painters as creators of windows on the world one of the most enduring metaphors for the representation Western art hoppers rooms open onto a view of the expansive ocean visible through the doorway and a simple seascape of light and dark blue creating a flat horizon here again Hopper alludes to the painters practice the horizon line is fundamental for creating pictorial space on a flat surface for rendering and painting and drawing the space we inhabit in the world and the way we perceive and understand ourselves in it Hopper once stated emphatically that wish to paint himself and in rooms by the sea with its multiple references to viewing views pictures seeing he seems to do just that by visually and symbolically cataloguing his matey a this is ingenious and helpful in a way and points to the seriousness of the picture but I think it attributes to hopper a kind of systemic attention to symbolism that would have surprised him John Hollander the Yale poet and critic and lucky for me the most influential teacher I had in college Hollander got closest to the playfully serious spirit of hoppers painting using a kind of ekphrasis a form of ancient poetry that since antiquity describes and partly re-enacts a work of art to do that Hollander chose a very demanding verse form the villanelle six stanzas of three lines each of them including a refrain that Hollander varies slightly as he goes and each stanza he tests a different impulse that might arise for somebody looking at the picture the form suits the teasing quality of the image the front room to step right out of the room into the sea directly as if the land outside had vanished with some silent boom how wonderfully sudden it would be how grandly liberating it could be having swept away all but sunlight with a painter's broom to step wide out of the room out to the sea to step right out of the room onto the see the blue hardwood floor or its surface stretched over an almost bottomless gloom how shockingly stabilizing it should be how nonchalant yet stirring it might be straw hatted wearing some buttonhole and yellow bloom to step gaily out of the room off to the sea to step wrongly out of the room up to the sea as if suddenly there were nothing anymore about perspective that we could assume how seemingly possible yet it can't be how simple and familiar it shall be in the broadly ordinary that for the time being remains our doom to step simply out of the room down to the sea the late Richard Benson a photographer teacher Dean of the School of Art at Yale wrote about the picture and its relation to what photographers do I love this painting because it's made of light he wrote one of the differences between rooms by the sea and a photograph is that Hopper chose everything in the picture he was 69 so he couldn't have maneuvered his step deep enough to get out of this room another strange element is the sea the size of the waves and the size of the ripples are wrong for the size of the room hopper has made this view of a pair of rooms as though it's through a wide-angle lens of a camera but when he comes to the sea it's as though he used a narrow angle that makes everything big he's put a 19th century photograph of the sea outside of the doorway of a mid 20th century photograph of two rooms finally Benson says to make art the photographer has to make distinctions between myriad equivalent things but Hopper only includes what he wants the poet mark strand was an expert at putting words to the experience of looking at pictures strand wrote this about rooms for the scene rooms by the sea a cheerful strangeness occupies its spaces the view that fills the open doorway on the right those Stark is not forbidding the water seems to come up right to the door as if there were no middle ground or sure as if in fact it had been stolen from Magritte it is a view of nature unembellished and extreme on the left side of a painting is a narrow crowded view of nature's opposite a room furnished for the couch or chair a bureau and the painting the selected accoutrements of domestic life the picture urges us to move from right to left as if the view it wished to offer us were not of the sea but of the partially hidden second room even the sea seems to be looking up and in and the light seems to be pointing telling us which way to look by moving across the picture flat front plane we move more deeply within it the second room is a furnished echo of the first the doubling of the space is comforting since it enacts ideas of continuation and connection both basic to domestic well-being and the sea and sky double agents of nature's will look harmless in this context so strand suggests that the harmless sea and the light point us toward the domestic well-being of the second room well I like his phrase the cheerful strangeness of the spaces but I think it's all intended to induce discomfort instead now I'd like to suggest a way to think about Harper Harper's picture the composition has three parts in the center with the wall on the floor and the patch of sunlight the inner room at the left and the open door with a sieve we've seen that each of these is realistic looking but each has been manipulated - undercut belief - destabilize the illusion of literal truth space in the sitting room is compressed exaggerating its snugness and as to the patch of sunlight back there and the shadow cast by the bureau you've seen that they're impossible on the opposite side the sea has an absolutely regular chop and it recedes believably but we don't know how big the waves are or where it is we don't know if it's just below the door or far below there's no scale figure or point of reference to help in the center the bright patch that we take to be white reveals itself up close as anything but white instead it's a layered mass of detached strokes of yellow rose blue it's a fabricated white so everything we first accepted as accurate has been manipulated what's the purpose of that well I think the picture first of all invites us to be suspicious of appearances realism and painting itself is naive and why would we trust the real in the first place hopper meditated on these questions most of his life and used French literature as encouragement for him what's commonly regarded as dependable reality is actually in flux evasive unreliable appearances deceive humans are absent from the picture but hopper is here as the subject of another of his experiments proposing his situation in life and perhaps ours the layout of the painting asks us to think about the contrasts he's posed in the back room there's civility decorum regular social routines of life that room represents safety physical comfort it offers reassurance it's familiar it'll always be there we may feel regret for what we've missed but we will have what we have the qualities of the sea are the opposite we can't even know where it is for sure how far down how deep and so forth how far it extends sure there may be Pleasant associations with the beach and sailing and luring ones to voyage into faraway places but there are the worrying unknowns Shoals storms shipwreck never returning home death at sea on the Left home is where the heart is on the right nothing ventured nothing gained its one trusty bit of folk wisdom versus another which is of course a serious enduring theme in Western literature from the Odyssey onward and a staple of the Romantic generations of the 18th and 19th centuries when it appears is it typically as a choice between stifling conformity and courageous ventures into the unknown so in between here what do we find light on the wall that is hoppers painted illusion of light you've seen that throughout his career hopper makes light appear in many guises most often penetrating our closed worlds where it seems to give life and bring thought light is central to both the painter's task and the spectators hopper gives a spectators also a good vantage point for all this his own our line of sight is a bit above the doorknob near the horizon not standing in other words but sitting sitting where Hopper himself sat at his easel painting this hopper was once talking to a friend about the demands that people were making on him to give his pictures more action hopper hopper said they walk they want me to paint people waving their arms then he admitted maybe I am not very human what I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house operas art was in choosing the fewest simplest most eloquent images that came to him to convey the essential realities realities of his own feeling his choices his own situation in life and those were often ambiguous or conflicted in ways that he could never fully resolve or put to rest stay or go be silent or risk getting it wrong be private or public be stoical or vent your anger contemplate or paint I see all of that in rooms by the sea not only for Hopper but in many ways for myself and perhaps for you too I want to say I've been grateful to all of you for being so wonderfully attentive during this series it's been a reward for me and I thank you very very much

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 43,087

Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, Edward Hopper

Id: yodiS9p35BY

Length: 67min 3sec (4023 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 11 2017