Anything but Still Lives: The Worlds of Edward Hopper

by Anne Gambling

an otherwise diverse commentary is a consensus about his pictorial silences. Anfam holds that scholars over the years have traced a crisis in European culture dating from the late 19th century in regard to human relationships with respect to space, architecture and the domestic or urban sphere. ‘By the same logic,’ he writes, ‘Hopper’s many blank walls, vacant windows and dramatic facades eventually ‘speak’ in lieu of his mute inhabitants … they enunciate an ultra-materialist American era in which things – invented, mass-produced by assembly line, consumed, bought, sold and discarded – gained the edge over people.’

  One can present a similar case for sparsity and silence in narrative expression. Ernest Hemingway famously said: ‘Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.’ Gustave Flaubert similarly held: ‘Words are like stones with which one builds walls.’ The implication here is that the architecture of fictional works is not evident, as such, to a reader. Strong foundations are necessary, granted, but should be obvious to no one but the builder/architect thereto, hence Hemingway’s iceberg theory as an oft-cited grail of truth for young writers: ‘Only 10-20% of an iceberg is exposed, and the great movement is under the water where the bulk is invisible.’ In this analogy is crystallised the whole notion of how much needs to be said versus how little has to be said.

  Contemplating the analogy in my own vernacular, it is as if the grains of sand in the settling pond of Hopper paintings (as much as Hemingway prose) fall to earth to render the base of the pool itself rich with organic matter. What is visible to a viewer or reader, however, is accessed via its surface – clean, translucent and fresh, yet replete with meaning invisibly arisen from the depths.

  Hopper was very conscious of stripping out the inessential features of Hemingway’s scorned ‘interior decoration’ to present his thoughts on canvas as clearly and concisely as possible. As Wagstaff (2004) writes, his desire was to reach a kind of plausibility, offering the minimum amount of information necessary to suggest that the scene could actually happen – ‘a painterly manifestation of what Goethe’s quote was all about’. She describes this intermeshing of emotional reality and narrative fiction, in effect, as achieving a cinematic purpose – aiding believability of the narrative as well as inviting the viewer to perform feats of imaginative projection.

  The spare quality of a Hopper scene also enables the viewer to focus more on the characters (or actors) within their stage-like setting. Peter Wollen (2004) quotes from Hopper’s wife Jo’s journal to confirm this intention: ‘Figures stand out in space, not fastened to background.’ It is such ‘standing out’, or the seeming three-dimensionality of his actors, that gives them weight and the painting a degree of solidity. The paradox, however, is that while they stand out and dominate the material space the canvas affords their story, so powerful is their inner removal (or pensive inflection) that we must take on some of their intimate distance as we look, to truly see ‘into’ them. It is as if we assume an abstracted, slightly hypnotic gaze ourselves in order to be able to view these internal pastures of reverie.

  Wagstaff (2004) writes that ‘most of Hopper’s characters are so immersed in thought that they seem completely unaware of their surroundings. They are posed in dramatic scenes of distraction, absorbed in private thought and sober musing.’ Hopper had his own muses in this regard. From Rembrandt, whose work he valued highly alongside that of Degas, Hopper learned the art of conveying internalised thought by focusing on the dichotomy of lighting and shadows. Degas’ prioritisation of framing a subject is also cited as an influence which the American artist used to good effect when, like Vermeer, he painted women alone – abstracted in oceanic reveries, and seemingly part of their habitats, even when that habitat was temporary.

  Hence, to weave a deft thread between the stories housed in this volume, I have chosen to concentrate on Hopper’s earlier works where women are the main protagonists, in the period leading up to and including America’s involvement in the Second World War. My aim is to present the worlds they inhabited during this era – anything but still lives! – as well as demonstrate that any issues, concerns, life questions or relationships they faced transcend cultural and historical constraints. Just as Hopper still speaks to contemporary art lovers, my stories are aimed similarly.

  Still points and stopping places

  In developing this collection, I have imagined Hopper’s paintings as ‘still points’ in each story’s narrative journey. The notion of the still point houses the idea of the existential moment, the contemplative finger-click before we do something. It exists, and yet most of the time we do not identify or recognise it. By concentrating on each Hopper still point, by giving it voice in a work of prose, the moment is acknowledged before being extended in either direction, fore or aft. As such, the moment captured in his painting exists in both time and space, as well as beyond temporal and spatial dimensions, something TS Eliot contemplates in ‘Burnt Norton’:

  … And do not call it fixity

  Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

  Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

  There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

  (from Four Quartets, 1944)

  It is the same notion which is housed in the Gilles Deleuze’s (1993) concept of the ‘event’: ‘To the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait for us and invite us in’. In this context he cites the French poet Bousquet’s First World War experience thus: ‘My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it’, which is analogous to Emerson’s (2003) observation that the soul already contains in itself the event that befalls it, ‘for the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts’. In short, therefore, Eliot’s ‘still point’ is a momentary event, the instant where temporal and eternal meet, one which Virginia Woolf (1985) describes as a ‘moment of being’, a sudden shock or ‘token of some real thing behind appearances.’ Needless to say, for Woolf such events need to be put into words to make them real, or whole, and I see the task likewise with the stories in this collection. By writing Hopper’s art into existence, my felt connection to the spirit of each of his individual work ‘events’ lives anew, within me and without.

  Hopper also informs, in this collection of stories, my understanding of how the philosophical intersects with the experiential. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, was acutely sensitive to the concept of place and the role it played in an individual life’s action. According to Krell and Bates (1997), he was convinced that the effects of environment, climate, and terrain on one’s life and thought were both tangible and profound, quoting as follows from his works: ‘Indeed, we ourselves are nothing other than what we sense at each instant of that onward flow. For even when we wish to go down to the stream of our most personal essence, Heraclitus’s statement holds true: one does not step twice into the same river.’

  In this context, the ‘instants’ or moments frozen in time to which Hopper has graciously granted us witness are worthy of reverence. They cannot be repeated, and are therefore akin to ‘stopping places’, where path and place intersect as a conceptual existential space, in the art of Richard Long. According to Ian Wightman (2005), Long’s art enacts the self-same Heideggerian sense of place Nietzsche described: ‘Where the truth of being is revealed to ourselves’.

  A Sarahan work of Long’s (Clearing, 1988) clearly attests to the correlation between path and place. As documented (through photography), one sees a path leading to a stone circle – a place to establish oneself within the world – from which another path leads out into the far distance, one assumes, to a further stopping place on his journey. Long (2005) describes what he does as ‘the ritual of an anonymous person. I come to some mountains and I move some stones around and then I disappear.’ His are works of passage which incorporate (or integrate, as it were) randomly chosen stopping places within the journey.

  As a writer, what I see in Hopper’s work is stillness, the anonymous capturing or
recording of an existential moment, onto which I can graft my painterly prose as a similar ‘work of passage’ – only possible, however, because of the stillness of Hopper’s art. For within the frame exists a tension, an energy to explore what is beyond, to journey on from his Longian clearing into yet-to-be mapped territory. Said tension, I believe, arises from the faces he gives his models – they are inscrutable, devoid of expression. Such minimalism fuels imagination, the viewer seemingly invited to enter the frame, to ‘read’ the work, or scratch beneath the surface of the canvas to reveal – what? In so doing, we are drawn to move beyond the borders of our known world, on and out, toward an imagined horizon, conjuring a narrative as we go. Hopper’s ‘stopping place’ is really a starting point for internal reverie.

  At times in this collection, therefore, the scene depicted by Hopper may commence a story; at times, it may end a story. Or perhaps it may simply form any one of a dozen scenes, backdrops as it were, to the action therein, a split second when time and place stand still, or a breath is drawn – when things are clearly seen under a sharp and uncompromising light,