The Lonely City Read Online Free PDF

before his death in 1967, he gave an unusually long interview to the Brooklyn Museum. He was eighty-four at the time: the foremost realist painter at work in America. As always, his wife was present in the room. Jo was a consummate interrupter, filling in the spaces, jumping in all the gaps. The conversation (which was recorded and transcribed, though never published in full) is illuminating not only in terms of content, but also for what it reveals of the Hoppers’ complex dynamic, their intimately adversarial marriage.
    The interviewer asks Edward how he comes to choose his subjects. As usual, he seems to find the question painful. He says that the process is complicated, very difficult to explain, but that he has to be very much interested in his subject, and that as such he can only produce perhaps one or two paintings a year. At this, his wife interrupts. ‘I’m being very biographic,’ she says, ‘but when he was twelve years old, he grew, he was six feet tall.’ ‘Not at twelve. Not at twelve,’ Hopper says. ‘But that’s what your mother said. And you said. Now you’re changing it. Oh, you contradict me . . . You know, you’d think we were bitter enemies.’ Theinterviewer makes some small sound of disavowal and Jo ploughs on, describing her husband as a schoolboy, slim as a blade of grass, no strength in him at all, not wanting to make trouble with the mean kids, the bullies.
    But that made him rather, it would make one shy . . . he had to lead the line at school, you know, the tallest, and oh, he hated that, these bad boys in back of him, and they’d try to push him off in the wrong direction.
    ‘Shy is hereditary,’ Hopper says, and she replies: ‘Well, I think it’s circumstantial too, you know . . . He never has been much on the declaring himself – ’. At that he interrupts, saying: ‘I declare myself in my paintings.’ And again, a little later: ‘I don’t think I ever tried to paint the American scene. I’m trying to paint myself’.
    He’d always had a knack for drawing, right from his boyhood in New Jersey at the tail end of the nineteenth century, the only son of cultured and not particularly well-suited parents. A lovely naturalness of line, and at the same time a certain sourness that came out especially in the ugly caricatures he drew right through his life. In these often strikingly unpleasant drawings, which were never exhibited but which can be seen in Gail Levin’s biography, Hopper presents himself as a skeletal figure, all long bones and a grimace, often under the thumb of women or hankering silently for something they refuse to supply.
    At eighteen, he went to art school in New York, where he was taught by Robert Henri, one of the foremost proponents of the gritty urban realism known as the Ashcan School. Hopperwas an outstanding and much-praised student, and so understandably lingered at college for years, unwilling to cast himself fully into independent adulthood. In 1906 his parents financed a trip to Paris, where he shut himself away, not meeting any of the artists in the city at the time, a lack of interest in prevailing currents or fashions that he maintained lifelong. ‘I’d heard of Gertrude Stein,’ he remembered later, ‘but I don’t recall having heard of Picasso at all.’ Instead, he spent his days wandering the streets, painting by the river or sketching prostitutes and passers-by, setting down a taxonomy of hairdos and women’s legs and nifty feathered hats.
    It was in Paris that he learned to open up his paintings, to let light in, following the example of the Impressionists, after the gloomy browns and blacks favoured in his New York training. Learned too to meddle with perspective, to make small impossibilities in his scenes: a bridge reaching where it couldn’t, the sun falling from two directions at once. People stretched, buildings shrunk, infinitesimal disturbances in the fabric of reality. This is how you unsettle the viewer, by making a