Edward Hopper: Man of Mysteries

By Richard Lacayo/Boston

Edward Hopper is one of those painters who are always there on the edge of your awareness. His famous canvases are constantly being reproduced. But when you come up against the real things, you discover that his work is even stranger and more haunted--more impregnable--than you remembered. That's the lesson of the mesmerizing Hopper show that has opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where it remains until Aug. 19 before traveling to Washington and Chicago. That's also the Hopper paradox. He's the easy-to-read artist who's always just beyond our grasp.

It's been decades since Hopper was miscategorized as an American Scene painter, the long-limbed, tight-lipped yeoman of Washington Square who distilled the essence of coastal New England and the odd corners of Manhattan. The strange solitude in his pictures, which has nothing to do with the regional or picturesque, is much more evident to us now. Even in his stalwart houses presenting themselves silently against blue sky, there's that mood of isolation so unnerving that it was a simple matter for Alfred Hitchcock to put it to his own uses in Psycho, in which an outline evoking every Hopper house lingers just behind the Bates Motel.

Hopper can bring to mind Robert Frost, another complex operator who was drafted into the role of corn-fed American. Like Frost, Hopper possessed a sophisticated aesthetic camouflaged by the apparent simplicity and straightforwardness of his art. It's true that he wanted American painting to stop taking its marching orders from France. But he was never the honking cultural isolationist that Thomas Hart Benton became, thundering on about the perversities of European art and the prancing New Yorkers who bought into it. By contrast, Hopper made it to Paris no fewer than three times from 1906 to 1910, and in his work you see the bluntness of Manet, the blue shadows (but not the flittering light effects) of the Impressionists and traces of De Chirico. He had no use for pure abstraction, but the intricate construction of his pictures shows how well he understood it.

For those reasons and for the endless ambiguities of his watercolors and canvases, he remains the 20th century Realist who still looks resolutely modern to us. And charming at the same time, though it's an irony that his paintings of old houses in Maine or on Cape Cod should strike us that way. When they first appeared, they were considered triumphs over the ugliness and banality of the houses themselves. Gilded Age piles with mansard roofs or carpentered scrollwork were deeply out of fashion in the 1920s, when Hopper started seeking them out. In the same way, when he painted Manhattan, it wasn't the jazz-age skyscrapers he was drawn to. It was nondescript brownstones and offices, places like the one in Room in New York, where you could peek through the windows and glimpse anonymous people flourishing their enigmas.

He could be an awkward figure painter. His men can be as blocky as his lighthouses. And the women--what to make of his notion of eroticism, all those strapping females who manage to look both carnal and remote? A "hard muscular girl" is how someone described the typical Hopper woman, "sturdy of leg and breast, bulging in her clothes." True enough. But look at Second Story Sunlight, in which her face is a chalky mask with opaque brown lozenges for eyes. She never looks into yours and never will.

Hopper once said his goal as a painter was to achieve "the greatest possible austerity without the loss of emotion." He might have added that the emotion would be a dry-eyed and somewhat mysterious melancholy. And that this would be a part of the national mood we would recognize as soon as we saw it. Even if we didn't know quite what to make of it.