Hopper: The Drawings of a great painter

Edward Hopper was a slow painter. He made many sketches, even finished drawings, of places and people before finally producing a finished oil. His process is on fascinating display in Hopper Drawing, now at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Of course Hopper was hardly unique in drawing first then painting. But what the Whitney show makes clear is how he absorbed the reality he drew and synthesized it into a personal vision. Hopper himself said that the “fact” became the “improvisation” in his work.Hopper's art is all about narrative. There must be stories here, we say to ourselves, but what are they? Hopper never tells us; he lets us imagine our own narrative for his unanimated and unconnected figures, for his strange unpopulated city buildings and his seemingly abandoned houses in an agrarian America being consumed by advancing mechanization. In building his simple works, Hopper was never afraid to bend reality, light and color. There is always something not quite right in his pictures, a visual dissonance that lends drama and mystery. He is blunt yet oddly poetic. There is an existential angst, a sense of melancholy and loneliness in Hopper's city dwellers, although Hopper rejected these descriptions as “overdone.” The show’s curator, Carter Foster, describes Hopper's New York City as mostly Greenwich Village, where he and his wife lived, and the Flatiron District. Hopper was constantly out with his sketchpad, recording every detail of subjects that interested him: movie theaters, buildings, interiors of rooms and houses he could see from the street or the elevated train. The Whitney owns over 2,500 of these drawings, which Hopper often dismissed as “of little interest.” But he was wrong.Take “Office at Night,” for example. In his studies, a woman stands before an open file drawer, her head turned toward a man, slightly turned toward her, reading a document from behind his desk. In the painting, we now look down on the pair from somewhat above, as if we are peering down at them from an open window. The woman, now voluptuous in a tight blue dress, turns the top of her body unnaturally toward the man, who is seen sitting forward at his desk reading a document. These are two people occupying the same room but each is alone.“Nighthawks” is probably Hopper's most famous painting; surely it invites the most narratives, the most longing for something “real” in viewers' minds. Yet it is highly synthesized: Foster thinks Hopper took the curved window from the ground floor of the Flatiron Building and wedded it to the facade of a wedge-shaped luncheonette he frequented in the Village. And the men in fedoras are similar to an actual photo of the diner's interior. Still it is the unreal in the picture that grabs us. The not-right green of the metal column in the window, the green of the sidewalk and the odd shop across the street with no sign, no goods on display.The light outside seems like bright moonshine. No one is talking, no one moving. We don't even know what the woman has in her hand. A package of cigarettes, perhaps? City paintings are not the only focus of the Whitney show. There are several pictures of the houses that fascinated Hopper throughout much of his career. These houses seem as lonely and melancholy as any of Hopper's people. The imposing Victorian structure in “House by the Railroad” stands in resigned isolation above a horizontal rail bed that will bring progress, change and abandonment of a way of life.The Whitney drawings themselves can be boring and overwhelming in their tossed-off qualities and sheer numbers. But even a quick viewing shows visual roads to final paintings transformed by Hopper into stories for our own imaginations to find. Hopper was a very great painter indeed. Hopper Drawing continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City through Oct. 6. Go to www.whitney.org for information.