Sometime in the early 1950s I saw a copy of a magazine of that period called Magazine of Art. In it there was an article about Edward Hopper’s work by the movie critic Parker Tyler. Among other things he contrasted Hopper’s work with that of Vermeer. He did this because there does not appear to be any major difference between the styles of the two artists, so why did the Hoppers sometimes give him a sense of overwhelming loneliness and the Vermeers do the opposite. In Vermeer a woman may be pouring milk from a jug unto a cup. There is a light coming through a window nearly behind her. The light circulates through the room. It falls on her, and on the jug, the tumbler, the table, the floor and through the room. The artist has been seeing how individual shapes and accents pressure the flow of the eye over the objects and into space[as well as rendering them]. The light provides the most important shapes, and they are calculated to produce a lovely irregular, off balance movement, a flow which makes the forms in space realized, but also allows us to spend some time with the woman in the room, reading or writing a letter, preparing to drink, or perhaps flirting with a man.
He compares the Vermeer with a painting by Hopper of an office at night. In the office there is a woman who is working at a filing cabinet, behind her and to our left a man sits at his desk looking at the papers he is working at. There is plenty of light, so that both of them can see what they are doing. But the light, coming from two artificial sources, and the furniture and the shadows it casts, separate the woman from the man, and make movement between them very difficult. As a result we get, not a bad painting, but a purposeful poetic event. To some of you who have heard the stories I tell, it may be reminiscent of the Paul Klee painting of the inside of a castle in which there is a good deal of movement but, as the title says "There is no way out of the castle." Thus a metaphoric painting using a piece of what would otherwise be bad picturemaking as its crux
Whenever Hopper produces an effect like this he has done it by slowing down or breaking a necessary movement which would otherwise complete his "good picture." I don't find it happening in all of Hopper's work, but I see it used in varying ways with different pictorial starting points over and over again. Such as, a long horizontal painting which has too long a horizontal axis for the vertical shapes which are supposed to compensate for it, and complete the eye's happy movements. This often separates a single figure from the rest of the composition.
Actually an establishment critic gave a review of Hopper's work today in which he complains about Hopper's lack of thrilling paintings, his ordinary level of painting skills. but grants him the skill at narrative painting. Well, it proves that, that critic is more sensitive than he allows himself to be. Hopper's narratives are rather poor and unspecific, except that his "painting mistakes" produce the haunting quality which is the hallmark of his finest work. It is not narrative painting, but metaphoric construction. Klee may have been the poet of cubism, but Hopper was the poet of American naturalism. And while that critic is not old enough to know it, Hopper's contemporaries at the Academy always saw to it that his annual contribution got its usual spot, under the stairs, or behind them [he shared those spots with Edwin Dickinson]. They knew there was something odd about his work, and they didn't like it.
I do believe that we should understand what we are seeing when we look at Matisse, or Marquet, or Roualt, and also when we look at Klee or Hopper. There should be no mystery in either Klee or Hopper. We should merely be seeing a different use of pictorial smarts for another end. An end which we could admire either more or less than , say Marquet, but it should be a part of the known spectrum, and not something to either condemn or to rate far above everything else.
Love,
Gabriel
P.S. Although, I have to admit, that I am quite open to liking poetic painting better lately.
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