“The memory of his paintings tyrannizes over the scene itself. One begins to see Hopper’s paintings everywhere’’- New York Times (1964)
Edward Hopper’s paintings have long interested critics and artists for his influence on younger painters, photographers and film-makers. Writers on Hopper tend simply to note his place in popular culture, while scholars stayed clear of a theoretical analysis of the paintings themselves. Since the 1980s, postmodern theories of the image have opened a new way of discussing his work. With the idea of the image as ‘virtual’ — distinct in meaning from the painting itself — critics have discussed the performative function of Hopper’s paintings and their effect on the viewer. Two paintings, ‘Nighthawks’ and ‘Morning Sun’, show how the virtual images in his work create a performative engagement with the viewer, introducing the ‘screen’ as a device that provokes desire, a technique borrowed from cinema.
Nighthawks ( 1942 )
In this oil painting, four figures sit inside a downtown diner, open late at night amid a dark, deserted street. They are viewed through the diner’s large glass window, the painting’s only source of light. The window gives the viewer direct access to the diner’s interior, framing the subjects’ actions and acting as a cinematic screen that separates the viewer from those on the far side of it. None of the four figures carries a distinct signifier of identity, which leaves room for the viewer’s own imagination — a fantasy built around the characters’ situation. The viewer does not only see them at their activities; the viewer imagines them acting.
What is the lonely man thinking?
What is the relationship between the man and the woman who remain so close to each other yet so distant?
The diner’s single light source recalls how Hopper kept his studio lights on at night even when the city observed blackouts as a security measure after the Pearl Harbour bombing, during the war. Just as Hopper’s desire lit his studio in those unprecedented times, the nighthawks resemble the painter’s desire, still at play, glowing in the dark. What are the nighthawks’ desires? Hopper’s paintings reveal nothing about his subjects’ desires directly, but the viewer watches them desiring.
Another painting, ‘Morning Sun’, carries the same phantasmatic traits of Hopper’s desire.
Morning Sun ( 1952 )
In Morning Sun, a woman wearing a pink dress (modelled on Hopper’s wife, Jo) sits on her bed facing the sun, looking out her bedroom window into a city sky. She appears lost in thought as the sunlight enters from outside the window, illuminating her body and the otherwise dull bedroom. She is looking at something — a sight situated outside the frame. As in many of his paintings, the sight is ‘absent’ from the frame yet functions as the hidden object that structures the condition of the subject and her desires. In his essay “Hopper and the Figure of the Room,” art historian John Hollander writes of Morning Sun that the parallelogram of light cast against the wall behind Jo is “an image of the meditative gazer’s mind as the cast shadow on the bed is of her body.”
The word ‘virtual’ comes from the Latin virtus, meaning ‘a power of acting without the agency of matter’ — that is, functionally or effectively but not formally of its kind. Objects in the realm of virtuality act on the viewing subject without being physically present in their materiality. This happens throughout Hopper’s paintings, not only in Morning Sun. By introducing windows as ‘screens’ in almost all his work, Hopper leaves the object of the gaze hidden: there is a trace of the other, but it is never fully revealed. In Morning Sun, the woman is looking at ‘what’? Who are the ‘Nighthawks’? The object is missing or in question, which draws the viewer to look for more. This opens a possibility of dialogue between the virtual Hopper and the viewer, who is left with mental images standing in for the missing object. Since these mental images form in the imaginary domain of perception, the viewer is drawn into a fantasy around the subjects’ situation — imagining a relationship between the man and the woman sitting close together in ‘Nighthawks’, or looking out from the woman’s window in ‘Morning Sun’. The subjects’ desires become the viewer’s own. Hopper’s paintings achieve an effect not unlike that of cinema. In Henry McBride’s words, Hopper’s paintings resemble ‘the slowest of slow-motion pictures’. The paradox of the slowest motion within something that by definition remains still may come from a remembered filmic image superimposed on the critic’s own view of the work, combined with the internal qualities of Hopper’s framing and perspective. The result is a tension between the material and the mental.
In 2019 the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts curated an exhibition where every detail of the painting ‘Western Motel’ was brought to life in a room built from the objects in the painting, offering guests the experience of staying the night. Afterward, the New York Times ran an article headed “What’s better than seeing a Hopper Painting? Sleeping in One.”
In the postmodern age of subjectivity, Edward Hopper’s realism feels less and less representational and all the more inter-subjective and cinematic — all too un-real.
Edward Hopper, Lighthouse Hill, 1927
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References:
Filip Lipiński. “The Virtual Hopper: Painting Between Dissemination and Desire” Oxford Art Journal, 2014, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2014), pp. 157-171 Published by: Oxford University Press
This Edward Hopper Painting Has Been Called One of the ‘Ultimate Images of Summer’, Katie White, July 21, 2020
Matt Backer. “Edward Hopper: An Artist in Pursuit of Desire” Resource Library, March 23, 2006