In Hopper icons such as the 1942 café scene “Nighthawks,” he was simply depicting a pre-cell-phone America in which there were still moments of silence. The 6-foot-5 former illustrator painted urban life with a sincere and guileless affection that Andy Warhol would later morph into irony and cleverness. True, a lot of Hopper’s light-drenched and comparatively cheerful oils and watercolors of New England houses are noticeably devoid of people, but that’s because Hopper’s tough sense of composition (you can almost hear the slamming of steel plates in those TV truck commercials) is so pared down to essentials that little figures would clutter it up.
Early on, Hopper was a typical young romantic, with show-offy brushwork and more than a bit of self-absorption. But his pictorial talent was quickly evident, especially in the 1921 etchings he made after hours on the days he spent—bitterly—being paid to embellish magazine articles. Hopper hit his stride in watercolor during four summers in 1920s Gloucester, Mass., a town known both as a hardworking fishing village and an artists’ colony. There he painted “The Mansard Roof” (1923), which was bought by the Brooklyn Museum. The sale launched a long career that, though punctuated with a few creative lulls, kept the poet-painter acknowledged as one of America’s greatest artists right through the avalanche of abstract expressionism and the tsunami of pop art.
The Hopper formula—if it can be called that—is about 70 percent common sense (fidelity to the subject, but no extraneous details) and 30 percent subdued lyricism. Two wonderful bits of business almost explain it all. The translucent window beside the diners with the cloche hats in “Chop Suey” (1929) is an achingly deft combination of a tiny patch of canvas left unpainted, daringly opaque paint used to depict transparent scuzz and an array of very subtle swamp greens. The rows of overhead lights reflected in the nighttime window in “Automat” (1927) recede like UFOs surveilling the woman alone with her coffee. Trivial? Hardly. They’re like lines you remember from great movies. Which isn’t surprising, seeing how Hopper was, in movie-star terms, essentially the Henry Fonda of American art.
