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The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (2004) 133-148



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To Look:
The Scene of the Seen in Edward Hopper

Wallace Jackson


Edward Hopper's Bridge in Paris (1906), painted during his early stay in France, offers the spectator a view of, but not into, the semicircular darkness dominating the center of the canvas. Immediately above the darkness is a disturbingly dark orange shipping signal. It is the only strong color in a largely brown and gray painting. The signal acts to warn the eye that it is about to be stopped, that no further penetration into the recesses of the painting is possible, that the eye cannot know the darkness into which it looks, that perhaps it is even dangerous to look. The work is a provocative mental event at the threshold of Hopper's career and raises the issue of this essay. What is it that we see when we look into the familiar views of ordinary life that Hopper so commonly offers us? Do we see what we think we see? And, most importantly, what is the relation between the act of seeing and the object seen?

I want to explore these questions by bringing together a complex of dissociated intellectual and aesthetic topics: the early-twentieth-century American literary movement, imagism, in which Ezra Pound was a leading figure; surrealism, in particular that of Giorgio de Chirico; and the [End Page 133] representation of texts in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. These subjects constitute the field from which perspectives on Hopper's art may be usefully if not exclusively drawn, though this is not to say that they constitute influences or sources in the normal meaning of those terms. Yet imagism is a movement contemporary with Hopper's career; de Chirico lived and worked during Hopper's lifetime; and the Dutch painting to which I refer is a genre of domestic realism, and therefore has historical affiliations with Hopper's own art. Hopper's work is variously illuminated by the imaginative energies and goals implicit in these activities, and they, at the very least, reflect the urgencies of his own imagination. It would have been difficult if not impossible for a man of Hopper's interests, professional and personal, to be unaware of any of the three, and in fact we know that he was not.



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Edward Hopper, Bridge in Paris, 1906. Oil on wood. 9 5/8 � 13 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest (70.1305). Photograph taken by Robert E. Mates Studio, New Jersey.



To the question "What is Hopper's subject?" there are several well-known answers, and it is best to begin with these since they have given us our idea of him and his place in twentieth-century art. Clement Greenberg suggested [End Page 134] as early as 1946 that Hopper's "rudimentary sense of composition is sufficient for a message that conveys an insight into the present nature of American life for which there is no parallel in our literature, though that insight itself is literary" (118). Greenberg's meaning is illustrated by the familiar commentary that finds, say, Western Motel "perhaps Hopper's most critical statement on America's changing mode of travel" (Berkow 62). In this view Hopper is a social documentarian, alert to, and re-presenting, the American scene, mainly, but not exclusively, urban. Greenberg's opinion is enlarged in Arthur Danto's suggestion that there is a "direct line of descent from Thomas Eakins through Robert Henri to Hopper," that "Eakins, indeed, set the agenda that Henri transformed into an aesthetic ideology and which Hopper merely adopted as a matter of course" (Danto 118).

Perhaps the most familiar view, however, and one not at all dissimilar from those above, is exemplified by Mark Strand's readings of Hopper's texts. "Hopper's paintings are short, isolated moments of figuration that suggest the tone of what will follow just as they carry forward the tone of what preceded them. The tone but not the content. The implication...

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