5. Spectral figures: Edward Hopper’s empty Paris*
Emily C. Burns
Two main interests emerge within Edward Hopper’s representations of Paris. The artist frequently depicted the architecture of the urban landscape and the River Seine, usually in oil on various supports. He also made detailed watercolour and pencil drawings on paper of the denizens of Parisian life, seated at café tables or standing mid-step. Sketched against a blank background, these detailed, and sometimes caricatured, representations of a single figure or group of figures seem placeless. Peculiarly, these two approaches rarely overlap.1 The oils depict architecture that is monumental in comparison with figures, which, if they are present at all, are relegated to miniscule dashes of pigment, while the sketches and watercolours evacuate any sense of a setting with a lack of ground line against the white paper.2
What accounts for this clear division between place and people and the artist’s refusal to combine them, leaving the viewer with a city perpetually incomplete? The oil paintings offer greater ambivalence and ambiguity than the Paris he describes in letters to his mother, with its vibrant urban life where ‘the streets … are alive from morning until night’.3 Such crowds are depicted in a postcard he mailed depicting an aerial view taken from the top of the Palais Garnier and showing the rue Auber populated with people and carriages (Figure 5.1). To his mother, Hopper described the ways in which the city forms a ‘harmonious whole’,4 but he denies this completeness within his art.
Figure 5.1. Postcard of the Rue Auber, Paris, from Edward Hopper to Nyack, c.1906. The postcard is held by the The Sanborn Hopper Archive at the Whitney Museum of American Art; image of postcard as reproduced here is from the author’s personal collection.
The existing scholarship on Hopper’s Paris paintings manifests a tension between assumptions of straightforward mimeticism and interpretations of his paintings as deliberately and self-consciously designed constructions.5 A careful look at the paintings offers support for both readings. Hopper experimented with naturalism and embraced the impressionist strategies of painting loosely to capture momentary qualities of light and the movement of wind through trees. These qualities draw the viewer into scenes of modern Paris. But his paintings also suggest extended grounding in space, architectonic study, carefully structured compositions and improbable depopulation. The lack of inhabitants jars any sense of the familiar and projects an imaginary city that is empty. These impossibly empty representations create a sense of the uncanny for the viewer, who, without a bustling crowd to join, has no place to enter or exit the compositions. Hopper’s compositional strategies reinforce the separation between the viewer and his urban scenes. In these qualities, his paintings are not readily confused with typical French impressionist approaches to depicting Paris and lack the instantaneity implied by Claude Monet’s canonical Boulevard de Capucines (1873–4; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.) or Camille Pissarro’s paintings of crowded central Paris from the early years of the twentieth century.
This chapter considers the role of emptiness in a selection of Hopper’s Paris paintings. Critics and art historians have commented that these paintings, made early in his career, predict his later interest in empty urban and rural landscapes as ‘the great American vacuist’, but tend not to probe them further to consider the implications of these unoccupied spaces, especially in the context of a young artist seeking to construct his individual artistic project.6 Instead of treating him independently of his contemporaries as a quintessential American artist, this chapter places Hopper in the context of American art study in Paris and in the midst of fractious dialogues about artistic influence and the relationship between modernity and tradition. Between the end of the American civil war and the start of World War I, thousands of American painters sought training in various Paris art institutions.7 US artists sought to gain prestige and patronage by adopting French academic practice, which was well received by wealthy American buyers.8 Yet the successful absorption of French models incited concerns among some US critics that there was nothing unique about American art. Some journalists chided artists to seek a nativist style that rejected foreign influences. For example, the critic Ellis T. Clarke complained in 1900 that American art was ‘little more than French art with American trimmings’.9 Hopper’s decision to study in Paris and the paintings he produced there were part of this cultural conversation about Franco-American artistic exchange. He was simultaneously engaging with and rejecting narratives of artistic influence. By looking closely at Hopper’s paintings of his Paris lodgings and of the monumental building of the Louvre, this chapter interprets the trope of emptiness as a visual argument for physical, cultural and artistic solitude that seeks to cut the threads of artistic tradition to which he responded.
These aesthetics and the tension created for the viewer not only anticipate Hopper’s later work, but also suggest his artistic disavowal of tradition.10 In his Paris paintings Hopper uses empty urban spaces as a modernist strategy. His representations of the Parisian built environment play with presence and absence through their lack of figures and tension between the still architecture and dynamic river and trees. The few examples in which Hopper combines figures and setting bring the underlying anxieties of an American artist working in Paris to the surface. Such drawings enhance the charged character of the emptiness in his other paintings. Significantly, these sketches present objects of desire that are rendered visible, but perpetually inaccessible, as the artist’s body remains implied but invisible to the viewer. In this anxious merging of figure and place, the challenges and possibilities of a young American artist in Paris come to the fore.
Figure 5.2. Edward Hopper, Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris, 1906, oil on wood, 12 7/8 × 9 5/16 in. (32.7 × 23.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest (70.1295)
Constructing solitude: charged emptiness in Hopper’s Parisian home
Hopper made three extended trips to Paris at the beginning of his career, but then never returned. After six years of art study in the United States with William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, he went to Europe.11 He stayed in Paris for his longest stretch from October 1906 until August 1907 aged twenty-four; and then returned from March to August 1909 and during the summer of 1910.12 His family found lodging in advance of his arrival in a small Christian pension, the Église Baptiste at 48 rue de Lille.13 While in Paris he produced about forty-two paintings, some watercolour illustrations and dozens of drawings in two sketchbooks.
Hopper’s first four oil paintings in Paris, made in 1906, depict his immediate surroundings at or near 48 rue de Lille. All are devoid of human figures.14 In Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris (Figure 5.2), Hopper places the viewer against the wall on a tightly spiralled staircase. Looking up, one can see a floor of the building, but the door is shut and vision blocked by a large red box next to the balustrade. Hopper creates a sense of unsteadiness with the lines of white that construct perspective on the risers of the staircase; as they move towards the bottom of the picture they are more loosely painted and more dramatically angled. This shift in the spacing of the risers places the viewer on a particularly vertiginous staircase. This compositional structure freezes the viewer in place, without a point of access by going up. The darkness and void in the background prohibit a downward exit.
Similarly in Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris (Figure 5.3), Hopper depicts an enclosed courtyard that offers the viewer no easy path into or around the composition. A doorway to the left is shrouded in shadow and the window that faces the viewer is opaque. All that one can see through the panes are white curtains and Hopper’s scraggly brushstrokes only tease at giving the viewer more visual information about what lies within.15 The radical angle created between the side of the building at the left and the wall with the single window in front again leaves the viewer without a point of exit.
These representations of the solitary spaces at Hopper’s lodging construct the artist’s claim to separation from existing artistic communities. By the 1870s, when American art study in Paris became common, structures to ease the transition to foreign life, such as artists’ clubs and shared colonies within the geography of Paris, were put into place.16 Hopper seems to have been at most a tangential part of this community. He spent time with other American artists in Paris, writing to his mother on 9 November 1906, ‘I have met a number of people that I know’ and listing Patrick Henry Bruce among them. But he never exhibited at the American Art Association of Paris and seems not to have attended their regular events.17 Unlike most of the other American art students during this period, who either attempted entry at the École des Beaux-Arts or paid for classes at the Académie Julian or the Académie Colarossi, Hopper did not seek any formal training in Paris. Also, no records suggest that Hopper ever submitted paintings for consideration at the annual salons, marking an atypical avoidance of a central goal of most American art students studying in Paris, even in the early twentieth century.
Figure 5.3. Edward Hopper, Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris, 1906, oil on composition board, 13 × 9 1/4 in. (33 × 23.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest (70.1304).
In evading these typical spaces, and in making paintings that emphasize emptiness and solitude, Hopper makes a visual argument for his artistic individuality which insists upon his resistance to art study as well as tradition. This effect parallels his later comments: during the Frank Rehn Galleries exhibition of the Paris paintings in 1941, he informed the art historian Lloyd Goodrich that ‘in Paris he did not study in any art school, but painted on his own’.18 Scholars have absorbed the artist’s claims to personal isolation that seem to exist in direct relationship with the emptiness of his paintings.19 The art historian Richard Bretell has suggested, for example, that the isolation of foreign study invited the lonely artist to become an ‘observateur-détaché’ depicting ‘isolement’.20 Yet reading such a one-to-one relationship between biography and painting denies the intentionality and constructed nature of these representations.
Indeed, Hopper’s time in Paris was by no means solitary, in spite of letters to his parents that describe his introverted explorations of the foreign capital. In addition to occasional circulation within the American artist community in Paris, biographers have recounted his relationships in Paris with a British woman named Enid Saies and with an American woman named Alta Hilsdale.21 One of Hopper’s rare drawings of his Paris lodging that combine figure and place heightens the charged emptiness of Hopper’s lodging paintings. The sketch includes an enigmatic depiction of a nude standing beside bed linens at an open window across the courtyard (Figure 5.4). The identity of this woman is unknown, though she bears a vague resemblance to Saies, who also lodged at the pension at 48 rue de Lille. It is also possible that the drawing represents artistic fantasy rather than a posed scene. But the drawing is significant, not only because it anticipates Hopper’s later representations of solitary nude women framed by empty architectural spaces.22 In its combination of figure and space, it manifests underlying tensions in his other paintings of his lodging. The scene simultaneously reveals and hides the woman, who is placed at the far side of the composition in a gaping window and separated from the rest of the scene by a harsh diagonal of the architecture. She gazes back at the artist, her arm on her neck, but only the bedclothes project from her balcony into the artist’s space. She is visually available to the viewer, but rendered unreachable across the empty air shaft, further blocked by the balcony railing at the lower right that grounds the viewer outside the composition. These added biographical details and the tensions that bubble to the surface in this mysterious sketch remind the observer that the emptiness of Hopper’s paintings of his lodging is carefully constructed. They should not, therefore, be understood as mere replications of his vision or experience. The deliberate isolation – disavowed only by a single sketch – reveals an artist at work to construct his physical and artistic separation.
Figure 5.4. Edward Hopper, Sketch of Paris Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille with Nude, c.1907, fabricated chalk, graphite pencil and grey wash on paper, 19 7/8 × 14 7/8 in (50.5 × 37.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest (70.1342)
Even as he tried to eschew connections with his contemporaries, both geographically and artistically, Hopper’s painting style reveals his experimentation with the loose brushwork and the often high-keyed colours of impressionism. Furthermore, he followed in the footsteps of many other French and American artists in his series of paintings of the Louvre. Yet the emptiness in these paintings marks his deliberate rejection of those traditions. Of Hopper’s approximately forty-two paintings of Paris, nine represent the monumental structure of the Louvre, his most repeated Parisian subject.23 Most of the series depict the Pavillon de Flore from the embankment below the left bank, next to the Pont Royal. This location was only a few minutes’ walk from Hopper’s boarding house on the rue de Lille. While this structure was certainly not a new artistic subject, Hopper’s approaches subtly varied from those of his contemporaries and indicate his use of compositional space and emptiness to imagine his Paris experience and relationship with tradition.24
This structure was a complex cultural icon that moderated between tradition and modernity. From a nationalist perspective, the Pavillon de Flore symbolized French resilience: it was the only part of the Palais des Tuileries that was reconstructed after a fire during the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 destroyed the palace.25 After the war ended and the site was renovated, it briefly held the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. From 1879 until about 1910 it acted as the administrative seat for various departments of the Third Republic, particularly those overseeing French colonies.26
Though this part of the monumental building was not an art exhibition space during the period of Hopper’s visits to Paris, American tourist materials treated it as part of the larger institution of the Louvre.27 Furthermore, when Hopper exhibited his Paris paintings in the United States between 1908 and 1920 their titles were often listed in the catalogues simply as ‘the Louvre’. The museum signalled French academic artistic tradition and cultural legacy in the objects it exhibited from its opening to the public in 1793.28 For many art students in Paris the structure of the Louvre reminded them of the weight of tradition.29 But the structure also invited debate about contemporary art display. In addition to the icons of art history held in the Louvre, the Tuileries was also the site for temporary buildings that held some of the early Salon des Indépendants exhibitions. In this way the site also became related to more experimental artistic practices. It simultaneously implied artistic past and present.
While the fanatic rite of passage of foreign study in Paris, with the objects in the Louvre as a central model, continued until the start of World War I, by the early twentieth century many American artists and critics expressed scepticism about the overt role of French art in shaping American art. They concomitantly called for a more nationally driven artistic practice. Hopper’s travels to Paris, which took place three times between 1906 and 1910, occurred during the tail end of these conversations as New York City increasingly took on importance as an international modernist art centre. In the context of debates about nationalism and art, Hopper’s paintings of the Louvre underscore the tensions between emulation and innovation.
Figure 5.5. Edward Hopper, Le Louvre et la Seine, 1907, oil on canvas, 23 5/8 × 28 5/8 in. (60 × 72.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest (70.1186).
His paintings, letters and postcards trace his complicated relationship with this structure and with artistic tradition. In one of his early impressionistic studies, The Louvre and the Seine (Figure 5.5) of 1907, Hopper places the structure at the upper centre of the composition, at the pinnacle of a pyramid created by the river and the wash boats that are moored at the left.30 When it was shown in 1941 at Rehn Galleries in New York, one critic announced this as ‘the first canvas Hopper painted out of doors’.31 It is one of the few paintings from the period that are signed and dated and he includes the word ‘Paris’ below his name, following a common practice of foreign artists working in the city. The picture seems to celebrate its place of origin, yet several aspects of the composition, colour and light distance the viewer from the Louvre. Its bright pastel colours invite the viewer to squint at the glare of the light, which is the brightest on the side of the Pavillon de Flore. The dashes of white brushstrokes and impasto serve almost to erase the façade and the sculptures that were added when the site was renovated in the late nineteenth century are hidden. Furthermore, Hopper blockades access to the structure by placing the viewer on the embankment implied by the pink triangle at the left of the composition. Our view of the building is partially obstructed by the large barges, which fully occlude the Pont Royal, which would otherwise provide access to the site across the river. As in Hopper’s paintings of his lodging, the viewer is marooned alone in this position. Hopper builds a tension between the imposing architectonic structure of the Louvre and the dynamism of the water lapping up to the edge of the barges, doubling back upon itself in white foam. The pink tones visually connect building, river and embankment, linking the monumental time of the durable structure with the ephemerality of nature’s motion and light. With a lack of figures and a lack of grounding in space, these temporalities – history and nature – avoid a sense of human time. They construct a viewer who is solitary, isolated and a unique observer of this tension.
The Louvre paintings of French impressionist Camille Pissarro, who also painted from a similar perspective in 1903, show a different relationship with the Louvre, suggesting Hopper’s distinctive project.32 Both artists shared this subject as a series and Hopper may have known Pissarro’s paintings from an exhibition in New York in 1904.33 Yet the differences in their approaches result in distinct visual arguments. In Pissarro’s painting The Pont Royal and the Pavillon de Flore (1903; Petit Palais, Paris), individual figures are generally implied in traffic across the bridge, whereas Hopper’s The Louvre and the Seine is devoid of human presence. While Hopper’s grounding is on the embankment, Pissarro’s viewer has a more egalitarian relationship with the building because his panoramic view allows a more domineering look at the Pavillon de Flore. Pissarro’s grounding is on the Quai Voltaire up above the embankment where Hopper places his viewer. Therefore the viewer can look down upon the barges that block Hopper’s view in The Louvre and the Seine and across at the Pavillon with visual mastery. Pissarro’s Pavillon is also smaller within the scale of the canvas. He creates an open composition in which the Pavillon sits casually within the city around it, whereas in Hopper’s depiction the scene is flattened and claustrophobic. In Pissarro’s painting the Pont Royal serves as a direct compositional conduit for the viewer to the museum. Hopper blocks the bridge as an access point to the building entirely in The Louvre and the Seine.34 Pissarro minimizes the foliage on the tree next to the Pavillon. In other paintings, such as Le Pavillon de Flore (1909; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Hopper chooses a compositional positioning to emphasize that foliage and allows it to shroud the Pavillon’s structure. The only movement in Hopper’s painting is created through the light strokes that give the sense of the trees lightly quivering in the breeze and the tiny corner of reflection in the Seine. These glints of movement whisper to an unseen embodied eye, with his long look up at the building punctured by momentary light and air. Though the building is more clearly articulated in this painting, which dates to two years after The Louvre and the Seine, its architectonic qualities make it no more accessible because of the compositional space. Compared with Hopper’s broad, flat strokes that emphasize the shape of the architecture, Pissarro’s brushstrokes are circular, as characteristic of impressionism. This distinction suggests the limited utility of the moniker of impressionism for Hopper’s paintings. Hopper has further tightened the scene so that the viewer has no embankment upon which to stand and lowers the Pavillon so that it seems closer and still more menacing to the viewer.
Perhaps most ominous of all is Hopper’s thickly painted Louvre in a Thunderstorm (Figure 5.6), in which the building is almost as dark as the black tugboat steam pipe in the lower centre. The brushwork of the foliage along the base of the building almost seems to target the building through the thick parallel lines, as if threatening to swallow up the dark, shadowy structure. The sky swirls tumultuously and unsteadily; and access via the Pont du Carousel at the centre is halted by the dense green foliage that frames the Louvre. Here again Hopper creates a tension between tradition and modernity by pairing the stone structure of the Louvre with the bridge, which had been newly restored with iron in 1906.35 Hopper provides the viewer with mechanisms of transportation and access, like the bridge and the tugboat at lower right, but freezes the viewer’s access in the compositional blocking and the stilled boat. This juxtaposition is enhanced by the relationship between the still historic architecture and the dynamism of the whirring trees and clouds in front of it. In Hopper’s paintings of the Louvre the building often appears as a spectre, overshadowing the landscape. It remains ever present, but perpetually inaccessible in the structures of his compositions.
Figure 5.6. Edward Hopper, The Louvre in a Thunderstorm, 1909, oil on canvas, 29 9/16 × 28 13/16 (59.8 × 73.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest (70.1223).
In the same way that Hopper’s paintings exhibit a tension between their surface realism and metaphorical depth, the technical aspects of the artist’s painting process in Paris reveal him paradoxically adopting and rejecting basic practices. His stylistic experimentation reinforces his ambivalent relationship with the Louvre as an icon of artistic tradition. The art historian Anne Coffin Hanson has observed that Hopper’s paintings in Paris were often produced on a white canvas, without the layers of darker ground that he learned to apply while studying with Henri in New York. The bright luminosity that appears in these paintings draws in part from French modernist interventions, such as impressionism and fauvism.36 At the same time, Hopper replicates a common practice by French romantic artists who painted without an underdrawing on the canvas, layering the compositional elements directly with the brush.37 With both of these experimental approaches Hopper departs from his artistic training. As Hanson has argued, as Hopper adopts these practices he erases the building blocks of more traditional academic painting. These stylistic approaches enhance his direct engagement, even a face-off, with the Louvre in his Paris paintings, with the museum placed on a literal and figurative blank slate.
Hopper’s letters from Paris treat the Louvre as a spectre, always present yet never in complete view. In a postcard of the Gare d’Orsay which he sent to his mother in 1907, Hopper explained that, though not pictured, ‘[j]ust across the river at the other end of the bridge is the Louvre’.38 He also noted that from his lodgings the Louvre was nearby: ‘I could go a few steps and I’d see the Louvre across the river’.39 In a postcard of booksellers along the Seine that he sent to the United States (Figure 5.7) the Louvre is subtly present along the skyline in the background. He wrote to his mother: ‘I also sent you one last week with a photo of the bookstalls of the way it looks on the river. The building in the background is the Louvre. This Quai is near the rue de Lille, only one block away’.40 In these observations the Louvre is an ever-present part of his artistic experience in Paris, but always peripherally. In his paintings Hopper developed visual strategies, such as compositional blocking, flattening and emptiness, which distanced the viewer from that structure and all that it implied. Through the tropes of solitude and emptiness Hopper sees the voice of tradition – signalled by the Louvre – present but forcefully pushed into the background. He compositionally enacts the metaphorical discourse of achieving an independent art practice in Paris.
Figure 5.7. Postcard of the Quai Voltaire booksellers, from Edward Hopper to Nyack, c.1907. Postcard is held by the The Sanborn Hopper Archive at the Whitney Museum of American Art; image of postcard as reproduced here is from the author’s personal collection.
The anxiety present in Hopper’s paintings of the Louvre comes to a pinnacle in a 1906 illustration, self-titled on the drawing itself Les Etudiants de Paris (Figure 5.8). While its combination of text and image implies that the sketch was intended as an illustration, it was not published. As in the drawing of his Parisian courtyard with nude (Figure 5.4), the combination of figure and setting brings to the fore a more overt visual argument and apprehension that are more muted in his oil paintings. Also like the nude sketch, Hopper presents an icon that is simultaneously visible but rendered inaccessible to the viewer. Though there is only one solitary figure, its plural title implies this figure as an archetype or stand-in for the art student in Paris. Hopper depicts the stereotypical melancholy artist-type, wearing a beret, holding a cigarette between his teeth, hands in pockets and looking glum as he shuffles forward. The figure is placed in the blank space of the foreground, without a ground line, as typical in Hopper’s sketches of Parisian types. Yet, unlike most of Hopper’s Paris sketches, a setting is provided through a framed scene behind the figure which locates him along the left bank of the Seine on the Quai Voltaire, just above the same embankment from which Hopper painted the Louvre. With the frame, which appears almost as a picture within a picture, Hopper’s drawing bears compositional resemblance to the illustrations he produced for an unpublished edition of Victor Hugo’s poems, L’Année terrible (1872), in which figures are placed against a framed background.41 In the scene that is the backdrop for Les Etudiants de Paris book stalls are visible, as in the postcard Hopper sent to his mother from Paris (Figure 5.7), and two figures wearing bowler hats stand at the far right, perhaps in the process of haggling about a book, though one appears to gawk at the skyline where again the dominant figure of the Pavillon de Flore is paramount. Yet, while it shadows him, the structure is entirely inaccessible to the artist, who occupies an altogether different plane continually parallel to, but never intersecting with, the one behind him. In this, the Louvre becomes an impossible dream, like the bridges that do not effectively convey figures to the structure (Figures 5.5, 5.6). This image anticipates the anxieties that Hopper works out in the oils of the Louvre; one can imagine Hopper as this art student, absent but imagined in the paintings looking up from the embankment at the monumental and meaning-laden, but unreachable, structure.
Figure 5.8. Edward Hopper, Les Etudiants de Paris, 1906–7, watercolour, brush and ink, and graphite pencil on paper, 19 3/4 X 14 5/8 in. (50.2 X 37.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest(70.1345).
The spectre of influence in American painting
Although they occupy an important place in his early oeuvre, Hopper’s Paris paintings were not successful when he exhibited them in the United States.42 By the time the paintings were shown in the years before World War I, American tastes had shifted from embracing French artistic subjects and styles to celebrating representations of American landscapes and cityscapes, particularly the New York scenes of the Ashcan School.43 For example, when The Louvre and the Seine (Figure 5.5) was exhibited in March 1908 in New York City at the Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Contemporary American Artists, a review entitled ‘One step nearer to a national art’ did not mention these foreign paintings at all.44 Compared with the paintings of the Ashcan artists, such as John Sloan and George Luks, which featured vibrant crowds in their urban settings, Hopper’s Paris paintings seem particularly empty. Yet Hopper continued to show these paintings until his first one-man exhibition in 1920 at the Whitney Studio Club, in which eleven of the sixteen paintings came from the artist’s time in Paris and were listed for the first time with French titles.45 After this exhibition, however, the paintings largely remained in his studio for the rest of his life, with the exception of a well-reviewed exhibition of an already canonized Hopper ‘early work’ at the Rehn Galleries in New York in 1941.
Later in his career, Hopper expressed worry about French artistic hegemony in the United States, in part in his insistence to the art historian Lloyd Goodrich and others that France held no influence over him.46 Yet he acknowledges this overarching influence in a comment in 1927 in an essay about Sloan in which he celebrated ‘emerging certain artists of originality and intelligence who are no longer content to be citizens of the world of art, but believe that now or in the near future American art should be weaned from its French mother’.47 His comments denigrate art study in Paris; Hopper notes a wider cultural shift in that ‘the home-staying painter is beginning to be looked upon with a new and envious respect by his colleague who has unwittingly exchanged his birthright for a cultural equipment that he begins to find of doubtful value’.48 In this era European study could ‘confuse and retard the [artist’s] reabsorption into the American’.49 Since Sloan had not studied in France like Henri and Hopper, he was extolled for his nativist tendencies and rejection of cosmopolitan art practices. Hopper’s comments verbalize the imposing power of the French art tradition, as well as the artist’s anxiety about them. In the process of celebrating an American art that began ‘as the logical growth of the art of one nation from that of another or others’ and insisting on the ‘native and distinct’, Hopper sought to obscure his French sojourns, which were tenuously experienced to begin with.50 He reiterated this perspective in 1933: ‘If an apprenticeship to a master has been necessary, I think we have served it. Any further relation to such a character can only mean humiliation. After all we are not French and never can be and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and try to impose [upon] ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer on the surface’.51 These later comments suggest the overshadowing influence of French artistic practice upon American art, but also Hopper’s ambivalent relationship with these traditions. His challenges – verbalized later – are also embedded in the compositions, painting approaches and perspectives of his Paris paintings.
In 1931 fellow artist Guy Pène du Bois chided the American public for forgetting Hopper’s Paris studies and for misinterpreting them as direct observations.52 Indeed, Hopper’s paintings of Paris seem insistently to remind the viewer of his artistic interventions, with their thick impasto on stark white canvases, with their careful declarations of solitude, with impossibly empty spaces. The tension that Hopper created between naturalist elements and emptiness unsettles time within the Paris paintings. With waving tree branches and the Seine’s currents implying motion, Hopper implies natural time and the phenomenological view of an embodied painter. Yet the empty streets and monumental stone architecture emphasize long historical time. In his depictions of the extended temporality of the longue durée and the momentary of nature, human temporality seems evacuated from the equation except as an evasive, solitary, embodied observer who is implied but rarely exposed. The empty streets and combined temporalities draw attention to the non-mimetic quality of his paintings and thus to the artist’s act of representation. While the artist does not turn to abstraction, he experiments, as the art historian David Peters Corbett has interpreted of the urban realism of the Camden Town Group, with ‘the visual possibilities of painting as fiction’.53 Hopper’s composite characteristics challenge simple mimeticism and deny the realities of urban experience to claim instead an artistic seclusion and a mitigated realism that reach towards modernism.
Hopper’s evacuation of either the figures or the setting and his insistence on an incomplete Paris symbolize concerns about the fraught practice of artistic study overseas. By implying solitude in the urban space through paintings of his building and by including an ambivalently overshadowing but inaccessible Louvre in many of his paintings, Hopper subtly addresses the trials of finding a distinctive artistic project among his contemporaries in the midst of anxieties about artistic influence. Alongside compositional blocking, the emptiness of the settings divides the viewer from access to the city by denying the ‘harmonious whole’. This functions to create a sense of personal isolation, as the artist hints tenuously at his own solitary presence in the scene. The spectral quality of figures, the Louvre and indeed the artist himself unsettles the viewer. In the context of Franco-American exchange, Hopper uses his experiments with empty spaces to claim an artistic isolation and to develop his modernist intervention. In the process he intervenes in the cultural conversations about the relationship between French tradition and modern American painting. For Hopper, emptiness acts as an artistic argument that declares his isolation from the world and deliberately separates him from the creative trajectories of other artists, past and present.
* All the accession numbers in the footnotes refer to objects in the Hopper collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which holds almost all of Hopper’s Paris paintings and sketches. This chapter was presented at a seminar at the In TRu research group at the University of Francois Rabelais in Tours and in a public lecture at the Bibliothèque américaine de Nancy. I am grateful for feedback from these presentations, especially from France Nerlich, Jean-Baptiste Minnaert, Christophe Morin, André Kaenel and Claudine Armand. I am also grateful for feedback from Noelle Paulson, Veerle Thielemans, Katherine Bourguignon, Beth Colleary, Jennifer Keating, Courtney Campbell, Allegra Giovine and for copy-edits from Michelle Mandarino. Thanks to Claudia Gerbracht, Jason Philips and David Miller at the Whitney Museum of American Art for taking a few hours to enable me to view many of Hopper’s Paris paintings in storage.
1 Le Bistro (70.1187) and Le Soir Bleu (70.1208) are two exceptions that combine figures and setting, but both of these were painted in New York City as memories of the artist’s time in Paris. In Le Bistro the figures are placed to the far left side of the composition and seem in tension with the bridge scene at right (L. Goodrich, ‘Notes on Paris oils seen at Hopper’s studio, 4/21/47’, Whitney Museum of American Art Archives, Edward and Josephine Hopper Research Collection (hereafter Hopper Research Collection), 4.044, p. 2). Hopper’s later etchings, such as Street in Paris (1915–18, 70.1071), also combine figures and setting and a few of his more finished pencil drawings also place the figures within the street.
2 On these drawings, which will not be discussed in this chapter, see C. Foster, ‘Hopper in Paris and Soir Bleu’, in Hopper Drawing, exh. cat. (New York, 2013), pp. 66–91.
3 Hopper to his mother, 23 Nov. 1906 (Hopper Research Collection, 4.008, General Correspondence Earliest). On this tension between the artist’s paintings and commentary, see E. Hankins, ‘Edward Hopper: the Paris years’, American Art Review, xv (Feb. 2003), 168–73, at p. 172.
4 Hopper to his mother, 30 Oct. 1906 (Hopper Research Collection, 4.008, General Correspondence Earliest).
5 At one end of the spectrum, art critic Brian O’Doherty summarized: ‘In Paris, he painted what was immediately accessible to observation’ (B. O’Doherty, ‘The Hopper bequest at the ‘Whitney’, Art in America, lix (Summer 1971), 68–9, 72, at p. 72. Hopper’s biographer Gail Levin explained that Hopper chose not to paint outdoors during the early parts of his stay due to poor weather, yet this does not investigate the artist’s insistence on tightly framed solitary scenes (G. Levin, Edward Hopper: a Catalogue Raisonné (4 vols., New York, 1995), i. 46; and G. Levin, Edward Hopper: an Intimate Biography (New York, 1995), p. 55). In a more interpretive vein, the art historian Richard Bretell has summed up Hopper’s Paris paintings as ‘des poèmes visuels de l’enfermement où abondent des escaliers vertigineux, des angles morts, des rues en impasse, des ponts massif et écrasants … Le Paris de Hopper est sombre, menaçant et vide, c’est une prison de pierre ou de plâtre sans habitant’ (R. Brettell, ‘Comment Edward Hopper devint en France un peintre américain’, in R. Brettell and E. Darragon, Edward Hopper: Les années parisiennes 1906–1910, exh. cat. (Giverny, 2004), pp. 24–86, at p. 34.
6 J. W. L., ‘Early Hopper: paintings before 1915’, Art News, xxxix (1 Feb. 1941), p. 13. Similar comments can be found in C. Betsky, ‘Edward Hopper: a re-view’, Harvard Advocate (Summer 1972), p. 34; S. Burrey, ‘Edward Hopper: the emptying spaces’, Art Digest (1 Apr. 1955), at pp. 8–10, 33; E. A. Jewell, ‘Early art shown of Edward Hopper: youthful zest and foretaste of later development seen in Parisian work, 1906–7’, New York Times, 11 Jan. 1941, p. 48; and ‘Edward Hopper at Rehn’s’, New York World-Telegram, 11 Jan. 1945 (unpaginated clipping, Hopper Research Collection, 2.035).
7 On the practice of American art study in Paris, see L. Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (Washington D.C., 1990); K. Adler, E. Hirshler, and H. Weinberg, Americans in Paris, 1860–1900, exh. cat. (London, 2006); and H. Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and their French Teachers (New York, 1991).
8 On the market for French academic painting in America, see D. E. McIntosh, ‘New York’s favorite pictures in the 1870s’, Magazine Antiques, clxv (Apr. 2004), 114–23. On the later US market for French modern art, see M. Fidell-Beaufort, ‘The American art trade and French painting at the end of the 19th century’, Van Gogh Museum Jour. (2000), 101–8.
9 E. T. Clarke, ‘Alien element in American art’, Brush and Pencil, vii (Oct. 1900), 35–47, at p. 37.
10 On Hopper’s modernism, see L. Nochlin, ‘Edward Hopper and the imagery of alienation’, Art Journal, xli (June 1981), 136–41.
11 Levin, Edward Hopper, i. 41–5.
12 On this period, see esp. Levin, Edward Hopper: a Catalogue Raisonné; Brettell, ‘Comment Edward Hopper devint’; Hankins, ‘Edward Hopper: the Paris years’; S. Nicholas, ‘The third dimension: Hopper’s European influences’, in Edward Hopper, ed. C. E. Foster (Milan, 2009), pp. 61–7; and G. Levin, ‘Edward Hopper: Francophile’, Arts Magazine, liii (June 1979), 114–21.
13 Brettell, ‘Comment Edward Hopper devint’, p. 30. Hopper also sent a postcard to his mother depicting the church (Hopper Research Collection, 4.008, General Correspondence Earliest).
14 The two paintings which will not be discussed here but are also relevant are View across Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris (70.1307) and Paris Street (70.1296).
15 On the theme of the window in Hopper’s later painting, see J. A. Ward, American Silences: the Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans and Edward Hopper (Baton Rouge, 1985), pp. 182–92.
16 E. Burns, ‘Revising Bohemia: the American artist colony in Paris, 1890–1914’, in Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914: Strangers in Paradise, ed. K. Carter and S. Waller (Aldershot, 2015), pp. 186–209; and E. Burns, ‘Puritan Parisians: American art students in late nineteenth-century Paris’, in A Seamless Web: Transatlantic Art in the Nineteenth Century, ed. C. L. May and M. Wardle (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2014), pp. 123–46.
17 Hopper to his mother, 9 Nov. 1906 (Hopper Research Collection, 4.008, General Correspondence Earliest). He also wrote about spending time with other Americans in Paris on 18 May 1909 (Hopper Research Collection, 4.008, General Correspondence Earliest). Levin suggested that, given his location in Paris and his social circle, he must have seen American Art Association of Paris exhibitions, even if he did not participate in them (Levin, Edward Hopper: an Intimate Biography, pp. 59–60).
18 L. Goodrich, ‘Notes on conversation with Edward Hopper, 4/21/47’ (Hopper Research Collection, 4.044), p. 1.
19 My Dear Mr. Hopper, ed. E. T. Colleary (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2013), pp. 17, 19–20, n. 6.
20 Brettell, ‘Comment Edward Hopper devint’, pp. 27, 44.
21 On Saies, see Levin, Edward Hopper: an Intimate Biography, pp. 68–9. Hillsdale’s letters to Hopper have been reprinted in Colleary, My Dear Mr. Hopper.
22 See Summer Interior (1909; 70.1197); and A Woman in the Sun (1961; 84.31).
23 These are reproduced in Levin, Edward Hopper: a Catalogue Raisonné, iii. 65–90, 95–104; O-127-O-159, O-164-O-174.
24 Other American artists who depicted the Louvre in their Paris paintings include Henry Bacon, Lady in a Boat (1872, Terra Foundation for American Art); and Robert Henri, The Louvre (1899, private collection; reproduced in Weinberg, The Lure of Paris, p. 81).
25 C. Aulanier, Le Pavillon de Flore (Paris, 1971), pp. 7, 91–2. The architect Hector Lefuel renovated the structure between 1864 and 1868 and added many sculptures. The Palais des Tuileries was destroyed in 1871 and not rebuilt, except for the Pavillon de Flore. The north structure, the Pavillon de Marsan, was built to match the Pavillon de Flore between 1874 and 1879.
26 Aulanier, Le Pavillon de Flore, pp. 93–8. The decision to move the government administrative offices from the Pavillon de Flore was made in 1902, but the transfer to the Louvre museum space was not made until 1910 (Aulanier, Le Pavillon de Flore, p. 98).
27 B. Eastman and F. Mayer, Paris, 1900: the American Guide to City and Exposition (New York, 1899), pp. 132–3. The Pavillon de Flore is not mentioned by name in this guidebook. A contemporaneous French guidebook mentions it specifically by name and also notes its current administrative use (C. de Tours, Vingt Jours à Paris pendant l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Paris, 1900), pp. 66, 136, 159, 163, 178, 188, 190).
28 A. McLellan, Inventing the Louvre: Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, 1994), p. 7; Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, p. 292, n. 24. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries national policy held that paintings acquired by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum would be transferred to the collection of the Louvre upon the artist’s death. Therefore state acquisition of paintings by a living artist was key to his or her hope for an artistic legacy and recognition (L. Alary, ‘L’Art vivant avant l’art moderne. Le Musée du Luxembourg, premier essai de muséographie pour “l’art vivant” en France’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, xlii (Apr.–June 1995), 219–39.
29 On the Louvre in the American imagination, see E. Kennedy, ‘American artists and the Louvre: an enduring legacy’, in American Artists and the Louvre, ed. E. Kennedy and O. Meslay, exh. cat (Chicago, Ill., 2006), pp. 72–91.
30 In Les Lavoirs à Pont-Royal (70.1247) the structure of the Louvre is entirely cropped out at the right side of the composition; and in Louvre and Boat Landing (70.1249) the colourful boat landing seems more the subject of the painting than the almost hidden structure of the Louvre in the background.
31 ‘The early roots of Edward Hopper’s art’, Art Digest, xv (Jan. 1941), 13.
32 Levin also makes this comparison, but does not discuss the important differences between the two approaches to the same subject. See Levin, Edward Hopper: a Catalogue Raisonné, i. 51.
33 H. G. Stephens, ‘Camille Pissarro, impressionist’, Brush and Pencil, xiii (March 1904), 411–35, at pp. 411–9, 421–3, 425–35. On Pissarro’s Louvre series, see R. Brettell and J. Pissarro, The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 103–4, 112–7, 123–6, 159.
34 In The Pont Royal (70.1223) Hopper does include the bridge and dabs to refer to figures, but the figures and omnibus are miniscule compared with the building. Furthermore, as he avoids depicting shadows, Hopper’s bridge across the river seems to be flattened along a single plane parallel to the right bank instead of perpendicular to it, further denying the viewer across the river access to the site. Après-midi de juin (1907; 70.1172) also exhibits this compositional flattening, which transforms the bridge into a parallel to the right bank. Hopper’s revision is nicely illustrated in G. Levin, Hopper’s Places (Berkeley, 1985), p. 152. The scholar Wallace Jackson has also observed Hopper’s deliberate blocking of access in Bridge in Paris (70.1305) (W. Jackson, ‘To look: the scene of the seen in Edward Hopper’, South Atlantic Quarterly, ciii (Winter 2004), 133–48, at p. 133. On this strategy in Hopper’s later paintings see Ward, American Silences, p. 177.
35 I am grateful to Jean-Baptiste Minnaert for this observation.
36 A. C. Hanson, ‘Edward Hopper, American meaning and French craft’, Art Journal, xli (June 1981), 142–9, at pp. 142–4.
37 Hanson, ‘Edward Hopper’, p. 146. On this shift and its signal towards ‘fostering originality’ for art students, see P. Duro, ‘Imitation and authority: the creation of the academic canon in French art, 1648–1870’, in Partisan Canons, ed. A. Brzyski (Durham, N.C. and London, 2007), pp. 95–113, at p. 109.
38 Hopper to his mother, 14 Jan. 1907 (Hopper Research Collection, 4.008, General Correspondence Earliest).
39 Quoted in B. O’Doherty, ‘Portrait: Edward Hopper’, Art in America, lii (Dec. 1964), 68–88, at p. 73.
40 Hopper to his mother, 16 Jan. 1907 (Hopper Research Collection, 4.008, General Correspondence Earliest). It was not possible to obtain a high quality image of this postcard or to find an exact replica, so a similar postcard from the same period is reproduced here.
41 On this series, see G. Levin, Edward Hopper as Illustrator (New York, 1979), p. 28.
42 The paintings were not publically exhibited in France until the 2004 exhibition at the Musée d’art américain in Giverny; and not in Paris until the 2012 exhibition at the Grand Palais (D. Ottinger et al., Hopper, exh. cat. (Paris, 2012), pp. 22–8, 89–101, 108–13).
43 See Levin, Edward Hopper: a Catalogue Raisonné, i. 2; and W. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
44 ‘One step nearer to a national art’, New York American, 10 March 1908, p. 8. See also Levin, Edward Hopper: a Catalogue Raisonné, i. 50; and Levin, Edward Hopper: an Intimate Biography, p. 75. The other Paris paintings included in this exhibition were Le Pont des Arts (1907; 70.1181) and Le Parc de Saint Cloud (70.1180). Le Louvre et la Seine was shown again at the Exhibition of Independent Artists in Apr. 1910 and suffered the same critical silence. See G. Levin, Edward Hopper: the Art and the Artist, exh. cat. (New York, 1980), p. 27; and Levin, Edward Hopper: an Intimate Biography, p. 81.
45 Levin, Edward Hopper: an Intimate Biography, p. 129.
46 Goodrich, ‘Notes on Paris oils’; and L. Goodrich, Edward Hopper, exh. cat. (New York, 1971), p. 19. On the ‘historical amnesia’ about the role of France in American art, see L. M. Fink, ‘Reactions to a French role in nineteenth-century American art’, in Kennedy and Meslay, American Artists and the Louvre, pp. 14–29, at pp. 27–8.
47 E. Hopper, ‘John Sloan and the Philadelphians’, Arts, xi (Apr. 1927), 169–78, at p. 177.
48 Hopper, ‘John Sloan’, p. 169.
49 Hopper, ‘John Sloan’, p. 170.
50 Hopper, ‘John Sloan’, p. 178.
51 E. Hopper, ‘Notes on painting’, in A. H. Barr, Edward Hopper Retrospective (New York, 1933), pp. 17–18; repeated in an oral history interview with Edward Hopper, conducted by J. Morse, 17 June 1959, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution <http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edward-hopper-11844> [accessed 5 Sept. 2015].
52 G. Pène du Bois, ‘The American paintings of Edward Hopper’, Creative Arts, vi (March 1931), 187–91, at p. 191. Du Bois refers specifically to Le Soir.
53 D. P. Corbett, ‘City visions: the urban scene in Camden Town Group and Ashcan School painting’, in The Camden Town Group in Context, ed. H. Bonnett, Y. Holt and J. Mundy (London, 2012) <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/david-peters-corbett-city-visions-the-urban-scene-in-camden-town-group-and-ashcan-school-r1104351> [accessed 25 Aug. 2015].