In April of 1944, Edward Hopper applied the last careful brushstrokes to his painting Morning in a City. The subject of male and female figures in a room by a window, together and alone, is something of a leitmotif in his work but this particular painting is, arguably, among the finest of his variations on the theme. A deceptively simple scene, the focal point is a nude woman in a Spartan interior who turns her back on the viewer and directs a contemplative gaze out the window. Little is present to distract the woman from her reverie or give viewers any clues to her identity. The inscrutable figure draws viewers into a spatially disorienting, complex psychological set, inviting them to project their own narrative into the room.

The contrast between what is seen and what is felt—the unconscious life beneath the surface—produces the open-ended narrative that has become synonymous with Hopper’s unique aesthetic. The preparatory sketches for Morning in a City provide a rare opportunity to follow the trajectory of Hopper’s artistic process as he pared down his thinking and, subsequently, the elements of his picture until it embodied this signature style. Hopper began his painting by drawing from a model, slowly compressing his observations into the final image through a process of clarifying and reducing the composition. Ultimately a drawing functioned as an aide memoire or index for what he had seen or conceived rather than as a fully worked out realization on paper of how a finished painting might look. In addition, the settings depicted in his pictures were typically a compilation of more than one place reshaped as a composite, fictional location.

When comparing Morning in a City to his preparatory drawings, the most striking transformation evident in Hopper’s thinking is the elimination of a second, male figure that appears briefly in the sketches [70.203a, possibly 70.205 & 70.206] but disappears in the final picture. In the exceptionally minimal room, where each and every detail carries tremendous weight, two pillows on the bed are the only lingering allusion to this figure’s absence. “What,” we might ask, “has taken place in the bed and between whom? About what is she musing?” In reducing his “plot” to one character in this setting, Hopper plunges us into speculation about the woman’s identity, her life, her inner thoughts. Indeed, in one preparatory drawing, the woman’s mouth is opened slightly as if she were about to speak, but in the painting, the young redhead’s crimson lips are sealed. Her body is revealed, but the viewer remains locked out of her mind. 

While Hopper’s carefully calculated arrangements produce the sense of an unsettled narrative, it is his dramatic deployment of a pronounced, distorted perspective that intensifies the perception of space as strangely off kilter. The disquieting mood of Morning in a City is magnified by the treatment of the surroundings in which the figures are placed. For example, the perspective lines fail to meet at their vanishing points, and the bed seems hopelessly short when compared to the woman who stands before it. Viewers are challenged to reconcile their faith in the picture plane as an extension of their own space with the version of reality presented by the artist.

The preparatory drawings for Morning in a City also reveal that the woman’s legs were not initially cropped out of the picture frame [70.294]. This deliberate cropping in the finished painting heightens the sense of her proximity to the viewer, thrusting us even further into the room and giving the illusion of intimacy. It is one of the great contradictions of Hopper’s works that he brings us this close to his figures, and yet we can never penetrate their inner lives, anticipate their actions, or know what has drawn them into the spaces they inhabit.

The simultaneous sense of familiarity and distance seems all the more striking and provocative in light of Hopper’s relation to the model for the figure—artist Josephine Nivison Hopper, his wife and model for over forty years, his staunchest defender and greatest antagonist. In the drawings, her face is clearly recognizable but she possesses a conspicuously youthful body for a woman in her sixties, suggesting that Hopper elided his personal association with her as he drew upon her form for inspiration. In the painting, the autobiographical origins of the work were gradually erased. The last remnants of Jo disappear as Hopper transforms her graying curls into the redhead’s wave. Yet, his positioning of the viewer from a “Hopper’s eye view” physically reinforces the sense that we, too, are voyeurs gazing at a private scene. The overall feeling of anxiety and unease is intensified by the blank windows that stare back, like open eyes, at the unclothed figure.

This “public” nakedness is further heightened through another decision made as Hopper refined his composition. The picture frames visible in three of the sketches were removed, leaving the walls of the finished painting as bare as the woman’s flesh [70.204, 70.205, 70.207]. Dense gestural brushwork emphatically presents this bare wall as an abstract albeit sensual painted field. Used compositionally, this extravagant passage of thickly applied paint creates a visual tension that marks Hopper’s skillful negotiation of the restless borders between representational art and the burgeoning taste for abstraction. 

Indeed, in Morning in a City, moody shadows encircle the woman’s form and match her somber expression. The stark contrast between areas of light and shadow and the lack of gradation between large fields of color enhance the painting’s abstract quality, opening its meaning beyond what is depicted. The title of the painting may indicate that it is bright morning sunlight flooding the interior space, but it does little to warm the woman’s pale skin or illuminate the dark recesses of the room and it tells us little about its subject. Hopper’s mastery of how to poetically distill such opposing elements and bring their contradiction into a delicate equipoise is precisely what gives his works the breathing space for inserting our private narratives into “Jo’s” mind.  Like a movie starring an actress whose face we have seen reflected on countless screens but will never know, his work challenges us to reflect on the enigmatic impulse to project narratives on his paintings that tell us far more about our desires than we shall ever know of hers.