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. |
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