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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