Many of Edward Hopper’s iconic scenes of twentieth-century American life are still highly affective. Indeed, there is something unsettling about a lot of his paintings, which are often isolated, somber, and even foreboding. This aesthetic of loneliness and alienation is conveyed strongly in Morning Sun (1952) and Office in a Small City (1953) [bottom left, bottom right]. Both depict a solitary contemporary subject in a stark, empty room. Wide windows in both paintings overlook what appears to be an urban cityscape of chimneys and multi-storey buildings. In Cape Cod Evening (1939) [top], a couple stands outside a white American Colonial-style house watching their dog play in the grass. A possibly foreboding darkness approaches through the trees behind them, and Hopper captures the dog as it seems to stare at something outside the frame. House on the Railroad (1925) [middle] is again a powerfully isolated image of a Victorian house, viewed from the other side of the railroad tracks, rising above the viewer’s vantage point against an empty blue-grey sky.
A lot of social and historical context can be read into the somber, monochromatic colours, lonely subjects, cityscapes, and rural locales of Hopper’s works, including urbanization, industrialization, changing social conditions, war, and anxieties about social, political, and economic change. Gail Levin describes how Hopper grew up in the midst of “the passage from the strong moral principles of rural and small-town America into the beginning of urban and industrial development that eroded the traditional ways of life and produced growing alienation” (1).
Linda Nochlin notes that Hopper’s paintings are images of “a thoroughgoing kind of rootlessness: alienation seized under the aspect of a particular time and place which is yet part of a larger American alienation” (2). She goes on to describe how the lonely figures are further insulated by the absence of transportation or exits - trapping them within the scene (3). They are “detached from the city both socially and spatially as it changes around them” (4). In these four paintings, with the exception of the (unused) railroad, the figures are boxed in by trees, buildings, and solid walls but still seem to exist in an almost frighteningly expansive, alienating world.
1. Quoted in Tom Slater, “Fear of the City 1882–1967: Edward Hopper and the Discourse of Anti-Urbanism,” Social & Cultural Geography 3, no. 2 (2002): 140.
2. Linda Nochlin, “Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation,” Art Journal 41, no. 2 (1981): 136.
3. Nochlin, “Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation,” 136.
4. Slater, “Fear of the city 1882–1967,” 141.
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