Torrents of words and phrases fall on Edward Hopper's paintings. Deadly silence, erotic despair, haunting ambiguity, irony, symbolic decoding, metaphysical, mysterious. Almost every critic, artist, writer (especially writers), art savant, book-jacket designer or media hack sees in his mature paintings solitude, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension. The general critical observation that Hopper's paintings depicted loneliness - and that this loneliness was an integral part of the American character - is a bit puzzling. Hopper himself didn't see it and once commented: "The loneliness thing is overdone." More likely than "loneliness" is the sense of self as different and apart, feelings not limited to Americans.
Just as Graham Greene created a distinctive mood of place that critics called "Greeneland", Hopper painted the feeling familiar to most humans - the triste embedded in existence, in our intimate knowledge of the solitude of the self. Although the 20th century was the heyday of Jung, Freud and psychoanalysis, if ever Hopper felt his psyche was distorted, he did not want it corrected, for art came from who the artist was in every way. He did not wish to tamper with his subconscious nor his personal vision of the world.
Today he is a toweringly important painter whose work is seen as the expression of a singular genius. But for many years his work was ignored while his fellow painters enjoyed success and fame. Hopper had, however, a sure sense of his importance and a strong conviction that his way was the right way to paint, particularly when confronted with abstract expressionism. Ironically, there were elements in Hopper's work that appealed to many abstractionists - points where reality, representation and abstraction rubbed shoulders.
He was born in 1882, into a religious-minded middle-class Baptist family in Nyack on the Hudson river. Although the religion did not rub off, he was puritanical with right-wing leanings, a life-long conservative Republican. By adolescence, he was drawing constantly, experimenting with oils and watercolours, adept with pen and ink. When he was 12, he put on a mighty growth spurt and topped 6ft, a great gangling child, awkward and uneasy in appearance; the sense of being an outsider never left him.
His parents urged him to become a commercial illustrator, and in 1899 he started at the New York School of Illustrating, a mediocre profit-shop. He stuck it out for a year. The next autumn, he switched to the New York School of Art, a serious institution attended by Guy Péne du Bois (who became Hopper's life-long friend), Rockwell Kent and others, including the young Josephine Nivison, later his wife. Hopper stayed on at the school several years beyond the regular course of instruction.
France was then the place American artists went, and in 1906, when he was 24, Hopper arrived in Paris to board in Rue de Lille at a lodging arranged by his parents through their church. By now he was 6ft 4in, very frugal and enchained by conservative Victorian mores. Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Renoir, Cézanne were in Paris at the time, but the awkward young man met none of them and did not take part in la vie bohème . After a cold, rainy winter, he enjoyed the Parisian spring; he was impressed by the impressionists and his palette colours moved toward pastel tones.
He returned to Paris twice, in 1909 and, briefly, 1910. The city stirred not just colour but sensual content in his paintings. There are indications of the mature artist in Summer Interior , painted in 1909; in her biography of Hopper, Gail Levin notes: "the loneliness of recurrent tense interiors, the sexual under-current, and the perspective of the voyeur". His interest in the complexity of light is clear.
Back in the US he had to make a living and turned to the advertising illustration he hated. In 1912, he submitted paintings for an exhibit at the MacDowell Club. He had done a strong oil in 1911, Blackwell's Island, but he did not send this to the gallery. Instead, he dragged out four of his old European paintings and a sailing scene. No one noticed his work. He was 30 years old and had never sold a painting.
He began to do magazine illustrations for System, the Magazine of Business, his frequent subject office interiors. He could hardly guess he was laying groundwork for future paintings. He also did movie posters, the beginning of his long love affair with films.
The sociable Guy Péne du Bois was a good friend to Hopper, getting him invitations to shows, worrying about him: "The hunger of him, the hunger of him!" he wrote in his diary. "I'd like to see him out of his present condition. I'd like to see him happy." But each time Du Bois wangled an exhibition invitation for Hopper, out would come the old French paintings that apparently moved no one. The public and the art world was in a nationalistic mood for "American art".
That idea of what was "American" was narrow in geographic range and period. It was old New England - frugal, austere, hard-working, taciturn, restrained, stubborn, pious, righteous, sexually repressed. Hopper travelled to the New England coast for the first time in summer 1913 and responded to the region viscerally. Although he later travelled to the west coast, through the south and into Mexico, he rarely liked these places nor was moved to paint them. His philosophy, his behaviour, his eye and his interests were all formed by and attracted to the small, rocky world of the northeast coast that the first white American settlers made home, and the streets of New York (whose skyscrapers Hopper slighted).
New England has always been enormously important in the national consciousness; its Puritan values, along with the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, have been claimed as the essence of the American character. One attribute of Puritanism art critics never mention is the interior sense of self-congratulation and superiority that is deeply embedded in the national character. Hopper's vaunted fidelity to a particular style, subjects and method may also be ascribed to the American sense of being right while the rest of the world is wrong.
It wasn't until late in 1924 that Hopper's fortunes changed. He tried to place his watercolours with the Kraushaar Art Galleries and was refused. Farther down the street, about to pass the new Rehn Gallery, he stepped in. Before Frank Rehn had a chance to look at Hopper's work, a customer seized on a painting and bought it. For the first time, Hopper was represented by a dealer and Rehn began to sell his pictures like the proverbial hot cakes. Critics lauded him, he was invited to show at major exhibits and important museums sat up like hungry dogs around a picnic.
In 1924, Hopper married Jo Nivison. They had known each other since art school days; gradually they began to court, through the medium of French poetry and billets-doux. When they married, both of them were 41 years old and Jo was a virgin. She moved into his Greenwich Village home, the top floor of a walkup with 74 stairs. He had moved there in December 1913; they stayed there for the rest of their lives. Those stairs probably kept the Hoppers physically fit.
Jo Nivison's Pepys-like diaries give us most of what we know of the taciturn Edward. Garrulous and opinionated, attached to the silent painter as a remora to a shark, she partially controlled the history and disposition of the works through the famous dime-store account books in which each painting was carefully described and accompanied by a small sketch, sale amounts set down in her black backhand. Hopper himself also kept careful records of each painting: the double ledgers seem to attest to the curious and ongoing power struggle between the couple. Jo was a painter whose work had a nascent reputation but Hopper despised and demeaned it.
The couple, married for 43 years, exhibited a weird combination of tenderness, fury, rivalry, disdain, cuffing and biting, competition, resentment, rejection, dependency and the strength of similar interests, including mutual passions for art and the theatre. Their periods of collaboration occurred as Jo posed for almost all the female subjects in Hopper's paintings, even Girlie Show when she was nearly 60.
Success and fame came in the years after their marriage. Hopper began to catch the attention of critics, one of whom was Lloyd Goodrich. Goodrich praised House by the Railroad, one of two Hopper oils in the New Society of Artists Seventh Exhibition in January 1926 as "the most striking picture in the exhibition ... one of the most poignant and desolating pieces of realism that we have ever seen". The label of "realism" attached to Hopper with that review, although the artist claimed, even in later life, that he was still an impressionist.
Through much of the 20th century, Hopper was called a realist painter at a time when realism was denigrated by the critics. Realism was for the masses, for the boob who declared: "I don't know much about art but I know what I like." What the boob liked was Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers - meticulously detailed paintings applying technical virtuosity to patriotic, nostalgic, down-home situations. Both Rockwell and Hopper were "realists", but there was an enormous gap between their different realities, shown by a preserved bit of dialogue.
According to Jo's description of Cape Cod Morning (1950) in the record book, Hopper had been painting fields in September with a "blondish housewife (appraising early A.M. weather) in pink cotton dress". She noted that the "painting went off speedily..." She claimed: "It's a woman looking out to see if the weather's good enough to hang out her wash," prompting Hopper to rejoin: "Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view, she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window."
And in that lies the great difference. Rockwell's paintings were "about" something; Hopper's were studies in mass and light expressed through the idiom of American landscape, architecture and figures. Where Rockwell painted fine detail punctiliously, Hopper's eye erased detail, a kind of painterly reductio. He left it to the viewer to construct a meaning or story, but so situational are the paintings that it is almost impossible to avoid interpreta tion and narrative explanation. These are powerful psychological paintings. Anyone who looks at a Hopper becomes involved.
By the 1930s, during a period of social consciousness and nationalism, Hopper's work began to pull serious attention; by the 1940s, he was recognised as a major American artist. Even in the 1950s, when abstract expressionism was in vogue and realism on the defensive, Hopper's professional reputation continued to grow and strengthen. Time magazine featured him on its cover in 1956, and in a survey of American art declared: "In the years since World War II, Americans have awakened, as never before, to the world's art heritage, and have discovered the startling truth that a sizable and important part of that heritage exists in their own backyard ... it has reflected not European painting but American life - rough and smooth, tumultuous and diverse. And though it is a great river of many sources and many passing moods, its strongest single current throughout is a searching realism. One measure of Edward Hopper's importance: he is today the revered champion of that tradition."
Hopper's work habits were prodigious; an immense amount of picture scouting, research, preparation, sketching and thinking lay behind each work. There are 53 surviving sketches for New York Movie , to many Hopper's finest painting. His output of oils - from the earliest 1895 Rowboat in Rocky Cove to his last painting, Two Comedians - numbered 366, roughly five paintings a year, in marked contrast to Picasso's huge output. The detailed preparatory work, the increasing difficulty of finding suitable subjects, and his long periods of depression when he did not paint at all kept the count down. He suffered from thyroid and pituitary conditions, perhaps the cause of his phlegmatic personality, his fatigues and depressions. In 1940, he painted Gas, the twilight gas station with the diagonal road and dark mass of locust trees. But of it, Jo wrote: "Pictures come so hard this year ... Ed is struggling."
The years ground on, the Hoppers holding to their routine of hauling coal up the 74 steps, summers on the Cape, scouting for picture subjects, painting, openings and art functions. Old and older the Hoppers grew; in the 1960s, they faced the danger in New York of street crime and eviction from the apartment by the landlord, New York University. Everything was harder for them. In the art world, furious arguments broke out between realists and abstract expressionists in the papers and magazines. Hopper kept painting, but worked on very few canvases. When asked what he was after in one of his last pictures, the 1963 Sun in an Empty Room, he snapped: "I'm after ME." In this great painting, he rubbed the abstractionists' noses in his abstract realism.
An early Hopper from his student years, 1902-1904, Solitary Figure in a Theater, shows an amorphous lone person seated in the dark waiting for a performance to begin. Hopper's last painting, Two Comedians, finished in the autumn of 1965, shows a man and a woman harlequin on stage taking final bows - Edward and Jo Hopper at the end of their lives. Hopper's adult life was bracketed between these two paintings. He died in his chair in the old walkup studio in May 1967.
Jo, almost blind, survived another nine months, trying to cope with taxes, bills, ill health and loneliness. At the end, says Levin in her biography, one of Hopper's important paintings "turned up inexplicably in the hands of someone who in this period took the trouble to face the 74 steps".
Edward Hopper is at Tate Modern, London SE1, May 17 to September 5. Details: 020-7887 8888.