AMERICAN EMPTINESS

EDWARD HOPPER, HIGH NOON, 1949

(Dayton Art Institute)

Edward Hopper is the poet laureate of American alienation. He’s the Walt Whitman of lonesomeness. He sings a song of solitary houses on rarely-traveled roads, of empty streets shining in early morning sunlight, of people trapped in sparsely furnished rooms, avoiding one another’s eyes. Even the four figures in his best-known work, the noir icon Nighthawks, are alone together, as trapped in themselves as in that strange diner without a door. In uninhabited daylight scenes, Hopper’s palette of frozen blue and white makes the most ordinary places–a farmhouse, a lighthouse–look disturbing and eerie. We wonder how it was possible for Hopper to see these things. There’s an emptiness in the paintings so profound that even the viewer’s presence–the painter’s presence and our own–is denied. How can we look on these places without violating their hermetic isolation? This is the mystery, the impossibility, of Hopper’s best work.

I stand alone in a small gallery at the Dayton Art Institute and look through a glass door at snow softly falling from a dreary February sky. Hanging beside the door, Edward Hopper’s High Noon blazes with all the brightness of summer. A solitary woman stands framed in the doorway of a lonely house somewhere on the American prairie. She has just opened her robe, and she looks up into the sunlight that falls on her bare breasts. The first reaction of critics and scholars is to associate her with traditional depictions of the Annunciation–the Virgin Mary impregnated by a ray of heavenly light–but I’m immediately reminded of Bellini’s great St. Francis at the Frick Collection, in which the saint stands in full sunlight before the entrance to a dark cave, ecstatically receiving the stigmata. Hopper’s modern woman likewise steps into sunlight, but her movement is more tentative, her gestures more ambiguous. She stands on the threshold. She has not yet completely escaped the ominous blackness of her home’s interior. The art historical references suggest a moment of epiphany, but for the viewer there is no revelation. The mystery only deepens: Who is she? Why is she doing this? How can we possibly be watching? Hopper’s woman exposes herself, but her nakedness gives nothing away.

The painting’s unusual composition, with the house cropped off at one side, encourages us to read the work from right to left. We begin in medias res, the horizontal lines on the house taking us quickly to the first of four vertical ‘chords’ in this very musical composition. The right-hand dormer and lower windows are the first chord, the next dormer and the doorway form the second chord, third comes the last window and the large triangular eaves above it, and the final chord is the empty vertical patch of land and sky. So we have a rhythm of three progressively heavier beats-da, DA, DA–and the last beat is lost in the landscape’s echoless void. The chimney strikes a high note in the melody, while its color harmonizes with the russet band around the foundation. And the whole tune is played to a bassline of light-brown grass. The color of the grass is picked up and lightened in the woman’s blonde hair, while her robe slightly darkens the beautiful Hopper blue of that big American sky. Thin white clouds harmonize wonderfully with the houses’s white, which is itself striated with blue pinstripes. There’s even the slightest hint of green at the corners of the house, and this sets up a Cézanne-ish harmony with the green wall visible through the last window.

A meticulously planned and composed painting, then, much more complex than it initially appears. Each of the four windows even has a significance all its own. The right dormer, with the blind drawn over its top half and curtains closed to the merest vertical slit, is an image of concealment; the eye cannot pass beyond. In the window below, the curtains are slightly parted at the middle, the long vertical separation rhyming with the woman’s parted robe and suggesting a possible, tentative opening. The curtains of the second dormer are parted in an emphatic black rectangle that both echos the black doorway below and signifies the mysterious blankness of the home’s interior. Even if the curtains were pulled wide open, there would be nothing but darkness to see. The curtains are fully open in the last window, however, and to our surprise a fragment of interior is visible. Stepping closer to the painting and peering into the window like a rural voyeur, I see a triangle of sunlight, part of a table, part of a chair and part of an unidentifiable painting hanging on the wall. This tiny framed painting is the key to understanding the image, for the entire scene framed by this window is a picture within a picture. It’s a miniature Hopper, as explicit and inexplicable as all of his best work. What is that painting? we ask. Why is that table placed just so? What does it all mean? Like the woman’s body, the window is open to view, but the revelation only draws us in further and deepens the mystery.

Is there a more important connection between the windows and the woman? One need hardly be a strict Freudian to interpret a series of vertical slits culminating in full openness as an image of female sexuality, and the fact that these openings are strongly associated with a partly nude woman seems to clinch the argument. But the question of meaning remains. What is Hopper telling us? The painting may reflect the artist’s–and his society’s–contradictory attitudes toward eros. There is first of all attraction and desire: the drive to reveal what is hidden behind windows and doors and clothes, the urge to part the robe and penetrate the woman. But this is mixed with an appreciation of the social rules that repress this desire, that function (like art museum guards) to keep the viewer at a distance, looking but not touching. And there is something else here that is an essential quality of many Hopper works: the idea that women–indeed, all human beings, but here the emphasis is on women–harbor mysteries no one can penetrate. Clothes can be removed, bodies can be possessed, but there is in each of us a hard core of aloneness that can never be cracked. There is always a part of us, deep inside, that will remain as unknowable as the darkness behind Hopper’s door.

Hopper is considered the greatest realist among twentieth-century American painters, and compared to the works of a contemporary such as Marsden Hartley or those of the younger generation (de Kooning, Pollock), there is an obvious surface realism to his work. However, the longer one studies High Noon–or any great Hopper–the less applicable that realist label seems. At his strongest, and in his own way, Hopper can be as ‘abstract’ as Mondrian or Frank Stella and as strange and surreal as Magritte. Look at the carefully calculated play of triangles and rectangles across the front of the house, and note how those Stella-like horizontal pinstripes seem to flatten the house into a single plane, despite the cast shadows. We have a sense that this isn’t a real house at all; it’s as artificial as a movie set. If we could walk around the corner would we see a row of two-by-fours propping up the facade? Look at the land around the house. Just as it might take us awhile to notice that the diner in Nighthawks has no door, we don’t immediately notice here that there’s no sidewalk or path leading up to the front steps. There’s a door, but there’s no way into or out of the house. And this place is truly in the middle of nowhere. Flat land stretches to the horizon and we see no other buildings, no towns, no roads, no paths. No way in, no way out. It is an image as stark and unreal as anything painted by Magritte. The woman is trapped on the threshold, and even if she could leave, even if she could walk down the steps, there would be nowhere to go.

Look at the land. Look at that endless prairie. Americans claim to love the ‘wide open spaces,’ but the way many of them live, even in the West, suggests horror vacui. Go to Plano, Texas, a large Yuppie suburb north of Dallas, and you can almost feel the fear. The suburb is a massive conglomeration of big, cookie-cutter houses squeezed as closely together as the real estate developers can get them. The back yards are hidden behind high stockade fences, and the front yards and sidewalks are almost always uninhabited. From a second-floor window the usual sight is a Cubistic perspective of overlapping rooftops, a manmade miniature mountain range that blocks one’s view of the vast prairie flatness beyond. The houses of Plano, like the one in High Noon, are artificial walls built against a very real terror. There’s a feeling of agoraphobia in Hopper’s image; the woman cannot leave the house because it’s her only protection against the Great American Emptiness outside. This is not the American landscape that early European settlers saw and feared, the ‘howling wilderness’ populated by ‘savages.’ Rather, it’s an incomprehensibly huge, terrifying nothingness. It’s a vastness that swallows individuals whole. People get lost in America. They drive to the corner market for beer and cigarettes, turn left instead of right, hit the highway and are never seen again. The federal witness protection program is based upon the principle that it’s possible to vanish here. It’s frighteningly easy to disappear. We build walls against the emptiness and deceive ourselves into a sense of safety, but our houses are all like Hopper’s, enclosing an even darker blankness than the one outside. And so this woman stands in the doorway, trapped on the threshold, neither outside nor in. Maybe she raises her head and opens her robe because she wants to feel the warm touch of the sunlight and know that she exists, that she is here, that the nothingness hasn’t swallowed her yet.

This painting implies another one–a work that Hopper never painted: the same scene with the door closed and the woman not visible. Typical Hopper, we would probably think if we saw it. Cool color harmonies, impeccable composition, a poetic sense of silence and solitude. But it wouldn’t disturb us as much as High Noon; it wouldn’t have this painting’s mysteries. High Noon, in fact, has the power to transform our understanding of some of Hopper’s other paintings; all those images of solitary country houses, lonely buildings and gas stations on empty roads suddenly take on a darker tone. We shouldn’t be too quick to call Hopper’s canvases lovely and lyrical. Granted, those words do describe his works, but they are also, at their best, dark and disturbing. When we look at a Hopper and see an empty street of houses or a lone house with no people, we should imagine the woman from High Noon standing behind every door. Hopper’s houses only look uninhabited. Every door conceals a person, and no one can know what that person conceals.

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