Photography pushed a great many Modernists, in the infancy of the twentieth century, into Abstract Expressionism.  The human soul sought to distinguish itself from the sterile order of the photographic image.   That emergent technology lit a fire in the shoes of the Modernist imagination, which flung modern art into the aesthetical diaspora it has come to be today.  Edward Hopper belonged to a dramatically original class of these new twentieth century painters, whose work appeared no less repulsed by photography than by the rebellious counterattacks of Cubism and Surrealism.  He would carry the torch of John Singer Sargent, venerating as his artistic ancestors, Turner and Constable.
 

Hopper’s work eludes the idiomatic fixation with technological refinement in a rather straightforward gesture, by controverting photography’s simplest utilitarian merits.  If photography was doomed to capture the myopia of the moment, severed from the soul’s synthesis of context then Hopper made it his project to reconnect them.  It was his sensitivity to natural and artificial light, coupled with an almost comical insight into the nature of the American experience going on around him: how people transformed the land, and how those transformations consequently shaped their lives.  Light fell upon America, revealing a broad and unending horizon, a lonely reminder of a yet uncorrupted Earth that industrial technology would strive to pervert, and every crowding skyline would rally to conceal.

It was a confrontation of the capabilities of thinking machines, and the obsolescence of human autonomy with those machines.  These things, Hopper’s work observes, can duplicate, but they will always fail to synthesize the way an artist does.    Hopper’s subjects wait within his paintings:  every field, every room, every street is a cell, vast and bereft of any further opportunity.  These are motionless views of the land upon which the dreams of the twentieth century were set lose, where they would roam, and never be apprehended.  That terrible irony infiltrates all Hopper’s work.  The houses and possessions in these paintings look like they should please their subjects.  It is, after all, their land, their accomplishments fleshed out on the erstwhile barren Earth.  But they don’t.  Staring across the available vacancies of land and ocean these subjects acknowledge a kind of living afterworld.  This was supposed to be it, the American Dream:  the winddrying white linens, the acreage, the window seat.  But something halted it.

There is yet another manifestation of Hopper’s vision of America, the landscape paintings.  In these there are no subjects by which the loneliness he purports exclusive to our national culture might be scapegoated.  The viewer takes that role.  The sunblinded body apprehending that idleness of sunlight is you, bored, looking at the horizon like it was a jail sentence.  These unpopulated scenes of the Earth are often the most difficult to deal with.  The comfort of fiction, and the aloof protection of drama are gone.  Like so many blank faces in his paintings, you stand exposed to the beguiling project this country undertook with the land.  It is an indictment of sorts.  The seeing constitutes complicity.

You leave the canvas, the museum, the folio in which the print appeared, dramatically altered in your understanding of historical contexts.  The old cell of Earth Hopper revealed like a lost city is apparent on all sides of you.  And in its absence, vacant columns of desolate land remain.  The four p.m. sunlight strikes the lawn and exposes the unattainable color of being happy.

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