Edward Hopper was an artist who did not want his paintings tagged with ulterior meanings. He tended to view the critical profession with suspicion and doubt. When critics commented on the stark “loneliness” of his subjects—gas stations on deserted country roads, bleak Victorian houses on the opposite side of railroad tracks, men and women isolated in characterless hotel rooms—Hopper objected. As Gail Levin notes in her highly informative monograph, Hopper’s Places, the taciturn Hopper responded by saying “the loneliness thing is overdone.” He was, however, often ambivalent and sometimes furtive about expressing his opinions. On another occasion, answering the same charge, he commented: “It’s probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don’t know. It could be the whole human condition.”
When partisans tried to enroll Hopper in the ranks of the American Scene painters of the 1930s, he rejected the notion, claiming that painters like Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry “caricatured America.” He plainly wanted none of it. “I always wanted to do myself,” he said. “The French painters didn’t talk about the ‘French Scene’ or the English painters about the ‘English Scene.’”
Hopper was, of course, one of the innumerable painters engaged in the nagging and seemingly obligatory search for a truly native America, just as American writers were expected to pursue the phantom of The Great American Novel. The Hudson River School painters, for example, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, were intent on capturing the
