Patrick Bade
American Art Between the Wars: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe

Patrick Bade - American Art Between the Wars: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe

- This is a painting which I’m sure is very familiar to you. It’s Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” painted in 1942. And it is one of the most widely known, one of the most loved paintings of the 20th century. It’s also one of the most parroted paintings. If you go onto the internet, you can find endless paradistic versions of it, which is a sign of just how well known it is. So why is this painting of a rather banal subject, a cafe at night, why has it become so famous? Why is it so fascinating to so many people? And I think it’s because it perfectly expresses an aspect of modern urban life that most of us have experienced at some time or other, of that sense of melancholy and of being alone in a big city full of people. I think he’s one of the great masters of urban alienation. It’s a major subject of his work throughout his career. So he was born in 1882 in a small town on the Hudson River that was known for boat building. And that is certainly also a theme, the river and boats, that he returns to many times in his life. And he came from a relatively comfortably off middle class family, and he went to New York, to the New York School of Art and Design to study. And he studied under William Merritt Chase, who was, perhaps, the leading American impressionist and who certainly introduced him to Impressionism as a style and to the kind of subject matter that he would continue to paint. But a more important mentor for him was the painter, Robert Henri or Henry. I’m not quite sure which way around the Americans pronounced it, who is a member of the so-called Ashcan School.

And here are two paintings by Robert Henri, the left, the application of paint, rather juicy, luscious paint and the bright colours. These certainly had an impact on Edward Hopper, but also the Ashcan subject matter is rather gritty, urban scenes like the one you see on the right hand side. And so, gritty urbanism, as I said, would be a major factor in his work throughout his life. This is Edward Hopper. And so is this, recognisable scenes of New York. This is another painting by Robert Henri. And I show this one, again, to emphasise his importance as far as Edward Hopper’s painting technique is concerned, but also the use of colour, the way that, for instance, the reds in this picture, they really sing. And I feel that’s a great quality of Edward Hopper, his ability to make colours sing. But like many great artists before him, and afterwards, of course, his family were anxious that they didn’t want him to starve in a garret, the usual cliche. It’s very difficult to earn a living as a fine artist. So in his early career, he concentrated on work as an illustrator. This is a drawing he made for an illustration for a magazine. And here is another one of his illustrations where you can see that he has an accomplished technique as a draughtsman. It’s a rather striking composition. And in these early illustrations, it’s very obvious that there is a strong influence from Japanese art. Here, for instance, the asymmetry of the composition, the way that tree on the right hand side is cropped at the top and the bottom, creating a certain spatial ambiguity and the large empty space, top left hand side. These are very typical features of Japanese woodcut prints, but these features don’t necessarily have to come directly from Japanese woodcut prints.

I’m sure he was aware of them. Everybody was looking at them at this time. But by the time he was working in the early 1900s, those Japanese qualities had really entered the bloodstream of Western art. So he could have picked up these features either from a Japanese print like the one you see on the right hand side, or from looking at modern French masters like Degas, who absorbed these very typical Japanese features. And here again, these large areas of empty space, the asymmetry, propping and so on, these are all very Japanese. And two, more of his earliest illustrations were, and there’s very strong contours, quite flat areas of colour without much modelling. These again, are typically Japanese features. They went to Paris to study several times before the first World War. But he was not one of those Americans who flocked to Gertrude Stein and took an interest in the avant garde. In fact, he resolutely ignored what was going on the cutting edge of the Paris art scene, which would have been Matisse and Fauvism, which you see on the left hand side. And then, of course, from ‘98 and '99, cubism. There’s a Cubist Picasso on the right hand side. These things meant nothing to him. You know, I think quite often there is this idea that if you’re not cutting edge, if you’re not modern, if you’re not up to speed, so to speak, that’s a sign of being second rate or not important. I would really refute that. And, in fact, the three artists I’m talking about today are all artists who really turned their back on mainstream modernism.

And I don’t think that diminishes them in any way. I think they’re all three wonderful artists. So much more important for Edward Hopper were the ideas of Charles Baudelaire. Again, he didn’t necessarily have to read them directly, the famous essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” that Baudelaire published in 1863. It’s actually an essay about the artist, illustrator, Constantin Guys. There’s a drawing by Constantin Guys on the left hand side, which says “An Encounter on a Paris Street "Between a Prostitute and a Prospective Customer”. And so, Baudelaire was saying he was rejecting or reacting against the kind of art that you tended to see exhibited at the salon in the 19th century. Huge history pictures, scenes from ancient history or the Middle Ages or mythology or religious scenes. He said, “No, that’s all boring. "Much, much more interesting, much more exciting "is to look around you, look at the city around you, "modern city life and to see how great we are”, he said, “in our top hats and our patent leather shoes.” And this is what he was urging artists to paint. They should be observers or cool and detached like journalists looking at the life around them. And this is, of course, what Edward Hopper did. This is a kind of manifesto picture by Manet actually exhibited just before the publication of “The Painter of Modern Life”. But Manet was friendly with Baudelaire and certainly very, very familiar with his ideas. And he seems to be trying to put them in practise in this famous picture of “Music in the Tuileries Gardens”. Manet himself as a rather sort of elegant figure with a top hat and a walking stick on the extreme left of the composition. Manet was certainly important to Edward Hopper. Again, I think it’s this technique, not so different from Robert Henri.

You can see that he relishes paint and the sort of wonderful creamy whites you find in Manet on the right hand side and in a painting by Edward Hopper on the left, the surface texture, the sort of fluidity of the paint surface is very Manet-esque. And the subject matter of Manet and Degas as painters of modern life, cafe life, which is so important. It’s still very important in Paris. People spend much more time in cafes in Paris than they do in London or many other cities. So this is Manet on the left hand side and Degas on the right hand side. Both artists, again, trying to express the quality of modern urban life and a sense of loneliness, alienation that I spoke of. And, of course, cafes are a very, very big theme of Edward Hopper. And here is another lonely, solitary young woman in a cafe by Hopper on the right hand side. And this is actually quite a late painting by Hopper. This is 1950. I mean, once he’s established himself, his subject matter and his style, he’s not really an artist who evolves. You can’t talk about early middle or late Hopper. He’s pretty consistent, I would say. A Degas cafe scene, top left and Edward Hopper bottom right, interesting similarities, compositional devices.

Again, the pillar, that very Japanese device of cropping the pillar at the top and the bottom. So it just looks like it’s on the surface of the picture and the lack of symmetry in the composition, and apparently casual, but actually very careful placing of the figures. This is, of course, one of his most famous cafe scenes, a chop suey restaurant. Here, you certainly see his ability to, as I said, to make colours sing. And the blues, the red, the green, oh, they have a really zingy quality to them. He’s also, I mean, something that he has picked up actually from Impressionism rather than from Manet and Degas, neither of whom really strictly speaking, impressionist artists, is his love of sunlight, both outdoors and sunlight penetrating into interiors. But this extraordinary sense of isolation that even in pictures where you’ve got several human figures in the picture that usually nobody is actually connecting with anybody else. They’re in their own little world. And something I think that he learns from Duggar is how to depict relations or non-relations in a way between human figures and particularly between the sexes. And he’s able to convey psychological tension through the placing of the figures and through their body language. Both Degas and Hopper, I think, have a great mastery of this, Degas top left hand side. It’s a picture called or “Sulking”. And so, we have the strong impression that the relationship between this man and woman is really quite tense and maybe even breaking down. And that has to do with the way the man is placed on the right hand side of the picture.

But he’s looking onwards out to the right, not back towards his wife and the whole body language with the folded arms and so on. And I think we can detect a similar sense of tension or even frustration in the painting by Hopper with the woman sitting at the, she’s sort of doodling in a way on the piano turned away from the man. And again, looking off into the distance on the right out, not back towards the centre of the picture. With Hopper, I think there’s very often a sense of sexual tension. I feel that in this picture, that there is some, this presumably, a boss and his secretary. I mean there are paintings where one is very tempted to make up a story. What’s going on here? Is there some kind of affair? It’s all, it’s left, I mean, the T’s are not crossed. The I’s are not dotted. It’s left very ambiguous. But there is a sense of something going on here. And, of course, for us, looking back, there is a nostalgic element in these pictures because when he painted this, of course, that this was what an office would’ve looked like. But I suppose filing cabinets and typewriters and Baker light, telephones and so on, these are all things that have long since disappeared from offices. Here’s another painting where I think there is, so what’s going on between these two? Do they actually know each other? Is he looking at her with interest or even with lust? And what’s her attitude towards him? Is she totally indifferent or again, you feel tempted to write a short story inspired by this picture.

These are things that, again, go back to 19th century French art that Gustav Courbet, he’s another great master, of course, of urban alienation and wonderful at depicting tensions and undertones in relationships between men and women. The man reading his newspaper, the woman daydreaming and looking out the window and the placing of the figures suggesting a certain tension between them. I’m not sure that, I mean, I can see quite a lot of parallels between Courbet’s work and Edward Hopper, but it’s not very likely actually that Edward Hopper would’ve directly known Courbet’s work at this time. I mean, Courbet’s great reputation, his fame is really quite a recent thing. You know, even when I was a student at in the 1970s, Courbet was really only spoken about as a collector and patron and friend of the Impressionists. His work was little known. Tremendous sense of tension, I would say in both these pictures. The Degas, the title that’s usually given to this picture is just “Interior”, but clearly something very dramatic and something very dark and sinister is going on in that picture. And the light has a very important role in creating that impression as it does, I think, in the Edward Hopper on the right hand side. So most historians think the Degas is actually inspired by the Zola novel “Therese Raquin”. So you can actually attach a story of what’s going on between these two characters 'cause we know it from Zola’s novel. But we, again, we have to make up our own story as far as Edward Hopper is concerned. And this was, I think, makes quite an interesting comparison with Hopper on the left, and Walter Sickert on the right.

Sickert loved playing games with his viewers. And so, again, you look at this picture and you feel that something probably quite dark is going on. But he gave alternate titles. He liked to tease his audience and he gave two titles to this picture. One was “The Camden Town Murders”, which suggests that what we’re looking at is the aftermath of a sex murder, but he also gave it the title, “What Should We Do for the Rent?” In which case, the man’s pose and gesture of despair is to do with his economic situation. But in both pictures, I think the way the woman is posed in the Hopper with the skirt raised, serves to expose her buttocks, giving it a really, I think, in both these pictures, a slightly brutal element of sexual undertone to both pictures. I doubt, again, whether Hopper and Sickert, I mean, Sickert, I suppose he’s almost a generation older than Hopper, but they were working as contemporaries for many decades, I doubt whether they were aware of one another. But I think there’s a, the similarities between these two pictures come about through a common source in French art and literature. So completely solitary figures, quite a few of those in Hopper’s work. Three contrasting pictures here. And, again, I think body language, legs crossed or open, what’s happening with the arms, all really quite expressive of a particular state of mind. And another aspect of Hopper, I would say is a sense of voyeurism that we are often spying on people who may not be aware that we’re spying on them. Oh, more of these figures, which are solitary figures. And again, you can see here how he enjoys painting the bright sunlight entering into the bedroom. This is another one of Hopper’s most famous pictures.

This cinema scene, again, dating from the late, this is the late just before the Second World War, late thirties. And so, many of the themes that I’ve already mentioned, of course, the only figure whose face we see is the usherette on the right hand side. And she is, again, a solitary, rather melancholy figure, apparently absorbed in her own thoughts. But I think a lot of the appeal and fascination of this picture is, well, it’s the way he’s created, recreated the atmosphere of the cinema. We can just see the black and white movie. We can’t see what it is, but we can see a bit of the screen on the left hand side and the contrast between the illusion of the screen and the reality of the cinema itself, and very interesting lighting with different light sources. I mean, this is what really takes me back to my, I don’t go to movies very often anymore, but this is a picture that certainly takes me back to my childhood when I used to very often go to movies with my sister in Bognor Regis. So many of the features in this picture, again, I would say deriving from 19th-century French paintings of opera houses and theatres. And this is Jean Beraud on the left hand side. Degas, who’s really the great pioneer of a whole new approach to painting theatres and opera houses.

Before Degas, what artists normally did was to try and give you the full illusion of what’s going on on the stage, but Degas is fascinated by the contrast between the illusion on the stage and the reality of the audience. And you get this juxtaposition. And here, again, I’d like to make a comparison with Walter Sickert. This is one of his most famous music scenes dating from around 1890 with the artificial lighting, contrast of light and shade and the spatial complexities, which make an interesting parallel with Edward Hopper. And again, the theme of the young woman lost in her thoughts, melancholy, isolated in a place that’s full of people. Reminds me of Manet’s final masterpiece, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” that you see on the right hand side. This young woman who seems to be completely under, presumably the man you see on the right hand side is actually asking her for a drink, but she doesn’t seem very interested in him or serving him. So far I’ve shown pictures with human beings and human interactions. But Hopper is a great master of buildings. It’s in his paintings, houses, buildings, structures can take on a powerful character. And they, again, you could easily make up a short story, a whole novel about the buildings in his pictures. And they’re often very banal. I mean, this is hardly an architectural masterpiece that we’re looking at that’s represented in this picture, but it’s extraordinary how he can extract beauty and poetry out of banality, out of a barber’s column or a fire hydrant or a very ordinary, little terrace house. And again, this is something that goes back to the middle of the 19th century to realist artists like Orbe or Pizarro, who felt that a cabbage can be just as beautiful as a rose. If you look at it in the right way, there is beauty to be found in most humble and the most banal subjects, even a petrol station as we see here.

And so, there’s something very cinematic about these pictures or buildings. We feel that this could be a scene from a movie and something very dramatic could be going on inside this house, even though we can’t see any people. And I feel there is something, an aspect, his work also that is romantic with the capital R, looking back to romantic landscapes in the first half of the 19th century. And, for instance, this glorious sunset behind a signal station, it makes me actually think of the wonderful sunsets painted by romantic artists like Turner or Casper David Friedrich, as we see in the bottom half of this image. Yes, back to the cinematic side to his work. In fact, I think there’s a very interesting two-way relationship here. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that he went to the movies and liked the movies and was inspired by them. And, in turn, he certainly inspired one of the greatest of all movie makers, Alfred Hitchcock. And this could really be a scene out of a painting by Hitchcock. This is, of course, a still. This is from the Hitchcock movie “Rear Window”. And that is one of the things that makes Hitchcock, I think, so compelling, is that sense of voyeurism in his movie, that he sucks us into this voyeurism. And if you’ve seen the film “Rear Window”, you’ll remember that the hero, he’s laid up with a broken leg and he becomes very fascinated by what he can see going on in through the windows of a neighbouring tenement. And this, here, I think there is a very, very direct influence from this painting of a house on a hill by Edward Hopper on the left hand side.

And the scariest house in the movie is probably, this is Norman Bates’ house in “Psycho”, 1960 film of Alfred Hitchcock. And that movie, I mean, it’s a movie, I like the opening scene very much. It’s a movie I could really not watch all the way through. It’s too amazingly disturbing and scary movie to this day, even though, of course, movies have become so much more violent and much more explicit. But there’s this wonderful opening scene in “Psycho” where we seem to, we are, again, we become the voyeur. We’re looking out of a window. We seem to be looking through binoculars or a telescope, and the camera is panning across this city rather, a view, a sort of, that’s quite similar to this painting just called “City” by Edward Hopper on the right hand side. And then the camera moves in on a window, which has a blind drawn all the way down. And then we actually move into the room where a very steamy love scene has just taken place. I think this is actually one of the most sensual and one of the most erotic scenes I know in the movies. And there’s quite a lot, I think, in those, I’ve shown you those paintings of a man and a woman in an office and man and a woman in a bedroom by Hopper that have a similar quality of erotic tension. Now, we move on to Georgia O'Keeffe, and she has been dubbed the mother of American Modernism. I think this is actually a misnomer because, in fact, apart from a fairly brief spell of just three or four years where she was experimenting with abstraction like Edward Hopper, really, she is not at all aligned with mainstream modernism either in America or in Europe. So she’s born in 1887. Her family were dairy farmers of Irish and Hungarian ancestry. Wonderful face, isn’t it? An extraordinarily beautiful and expressive face. You think, oh, she could have had a career in the movies, a sort of Garbo face.

She went to, again, I mean the family were not wealthy, but not poor. And she went to Chicago to study at the Art Institute there. And the painting on the right hand side is a student work by her. And it’s an accomplished pastiche, I would say, of Schaldach. She’s obviously been very carefully studying paintings by Schaldach, like the one you see on the left, the copper pan and the dead rabbit. And I think you can see even in the illustration on your screen that it’s quite painterly. Of course, that’s one of the great attractions of Schaldach is the wonderfully sensuous and tactile paint surface of all his still life paintings that, so I think it’s interesting that she’s drawn to this great still life artist. But this is the last time that you’ll see, certainly in any of the images I’m showing you in my lecture, a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe that shows any kind of interest in surface texture or brushwork. It’s something that is eliminated from her mature work. So this is one of these abstract paintings or drawings that she made over a period of between about 1915 and 1918. So during the First World War. And this is the only time, as I said, in her career, where she is kind of aligned with mainstream developments in modern art, both in America and in Europe. America had its first taste of abstract art at the Armoury Show in 1913. And it’s just around this time leading into the first World War that artists like Kandinsky, Mondrian, are moving into abstraction.

And I’m sure she’s very aware of, this is another one of her, this abstract pictures. This one has a musical title, it’s called “Blue and Green Music”. And this, of course, refers, I think to the fashionable idea in the late 19th and early 1920 that all art should aspire to the condition of music. This was an important idea for Kandinsky, for instance, that music is an art form that can move you very profoundly, can really speak to your emotions without actually depicting anything or telling a story. It moves you by purely abstract means. And so, avant garde artists were interested in this idea that art should be able to move you without referring to or representing anything else. But as I said, this is a fairly brief phase in her work. Here are two more pictures, which could be abstract. You could interpret them as abstract pictures or you could possibly see them as very abstracted and stylized landscapes. And, for comparison, this is on the left, painted by another great pioneer of abstraction, the Czech artist, Frantisek Kupka, which has, and at this time, the international art, the whole art scene, the whole avant garde art scene, is very, very internationalised through exhibitions like the Armoury Show and also through art magazines with much better quality photographic illustrations. So the art is, I think, it’s quite likely, well, I’m sure that Georgia O'Keeffe was very aware of the latest developments in European art. This is the man who really changed the course of her career. This is Alfred Stieglitz. He was quite a lot older. He was a generation older. He was born in 1864 of a German Jewish background. And I think, you could call him the father of American modernism. He certainly played a role in introducing the latest trends in modern European art to America. He exhibited modern art in his galleries.

And he’s also a very, he’s a pioneer of photography as an art form, that a photograph is not, again, not just something that is a record of a place or a person. That photography in itself could be expressive. And these two photographs made in the 1890s or around the turn of the century of New York, you can see he’s trying to capture light and atmosphere in the city, rather as the Impressionists had done a generation earlier. This is one of his most famous photographs, “Steerage”, where we see the poor immigrants were flooding to America at this time. This has become a truly iconic image. It’s really a representation of the whole phenomenon of mass immigration to America. So it was Stieglitz who really recognised Georgia O'Keeffe’s potential and talent. And he really was a mentor to her and he exhibited her work and he was a great propagandist on her behalf. And she also became his model. And, in fact, his first wife came home unexpectedly and found Georgia O'Keeffe posing naked for Alfred Stieglitz. And she gave him an ultimatum, her or me, and he chose her. Well, he chose Georgia O'Keeffe and he moved in with her and, of course, later married her. These are images of her. And so, these were exhibited at the time, and it was known that Georgia O'Keeffe posed nude and bought erotic photos. And that also played a role, I think, in how people interpreted her work. Just at the end of the first world war in the twenties, she was showing these stylized, closeup images of flowers. They’re probably the works that she’s most known for.

And remember, this is a time when, I mean, Freud is very influential, all intellectuals in New York, they’re all reading Freud. And they all gave a very Freudian interpretation to these flowers, seeing them as sexualized images. Now, Georgia O'Keeffe adamantly denied this all the way through. She completely rejected a sexual interpretation of her flower pictures, but I think she probably protested too much. And I wouldn’t take those protests very seriously. Firstly, artists aren’t always necessarily aware of these things in their work. And secondly, in my experience of artists, they’re always very, very keen to cover their tracks and to disassemble what has actually really inspired their work. I mean, maybe it’s just me, but to my eyes, they are indeed very sexual images referring to the female sex. And if she was doing this, she wasn’t alone at the time, particularly these lilies. You can find them in other artists’ work being used in a very sexual way, particularly Tamara de Lempicka. I mean, these are two paintings with Arum lilies that are of women with whom Tamara de Lempicka was sexually involved, Ira Perrot on the right hand side was an on-off lover over many years. And Arlette Boucard was, I don’t know if that was relationship that was consummated, but there’s no doubt that Tamara de Lempicka was courting her and attracted to her. And you can see this with the lilies and the framed photograph of Arlette Boucard on the left hand side. And this is a painting by Diego Rivera, a great Mexican artist, stylistically not a million miles, really, from Georgia O'Keeffe.

This is a portrait of the very beautiful Natasha Gelman. She was a Czech Jewish refugee who came to Mexico and she married a film director and they became very, very wealthy and they became important art collectors. In fact, after the death of her husband, her bequest of modern art to the Metropolitan Museum in New York was actually one of the most important bequests of modern art ever made to that institution. But I don’t know whether Natasha Gelman was aware of it, but I’m quite sure that Diego Rivera was very aware of the sexual connotations of these lilies. A series of works by Georgia O'Keeffe from the 1920s that are very appealing to me, I suppose ‘cause I’m what the Germans would call I’m a big city person. I’m never happy away from the centre of the city. And I adore New York. I think New York is just for me. I react, when I go to New York, I react to the architecture of New York, the way the romantics reacted to the mountains of the Alps. I have this sense of awe and thrill when I’m in New York, and this certainly comes across, I think in this amazing series of skyscrapers. Very deco, aren’t they? There is this aspect, I mean, if you want to, I don’t think you can really pigeonhole any of the three artists I’m talking about tonight, but if you wanted to, you could say that there is an art deco aspect to these works. And here is, of course, a famous art deco illustrator, George Lepape, left hand side, who worked for Vogue using a very similar image of New York skyscrapers at night. And Tamara de Lempicka, when she arrived in New York in 1929, just before the Wall Street crash, and she was very thrilled by New York skyscrapers and used them in a similar way in the background of some of her portraits.

So the relationship with Alfred Stieglitz was quite a troubled one. I mean, he was a compulsive womaniser, serially unfaithful, and Georgia O'Keeffe went through a kind of crisis and then their relationship lasted until his death. But from 1929 onwards, they were frequently living apart. And she spent a large part of the year in southwest in New Mexico. This is her mountain, as she puts it. It’s rather as It was Suzanne’s mountain. This is Cerro Pedernal. I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly. Somebody will correct me, I’m sure. And she said about it, “It’s my private mountain, it belongs to me. "God told me if I painted it, I could have it.” And here is one of her paintings of it. And again, I feel that, as with the flower paintings, these landscapes of the southwest of United States are very anthropomorphic. Perhaps, you’re just going to say, oh, that’s Patrick. He’s just obsessed by these things. But I see the contours of a woman’s body in these hills and, in that sense, they’re very similar to the south downs, the hills where I spent my early childhood in Sussex that have these gentle, I think, rather feminine contours that were celebrated. This is Edward Burra on the right hand side, and this is Eric Rubius. So I feel a strong sense of the human body, particularly the female body in the curves of these hills and landscapes. Another series of Georgia O'Keefe, which is very famous, are of the skulls, ox skulls and so on. And these, I think relate her to surrealism.

Surrealism is a movement that was launched in the 1920s in Paris. By the thirties, again, it’ll become a major international movement. And I’m quite sure she was very aware of it. And here’s a Magritte, for instance. I mean she would’ve seen, certainly seen reproductions of Magritte’s in art magazines. And his work was exhibited in New York. And again, this is a work, to me, by Georgia O'Keefe that has a surreal quality to it. And two more of these skulls. Now, my last artist, this is Grant Wood. He’s born in 1891. He’s quite short-lived, he dies in 1942. This is his self-portrait on the left-hand side. And he called himself a regionalist. And so, he feels that he wants his art to express the character of where he grew up, where he lived, which was in, he grew up in Iowa. You can’t get more rural than that, I suppose, in the United States. And this picture on the right hand side is, of course, his most famous picture. “American Gothic”, was actually his sister who posed for the woman and his dentist, who posed for the man. And we can, again, we might be tempted to make up a story. What is the relationship of these two? His sister who survived him, maintained to the end of her life, that it was father and daughter, not husband and wife were represented in this picture. In fact, of the three artists I’m talking about tonight, I think Grant Wood is the one who is most easily related to what is going on in the art world, generally around the world. And it’s in the 1920s in the interwar period, there is a neorealism, you can find it everywhere. You can find it in Italy.

You can find it in England. You can find it in France. And particularly, of course, oh, here is the, this again, iconic image. And, of course, rather like “Nighthawks”, it’s been endlessly imitated and parroted. So he also went to, everybody went to Paris. It was the mecca of the art world, particularly for Americans. I mean, rather, as in earlier centuries, everybody had to go to Rome, in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century, you had to go to Paris. And he certainly, he looked at Impressionism, but he was untouched by it. He was actually much more interested in what were then called the Flemish primitives, the precise technique, the BDI of Yan Vanna and the marriage of Arnold Feeney, that you see on the right hand side. And oh, yes, as I said, there’s this neorealism probably the most interesting version of it is the German version, up until 1933, which is dubbed new objectivity or new realism. And I think this makes a rather fascinating comparison. Grant Wood and the Christian Schad, these are paintings that are almost exactly contemporary and they’re both expressing a reality. There’s the reality of the American Midwest on the left, and there is the reality of Weimar, Berlin. So a big contrast, of course, between rural and urban. And many rural subjects. And he will certainly have been very aware of Barbisan paintings, Miers with this theme of wanting to be close to the earth and the idea of planting things and growing things. So Miers, top left, Grant Wood, bottom right. And a sort of magic evocation, magical evocation of rural life and timeless rituals of the country, of planting things, growing things, harvesting things and so on. Again, Grant Wood. And, as I said, you can find parallels between his art and what’s going on in Europe at the time. This is an English artist, John Nash, on the right hand side. I don’t know whether, again, these two artists actually knew each other, but there is certainly a very striking resemblance in their work. Right, I’m going to go into the questions and see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

It’s Clive and Bonnie, went to Chicago Museum to see “Nighthawks”. Oh, it’s so frustrating when that happens. It’s happened to me many times when you go to see a particular painting and it’s gone off on its travel somewhere else.

So it’s pronounced Henry rather than Henri. Thank you.

Q: What period were Japanese prints you showed?

A: Well, the ones I showed you are actually all from my own collection 'cause I happen to have them, the images nearby and they’re by an artist, all the ones I showed you, are by the artist Yoshitoshi. So the second half of the 19th century.

Who did Hopper, I don’t think he actually, what normally happened when you went to Paris was that you could enrol in one of these places like the Academie Colarossi or the Academy Julian, so that you could use the models. But I don’t think he was seriously enrolled with a particular artist. PBS, somebody else told me that there’s a feature on Hopper, that his wife’s colourful paintings influenced the introduction of, I don’t think that, well, she couldn’t. She was certainly very important in his life and she modelled for him and I’m quite sure she does deserve a lot of the credit, but I think he was always a wonderful colorist even before he met her. So I don’t think you could, it’d be a bit of an exaggeration, I think, to say that colour was introduced into his work because of her. But she may have encouraged him to develop that side of his art.

Q: Was Hopper lonely in his private life?

A: He was very happily married, but I can’t tell you whether he was otherwise lonely or not.

Q: Did Hopper use photography to distil his subject matter?

A: There is a very photographic quality to some of the work. My guess is that he may have used photos, but, as I said, artists love to cover their tracks, especially in the 20th century. Artists are not always upfront about their use of photographs.

Q: The Hopper painting of the woman with her back to the bedside showed a woman with muscularity in her shoulders and arms, was this intentional?

A: I’m sure it was intentional. I don’t know if he was making a particular statement. In fact, I mean most of his women’s have, you know, they, they’re quite, they, of course, shoulders were very fashionable. You know, women emphasised the shoulders in the 1930s. Think of Joan Crawford.

Like Walter Sickert two? Yes, I think, as I said, I think there are interesting parallels. Whether they knew each other, I couldn’t say.

Q: This is Shelly. How would I compare the melancholy and alienation of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” with Hopper’s “Nighthawk”?

A: They’re quite, they are different, aren’t they? They’re very different because I mean the “American Gothic”, those two people are really engaging with the viewer even though they give us quite a cold, wary stare. But they are actually interacting with the viewer. So I think it’s actually different from Hopper.

This is Margaret. She agrees that several of Hopper’s paintings suggest a story. I found the same in the latter paintings by Vermeer. Yes, I think that’s interesting. Good, I bet he knew because Vermeer was already very, very famous. I’m sure he looked at Vermeer and was influenced by him. I could have developed that maybe. It’s said that Hopper was influenced by Albert Hitchcock’s black and white movies, I think. Yes, yes, indeed.

Ron, I did say that. There was a very, very good exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. It must be about 10 years ago now on Alfred Hitchcock and the fine art influences on his films. And Hitchcock was very interested, of course, in painting. Large windows and lots of corner properties. That’s really interesting, isn’t it? Yes. I need to think a bit about that. The corner, you’re so right, there are so many images of corner properties.

Q: And this is Nikki saying, I’ve seen a few Hoppers at galleries and there’ve been small scale. Did he ever paint large?

A: I think no. Well, I think the answer to that is no, not as far as I know.

Q: Did he use a sketchbook?

A: Yes, I’m sure he did. Ellie, thank you very much.

You have a love-hate feeling about Hopper’s work. Well, that sounds interesting. At some point, I’d love to have that discussion with you. Of course, when you do a very intense, and when you’re doing research on an artist and you can become obsessed by the artist, it’s quite easy to develop a love-hate relationship.

Yes, Hitchcock certainly did reference Hopper. Hopper and Magritte. As I said, I see more of a relationship between Magritte and Georgia O'Keefe. But I did consider, do you know there’s that famous early painting Magritte of a sex murder where the criminal, you’ve got the detectives coming in and he’s listening to a gramophone record and they’re going to catch him. And I did think of showing that because I think it has a quite Hopper-like quality, that painting. Many of the landscapes, gas station, captain’s houses, lighthouses, are seen from actual places within a few miles of his home in Truro, Massachusetts.

Q: What do I make of Hopper’s use of straight lines and squares and his bleak paintings?

A: Yes, I mean the paintings, you could make a good comparison, again, with Vermeer and with Peter de Hook in the way the paintings are often constructed in straight lines and rectangles. An exhibition of Judy Chicago at The Serpentine this summer.

Probably not, Ruth. I mean, I remember seeing a big show of Judy Chicago many years ago in London and I liked it, but it’s probably not my kind of thing to talk about. And you’re saying that her flowers look like Chicago’s flowers. What is the paper on the ground next to the reclining woman? I’d have to go back and have a look at that.

Q: How can you say O'Keefe is not really an abstract painter?

A: No, you don’t have, it is not like you, she’s not a realist, but she’s almost never an abstract painter. You can say that there is a tendency to abstract. That’s another thing altogether, that there’s an element of abstraction in her painting, but they’re nearly always representing something. They’re not abstract pictures.

Thank you, Carrie. A much disputed allegation. Yes. That’s a whole other story. No, I didn’t mention it in this lecture, of course, I did a lecture on Walter Sickert some months ago and I think he was just winding people up. He liked, you know, you met him at a party and he’d say, “Oh, I know more "about those Jack the Ripper murders "than I’m going to tell you.” He liked to pretend that he knew about them.

Victor, Bernard, I totally disagree with you. I don’t find Grant Wood boring. I think they’re wonderful. I particularly like those landscapes.

Q: Why is she not the mother of modern painting in the USA?

A: Well, for the reason I said, really, that she’s her own woman. She’s not somebody you can pigeonhole and she’s not a sort of mainstream person. And I don’t think she really, I mean, she’s an utterly individual artist and I don’t think she had a lot of influence, actually, on other American artists.

So this is Rose who knows more about, she says the marriage was not happy, that she was and, of course, there’s a very interesting parallel there with Bonard and his wife. But it doesn’t mean to say just because she was intensely jealous and she was his only model, doesn’t mean to say that the marriage was not happy.

This is Herbert. Stieglitz was my wife’s aunt’s uncle and when she was in university he asked her and her roommate to pose nude. Her aunt wouldn’t, but her roommate did and was immortal. Yes, good for her. It’s good to be immortalised. In “American Gothic”, the prongs of the fork are represented in the pattern of the man’s shirt and also in the top window in the background. There’s quite an abstract element there actually in that picture. It’s also abstracted. It’s not abstract.

Q: Do I think Hopper influenced Hockney?

A: Yes, probably, yes. You know, when you think of that period where he, the Californian swimming, they have a certain deadpan quality that is quite Hopper-esque. I’ve done a lecture on but not for lockdown. I quite frequently lecture on He’s one of my absolute favourite artists. I’ll have to negotiate that one. It would have to fit into the plan of the lectures.

And this is Linda. Part of my docent training at the High Museum in Atlanta, we studied the Henry painting. Regarding the pronunciation of his name, it’s Henry, as odd as that sounds. Apparently, Henry’s father, a wealthy man was accused of murder in some financial dealings. As a consequence, Henry Jr changed the pronunciation of his name to create distance. So it’s Hen-rye. Henry Rye. It’s not Henry. I’m sorry, I’m just reading it. So I-N-M-H-O, American art went through a very dull period at this time. It wasn’t till abstract expressions.

I don’t agree with you at all. We’re not going to agree, Bernard, I’m sorry. And actually, I find the abstract expressionists mostly very boring and pretentious like Willem de Kooning and Rothko. But you can have the rest of them, as far as I’m concerned. Hopper, probably influenced by Richard Deen as well.

Do the dates, do they match up? And I agree with you, Ellie, not dull at all, a transition reflecting various aspects of American life. Good, well, it’s good that we can disagree and not fall out over it, I hope. And it will be a little while before I speak to you again 'cause I’m with a group of Australians. I’m looking after them for the next two weeks, so it’ll actually be in two weeks time that I do my next lecture.

Thank you all very, very much and goodbye for now.