By Deborah Weisgall


In 1914, Edward Hopper was living in New York earning a living as an illustrator and not painting much. A friend suggested that a summer in Maine, where Hopper’s teacher Robert Henri and his friends and classmates Rockwell Kent and George Bellows had been going for several years, might do him good. Hopper went to Ogunquit and started working again; he finished six major paintings. Over the next fifteen years, he spent nine summers on the Maine coast: in Ogunquit, Monhegan, Rockland, Pemaquid, Portland, and Cape Elizabeth.

(Dories in a Cove (1914) - Licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper.)

"Edward Hopper’s Maine," a fascinating exhibition now on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, gathers almost all of the watercolors, drawings, and oils Hopper made during these summers. Some, like his Monhegan oil sketches, which he painted between 1916 and 1919, have rarely been exhibited. Others — his stark, sun-washed lighthouses — are what we think of when we think of Maine.

The exhibition, co-curated by the museum’s director, Kevin Salatino, and Diana Tuite, the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the museum, tracks how Hopper slowly emerged, how he found his solitary subjects, images tinged with loss, in places that had been painted and interpreted by generations of artists. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Maine’s landscape represented an American ideal of the sublime — the grandeur of pristine nature; cliffs and ocean were metaphors for a fierce, boundless sense of possibility. By 1914, Henri and Kent and Bellows had painted powerful and compelling modernist versions of this ideal on Monhegan.(Two Lights Village (1927) - Fitchburg Art Museum, Massachusetts  1974.4)

After that first summer, Hopper put one of his new paintings, called Road in Maine, in a group show. A dirt road curves around an ordinary outcropping: no vast sea, no dangerous surf, no virtuosic brushwork, just bright light, deep shadow, the wind riffling a hayfield — and three telephone poles, jarring and inevitable punctuation marks on the landscape. The painting got mixed reviews.

But Hopper went back to Ogunquit the following summer with Henri and Bellows, and in the summer of 1916 he moved out to Monhegan. Following Henri’s advice, he hiked all over the island carrying his paints and small wooden panels; thirty sketches survive from those four summers. Hopper painted the cliffs and surf, but he was not interested in Henri’s drama, Bellows’ raw power, or Kent’s cool immensity.

Hopper painted shapes, not movement, as if he were working to still the action. He experimented with thick brushstrokes, laying on colors like patchwork; he plunked down impenetrable, improbable shadows and thick wedges of spume. Some of these sketches are wild, representations of a state of mind more than of a landscape. Their energy doesn’t seem to connect to his subjects as much as to the possibilities of the medium: to what he could achieve with paint.

As exciting as they are, the paintings feel abstract and distanced from their subject. It seems, as Carol Troyen writes in her excellent overview in the exhibition catalogue, “as though geometry rather than nature was his core concern.” In New York, Hopper only exhibited a couple of his Monhegan paintings and never sold any of them.
(Dories in a Cove (1914) - Licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper.)

But by the time he returned to Maine seven years later, Hopper was painting with watercolor, and critics had compared him favorably to John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer (who had also begun his career as an illustrator). Hopper had achieved success, and he had found his subject. It was not nature, but something like what he was getting at in his Road in Maine: evidence of human habitation on the landscape. He was drawn to roads and telephone poles; he sought outdated Victorian houses and commercial fishing boats.

In the summer of 1926, he bought a car and drove all the way to Eastport, but the town didn’t have what he wanted. Maybe the Lubec lighthouse was striped, the domestic architecture too plain; maybe it was too remote for his wife, Jo, whom he’d married in 1924. The Hoppers turned around and stopped in Rockland, where George Bellows had spent time two decades before.

Hopper stayed at Mrs. Acorn’s boarding house, and he painted her cluttered parlor. He used autumnal colors, the orange of maple leaves, oak-leaf brown, purplish shadows. Pattern runs amok on the rug and upholstery; antimacassars are rumpled like bed sheets; tipsy chairs and tables bump into each other like guests at a claustrophobic cocktail party. But the room is empty, the organ stool pushed back as if its player has just escaped.

It must have been similar to the parlor in the house in Nyack, New York where Hopper grew up. The watercolor is funny, sexy, and desolate.

(Lime Rock Quarry II - Collection of Kathy and Bruce Hornsby)

That summer in Rockland, Hopper painted roads and railroad crossings: the road a white void, the lines of iron rails fencing the viewer from the landscape. Transmission lines and their giant poles march across the field in the watercolor he named Civil War Campground. Hopper painted fishing trawlers, turning engines and winches into hulking constructs, altars to brutal labor. A trawler’s smokestack and a telegraph pole intersect in a skewed, industrial embrace — a gritty, sullied romance, and the ocean shrinks to a tiny pool of blue at the edge of the picture. A listing schooner, shredded lines fluttering from its brave, useless bowsprit, rots beside a boat shed.

Hopper painted the Talbot house — its Victorian ornament was considered ugly and outdated. He made its siding the color of the hazy sky and the baroque carvings over the shaded windows delicate as canvas awnings. Only the powerline to the attic and the orange chimney pillar anchor it to the ground. He drove out to the abandoned quarries ringing the city and painted gouged pillars of limestone as if they were monumental ruins, according them — and not Monhegan’s famous cliffs — reverence and grandeur.

In Rockland, Hopper painted harsh light and eroding wind, absence and a devalued past. He put no people in the paintings, although he did make some drawings featuring cows. The assurance of these watercolors is stunning. He chose surprising vantage points that thrust the viewer into the visual drama; he played with scale and perspective; he deployed his instinct for abstraction, the power of pure form and color, to give emotional weight to an ordinary scene.
(Maine in Fog (1926-1929) Licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, © Heirs of Josephine Hopper.)

Rockland in 1926 was Hopper’s proving ground; his work from that summer sold for high prices. He found in Maine images that resonated with what he called his own “intimate experience,” which coincided with a growing sense of a damaged America, of innocence lost. The year before, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby; the hero ends up dead in his swimming pool, dream destroyed, that green light a beacon of impossibility. Jake Barnes, in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, is rendered impotent by a war wound. Modernity came with a price. Steam-powered trawlers could ignore the wind, but the grid of telegraph wires shadowed the natural world.

In 1927 and 1929, Hopper stayed near Portland and Cape Elizabeth, not too far from Prouts Neck, Winslow Homer territory, and painted his great series of lighthouses, watercolors and oils that powerfully expressed this new mood. For a century, artists in Maine painted lighthouses as signs of reassurance, the wilderness tamed. Even Rockwell Kent’s lighthouses were beacons guiding sailors home, warning of danger, marking a safe haven. But Hopper’s lighthouses and keepers’ houses, his fog horn stations, promise isolation, physical and emotional.

Often he painted them with his back to the shore, facing inland — looking inward, not outward, eliminating the ocean. He constructs the buildings from oblique light and deep shadow, and even the squat, ungainly Coast Guard station on Cape Elizabeth becomes austere and beautiful despite itself. Hopper fills his paper with the concrete bases of the lighthouses and cuts off the tower halfway. In a watercolor of Pemaquid Light, fissured cliffs obscure the lower half of the buildings, too.

(Foreshore – Two Lights (1927) - High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Purchase with Henry B. Scott Fund 59.39

Only one image contains figures, four faceless men (tourists?) looking out to an empty sea. No ships on the horizon, not even a rowboat — there is nothing left for the lighthouses — or their heroic keepers — to do. Indeed, by 1929, many of these lights, including one of the Two Lights, had become automated or decommissioned.

In some of the watercolors from those last summers in Maine, Hopper seems to have come full circle. On his own terms he nails subjects he attempted fifteen years earlier: rocky coves, breaking surf. Now, using watercolor, he catches light and wind with fluid, almost abstract washes. His low vantage points invite the viewer in, but he blocks that intimacy with enormous boulders in the foreground.

In one watercolor, Foreshore—Two Lights, a lighthouse painting with no lighthouse, Hopper seems to be, as Kevin Salatino says, “channeling Winslow Homer.” Homer’s indigo ocean, black-green rocks, swirling surf, and lowering sky: but no yellow-slickered sailor rows his dory into the waves. Hopper tells no story, suggests no possibility; he paints only his private, bleak, and haunting truth.

IF YOU GO: "Edward Hopper’s Maine" is on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick through October 16. 207-725-3275. bowdoin.edu/art-museum