American Masters: "Hopper: An American Love Story" (M&C Media and Exhibition on Screen, Seven Arts Productions, American Masters Pictures, Center for Independent Documentary, Thirteen Productions, Inc., WNET Group, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 13) my husband Charles returned home from work in time to join me in watching an American Masters PBS-TV special on the artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) called “Hopper: A Love Story.” The love story in question was between Hopper and his wife, fellow artist Josephine Nivinson. Hopper was born in Nyack in upstate New York to middle-class parents who frequently took him the 40 miles to New York City and experienced its culture, including galleries, musea and Broadway shows. Born relatively short, Hopper experienced a growth spurt just before his senior year in high school, which ironically made him the target of bullying. (As someone who spent much of his school years wishing for a spurt in growth so I wouldn’t be bullied for being too short, I thought that’s in the “be careful what you wish for, you might get it” category.) Hopper was drawn to art and never wanted to do anything else with his life, though in his early years he made his living as a magazine and poster illustrator and hated every minute of it, particularly the constraints under which illustrators labored and the lack of any real creativity. In 1913 Hopper’s parents sent him to Paris to study, but they insisted he live in a church-owned building to protect him from the bad habits other would-be artists fell into in Paris, including alcohol, drugs and casual sex with “loose” women. Hopper had a weirdly one-sided relationship in Paris with a woman named Alta Hilsdale, who literally kept putting off his requests for dates in letters formally addressed “Dear Mr. Hopper” in which she repeatedly wrote she was way too busy to see him. (The “Dear Mr. Hopper” salutation should have been enough to make clear to him that she kept him firmly in the “friend zone,” as we would say today, and wasn’t at all interested in him as a romantic or sexual partner.) Hopper also made it clear in later years that though he lived in Paris at a time when successive revolutions had shaken the art world – Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism – his own work remained resolutely representational and he said he’d never heard of Picasso until he returned to the U.S. in the early 1920’s.

Hopper alternated between Glouscester, Massachusetts (where Nivison also lived and the two became art partners before they started dating and became a life couple as well) and Greenwich Village, New York City. As his style evolved he specialized in urban scenes, often of people in dead-end middle-class jobs, riding subways, sitting in lonely hotel rooms, or – in his most famous painting, Nighthawks (1942) – at an all-night diner. When he wasn’t working, he would either read magazines or watch movies, and the show argued that Hopper’s work and the film world influenced each other. It cited a painting he did of an old house in Gloucester, House by the Railroad (1925), as the alleged inspiration for Norman Bates’s seedy ancient abode in Psycho (1960) – though the house in Psycho was a pre-existing old set on the Universal backlot that Hitchcock just pressed into service, and all he had built were the rows of motel rooms behind it. The narration for this film, written and directed by Michael Cascio and Phil Grabsky, also said Hopper was particularly influenced by Delbert Mann’s Marty (1955) and Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), though bizarrely they called Strangers on a Train “early Hitchcock.” It was actually made at the mid-point of his career between his first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), and his last, Family Plot (1976). The film touched on the problems faced by straight two-artist couples like Hopper and Nivison, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: the woman’s career tended to get overshadowed by the man’s (though in the case of Rivera and Kahlo their relative reputations have flipped since their deaths: today “Frida” is a feminist icon and Rivera rather humbly trundles along in her wake). It’s arguable that Nivison was at least potentially a more interesting painter than Hopper; there’s a fascinating scene in the film in which two paintings they both did of the same scene in Gloucester are shown side by side. They’re clearly of the same subject, but Nivison’s color palette is much brighter and (to me, at least) more interesting than Hopper’s.

It’s also fascinating that Hopper “froze” his style relatively early and there’s little difference between his New York urban landscapes from the 1930’s and those from the 1960’s. One of the “talking heads,” National Gallery of Art curator of American paintings Franklin Kelly, says of Hopper in the film, “[H]e's going one place and he did it and he did it brilliantly. But in terms of the tree of art history, of modernism, Hopper’s line really doesn’t go anywhere. It’s its own line.” Just as Hopper’s art in his Paris years had ignored the revolutionary developments of the age, so Hopper in New York and Gloucester remained resolutely representational at a time when the American art scene in the 1950’s was dominated by Abstract Expressionism (though some of the Abstract Expressionists, notably Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, either cited Hopper as an influence or referenced him in their early paintings), which in the 1960’s was similarly dethroned by Pop Art. Hopper was never a prolific painter – he would work for about a month or so on a single painting, though once he finished he would ship it to his dealer within a day or two instead of letting it sit in his studio for weeks or even months – and only 366 of his canvases are known to exist. One of the “talking heads” in the documentary criticized Hopper for his political obliviousness and the fact that he ignored “[t]he ‘new Negro’ movement beginning, really, kind of burgeoning in Greenwich Village, the protests that would have been happening through the '50’s and '60’s. It's just almost comical for me to imagine Hopper still in his button-down at his easel when you have this great, like, bohemian culture happening right outside the window. And it's not really reflected in the work.” It’s also worth noting that just about all the people in Hopper’s paintings are white; he either ignored or failed to register New York’s incredibly racially diverse population. And yet Hopper’s work has survived and even thrived in American popular culture; Nighthawks in particular has been endlessly parodied (including by Turner Classic Movies, whose artists replaced the anonymous figures of Hopper’s original with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean) and referenced by, among other people, singer-songwriter Tom Waits, who called one of his albums Nighthawks at the Diner in honor of the painting.