Photo: Edward Hopper, Summertime 1943. Oil on canvas. 74 x 11.8 cm. Courtesy of Delaware Art Museum. Gift of Dora Sexton Brown 1962

Carolyn Bandel went to see a retrospective of one of America’s greatest modern painters, Edward Hopper, on show at Tate Modern until September 5.

Looking at a Hopper painting is much like watching a still frame shot from Hitchcock’s Psycho on the VCR.

There is an inanimate house by a railroad, lonely and in eerie solitude. A large portion of the actual house is missing, there are no surroundings except the train tracks. The painting has a sense of abandonment. Its shadows give the house an ominous dark presence.

Upon further inspection, the sad house looks more like a place to die than a place to live. So it’s not surprising that this painting, House by the Railroad (1925) provided inspiration for the house of horror in Psycho.

Photo: Edward Hopper, Excursion into Philosophy 1959. Oil on canvas. 76.2 x 101.6 cm. Private Collection

All the primary moods of classic film noire are present in Hopper’s paintings: melancholy, alienation, disillusionment, ambiguity, disenchantment, offering simply a moment of frozen time and leaving the viewer to embroider their own narrative.

Though his paintings seem frozen filmic fragments, they tell a complete story at the same time, mainly that of what it meant to be alive in the middle of the 20th century.

Photo: Edward Hopper, Morning Sun 1952. Oil on canvas. 71.4 x 101.9 cm. Courtesy of Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Museum Purchase, Howald Fund

Hopper is famous yet hardly known. His isolated figures in diners and seedy motels and his apartments glimpsed through windows at night are widely loved and published, yet how many have seen Nighthawks, Hopper’s most published painting, face to face?

There hasn’t been a Hopper exhibition here for 20 years but Tate Modern is making up for lost time with its latest exhibition entirely devoted to the American artist. The show covers Hopper’s entire career ranging from his iconic paintings, which have been absorbed into popular culture to a selection of watercolours, drawings and etchings.

New York born Hopper (1882-1967) was encouraged by Robert Henri, his teacher at the New York School of Art, to visit Paris. He did so between 1906 and 1910. But it wasn’t the contemporary avant-garde who drew his attention. "Whom did I meet? Nobody. I’d heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don’t remember having heard of Picasso at all," he later admitted.

Instead Hopper makes us think back to Manet and Degas, Pissaro, Sisley, Monet and Cézanne. His early work even reminds us of Vermeer.

Photo: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks 1942. See below for full caption.

Hopper found structure late. Until 1924 he was a bit of an artist and a bit of a commercial illustrator and for a while gave up painting entirely. However, at 42, Hopper’s professional fortunes changed and his second solo show was a sell-out.

By the 1930s Hopper had become extremely well known, he was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s second exhibition and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York bought his Early Sunday Morning - its most expensive purchase up to that time, even though it was the Depression.

Photo: Edward Hopper, Office at Night 1940. Oil on canvas. 56.4 x 63.8 cm. Courtesy of Collection Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis. Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, Gilbert M. Walker Fund 1948

Part of the appeal of Hopper’s work lies in its distinct voyeuristic flavour. "His interest in portraying the isolated figure reappears throughout his work," explains Sheena Wagstaff, curator of the exhibition at Tate Modern.

Automat for instance is a painting in which little appears to be happening. A woman sits idly in a launderette, staring into space. Hopper doesn’t tell you what the people in his paintings are thinking, nor what you should think.

In his later work Hopper became the voyeur himself when he painted rather obvious sexual fantasies. Though he only painted his wife Jo (she wouldn’t allow him to paint other models), the ageing process she went through doesn’t show in the sometimes naked, sometimes suggestively dressed women.

Photo: Edward Hopper, Self Portrait 1925-3. Oil on canvas. 64.1 x 52.4 cm. Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest

The Tate’s retrospective shows all of these aspects of Hopper. His cinematic approach, his obsession with light and shadow, the psychological tension and of course Nighthawks, the epitome of the sad desolation of suburbia. The best thing though is that every work is given enough space, enough space for us to contemplate.

Hopper was endangered of becoming a bit like the spectators of his paintings, present yet excluded. But Tate Modern has saved the day with a truly great show.

Captions

Photo: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks 1942. Oil on canvas. 84.1 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago. Friends of American Art Collection, 1942 © 2004 The Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved