Robert Henri and the eight apostles of ugliness – Part 1

Although viewed by hundreds of thousands of Americans, the Armory Show of 1913 created a backlash against the modernist movements in art and stirred a jingoistic response for a return to realism, theretofore the dominant form, in the US. Edward Hopper is one of the better-known artists who emerged from the Ashcan School, “a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in poor urban neighborhoods” (1). In fact, he studied under Robert Henri, an original member of “The Eight” founders of the Ashcan School (1). Hopper practiced American Scene painting, focusing largely on the loneliness of city life as his subject matter. He has often been compared to his contemporary in realism, Norman Rockwell, but while Rockwell’s work seem more of an homage to the values that Americans hold dear, such as family and patriotism, Hopper’s works possess a darker bent, centralizing on what the artist himself referred to as the “hideous beauty” of America (2). Since most of his work is from the post-depression era, it is easy to draw conclusions about the harshness of lessons learned as an influence in his choice of subject matter.

Between 1913 and 1923, Hopper was a commercial illustrator, and indeed his paintings often bear an illustrative quality, apparent in his use of bright colors in the foreground juxtaposed with darker ones in the background, as is often seen in comic books. Despite his several trips to Europe, he brought home little of the teachings of modernism, exhibiting only minor nods to Impressionism, sometimes evident when “the outlines of the buildings and their windows are too anomalous and wavering to qualify as true realism,” and to Expressionism in “details like the heavy gesture and painterly coloration ofwalls” (3). These are the sort of differences that set him apart from artists such as Rockwell; Hopper painted in a realistic style, but he acknowledged other movements without truly practicing them.

“The unique brilliance of Hopper’s paintingslies in the hyper-accessible ambiguity of his narratives. Each work implies a narrative history” (3); in plainer English, Hopper’s paintings are open to interpretation while remaining free of visual clutter. Everything before you on the canvas is simple and recognizable, but there can be a number of different scenarios applied to whatever mini-drama is being enacted, and even those scenarios