William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

1997

Bathers at La Grenouillère

Picasso, it is intriguing to note, did not like Monet’s work, particularly the famous water lily sequences, the Nymphéas , painted towards the end of his life. He found it insubstantial, flimsy, perhaps even pretentious. Picasso was clearly reacting against Monet in order to find and determine a place for his own work, to create a taste by which he might be appreciated (just as Monet and the other Impressionists had reacted against the confining Beaux-Arts classicism that preceded them).

Of course, it is possible, if you are determined to be prejudiced, to be “against” almost anything, however universally admired, and, if one adopts Picasso’s standpoint and considers his own contribution to twentieth-century art, one can understand the thrust of his reservations. For a painter obsessed with structure and physicality the suggestibility and sheer airiness of Impressionism, with its concentration on the fleeting and iridescent, might indeed make it seem somewhat incorporeal and vacuous. However, I have always thought that Monet’s painting Bathers at La Grenouillère can stand as a particularly redoubtable response to this line of attack.

First of all, while the painting seems to be prototypically Impressionist in subject matter, two factors make it less obviously generic. First it is a painting of shadow rather than sunlight — deep shadow too, its dominant tones are blues, browns and greens, not yellows, lemons or creams — and, second, it is anything but ethereal in treatment. Although more than half the painting is water it is rendered with a solidity and plasticity that, I dare say, Cézanne would have been proud of. True, the painting is a sketch, a study, presumably for a larger more “finished” painting that was never completed, and the boldness of the individual brushstrokes might not have survived in anything more worked up, but the thick smears of paint, the broad slashes of impasto recall the uncompromising way the Fauves applied pigment to their canvases — and Fauvism was still three decades or so away from 1869 when Monet’s painting was executed. That such thick, dark oil paint can look like rippling light-freckled water is part of the individual magic of this painting; and that a palette so subdued, so positively sombre, can summon up all the luminous ambience of a riverine scene is testimony to a talent and a painterliness that are remarkable. Even a pusillanimous Picasso might have had grudgingly to concede that, sometimes, Monet could do no wrong.

1998

Notes Towards a Definition of Edward Hopper

1. In December 1946 Edward Hopper showed a picture in the Whitney Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. The show was reviewed by Clement Greenberg — champion of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism — and he had this to say: “A special category of art should be devised for the kind of thing Hopper does. He is not a painter in the full sense; his means are second hand, shabby and impersonal … Hopper’s painting is essentially photography and it is literary in the way the best photography is … Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.” Greenberg’s facile nonsense is almost entertaining here — a fine example, as Chekhov saw it, of the critic as horse-fly bothering the quietly labouring artist—“buzzing,” Chekhov called the irritating noise, as if the critic were saying: “See, I can buzz too, buzz about anything.” But in the midst of Greenberg’s self-satisfied buzzing he is actually on to something. Hopper is, as anybody can see who has looked closely at the body of his work, a superb painter. He was also an excellent draughtsman, a dramatically innovative etcher and a watercolourist of fantastic ability. Compared to Jackson Pollock, for example — whose draughtsmanship is awesomely inept — Hopper’s talent is out of sight. Hopper was such a good painter that he deliberately decided to make his paintings look as if he were a bad painter.

2. There is a Hopper chalk drawing of his wife, Jo Nevinson Hopper, sitting on a bed, her knees raised with her arms loosely folded around them. It is a study for the painting Morning Sun (1952). The figure is surrounded by little scribbled notes that Hopper has written to himself. “Legs cooler than arms,” “cool reflections from sheets,” “cool blue-gray shadows,” “very light reflected light,” “warm shadows in ear,” “thighs cooler,” “light against wall shadow,” “brownish warm against cool,” “cool half-tone,” and so on. Light, cool, shadow: conceivably the absolute verbal reduction of a Hopper painting. But on this small drawing there are over twenty such memoranda: powerful evidence of the acuteness of his eye, his awareness of minute nuance. The painting itself is of a woman in a pink peignoir sitting on a sheeted bed staring out of a window on to a truncated cityscape. Only the top of a small terraced row of brownstones is visible and above them is a large expanse of washed-out blue sky. Through the open window morning sunlight streams, casting a wide panel of light on the featureless wall to the side of the bed and illuminating the pensive woman. Yet the finished painting is virtually without detail, its illusionary three-dimensionality (its depth-of-field) more notional than precise, giving the picture its trademark Hopperian stage-scenery feel.

3. A few random facts. Edward Hopper was an avid reader: according to his wife he “drank print.” He suffered from “chronic boredom” which often prevented him from working. He was also six feet five inches tall. Hopper was born in 1882 so by the time he left art school in 1905 he would have been fully grown. In the early twentieth century a man who was six foot five would be regarded as freakishly tall. For a self-conscious, shy individual such marked loftiness would have a significant effect on one’s comportment, on one’s self-consciousness and one’s attitude to fellow human beings. Some of Hopper’s reclusive, taciturn nature must be due to this fact: nobody likes to be stared at in the street, after all. Few artists have spoken less about their work but it’s significant, I think, that Hopper painted a picture of an isolated multi-storeyed apartment building and entitled it for a while as a “self-portrait.” He also strongly identified himself with the lighthouses he painted so often.

4. As a young man Hopper made three trips to Europe. In 1906/7 he spent some time in Paris (from October to August) and also visited London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. In 1909 he spent another four months in Paris (April-July). In 1910 he went to Paris, Madrid and Toledo during a short trip that began in May and ended on 1 July. When he returned to New York in 1910 it marked the end of his transatlantic voyages and he never left the USA (apart from the odd trip to Mexico) again. All in all he spent just over a year in Europe, most of it in Paris, but he was also drawn to Spain. Paris is a beautiful and memorable city and while he was there Hopper painted in what might be termed a recognizable post-Impressionist style. Yet his most remarkable painting of this early period is Soir Bleu (1914). A painted clown, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, sits on a cafe terrace attracting no curious stares from the other recognizably French drinkers around him. An American in Paris? A portrait of the artist? Whether it is or not, this painting is linked to the mature style both in mood and method. Hopper was a late developer: he sold his first painting at the age of thirty-one. His name was made with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. He developed his visual style and manner in his early forties and for the next four decades nothing really changed.