Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2002

Fear of the city 1882–1967: Edward Hopper and thediscourse of anti-urbanism

Tom SlaterDepartment of Geography, King’s College London, Strand Campus, London WC2R 2LS, UK

This paper traces the extent to which some of the major cityscape representations of theAmerican ‘Realist’ painter, Edward Hopper, have contributed to the production andarticulation of the discourse of anti-urbanism in American culture. Following an introduc-tory background to this discourse, the paper discusses the development of Realism inAmerican art, and how the urban representations that emerged were a response to therapidly changing, early twentieth-century American city. A brief biographical account ofEdward Hopper is presented to explore the intertextual in�uences behind his anti-urbansentiments, and how these translated into the unique form of Realism for which Hopperis renowned. This sets the stage for a reading of four key Hopper works that are suggestiveof the anti-urban discourse: Night Shadows, Nighthawks, Approaching a City and Sunday.The powers of representation and the artist’s popularity have fed into the discourse ofanti-urbanism—a discourse that has a material effect on urban life in America.

Key words: discourse, anti-urbanism, cityscape, Edward Hopper, representation.

Introduction

But when in American history has there not been afear of the city … ? (Kazin 1983: 14)

In their seminal work on the intellectual rootsof American anti-urban discourse, Morton andLucia White observe that

enthusiasm for the American city has not been typi-cal or predominant in our intellectual history. Fearhas been the more common reaction. For a variety ofreasons our most celebrated thinkers have expresseddifferent degrees of ambivalence and animosity to-ward the city. (1962: 1)

The ‘celebrated thinkers’ to which they referinclude Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emer-son, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe,Henry James, Frank Lloyd Wright and LewisMumford. The writings of these individualswere seen to have left America with a ‘power-ful tradition of anti-urbanism’ (White andWhite 1962: 3), a legacy of distrust, suspicionand prejudice towards urban areas which wasinstalled and strengthened by frequent refer-ences to the joys of nature and the moralsuperiority of rural life. As Beauregard (1993:14) argues, anti-urban sentiment has its originsin the introduction in large American cities of‘values and practices antithetical to those held

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/02/020135–20 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/14649360220133916

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and followed by people living in rural areas’.The burgeoning system of capitalist accumula-tion in the nineteenth century and its manifes-tation in widespread industrialization andintense urbanization was viewed with dismayby subscribers to traditional rural values, whosaw the cities as places which encouraged a‘severing of the ties to those basic human val-ues that provide the foundation of a moralexistence’ (Beauregard 1993: 15). A negativediscourse of the city, which began with thepastoral musings of Thomas Jefferson and wasfurthered signi�cantly by the transcendentalcontemplations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, grewstronger and became embedded in social lifethrough powerful representations of urbanmalaise in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, art and social the-ory. Far from being celebrated as signs ofindustrial and economic progress, Americancities were often viewed as dirty and disease-ridden arenas of degenerate, immoral and cor-rupt behaviour, the exact and unruly oppositesof small town and rural America, and thereforeplaces which middle-class Americans would bewise to avoid for their own well-being.

It was to this body of anti-urban sentimentthat European social theorists such as Ferdi-nand Tonnies and Emile Durkheim deliveredtheir classic studies of the social and psycholog-ical effects of rampant urbanization (Knox1994: 267–269). While it would be incorrect todescribe their immensely in�uential and diverseperspectives on the changing patterns of sociallife in the city as anti-urban, it would beequally incorrect to downplay the role they hadin reinforcing anti-urban sentiment. Tonnies’selaborations of the impersonal and super�cialhuman associations of an urban gessellschaftsociety, the opposite of community (gemein-schaft), coupled with Durkheim’s plaintive pro-jections of the urban condition of anomie andthe deviant behaviour which might accompany

social isolation and confusion, added fuel tothe legacy of urban fear left by Emerson,Thoreau and the transcendentalists. The ideasand attitudes of the sociologists may have dif-fered, but their writings on what can happen tosocieties and individuals when cities expand didlittle to reverse the tide of anti-urban thinkingwhich had penetrated the public imagination,even if the city was not always portrayed as thedemon it was made out to be by those whocame before them. Blended together, this is theresult:

The city was seen imaginatively as the heart ofcontemporary darkness, a secular Hell—temptation,trap and punishment all in one—exciting, rich inpotentiality for the ambitious, threatening to theweak, destructive of traditional mores, creator ofnovelties, of anonymity, breeder of the pervasivemodern diseases of anomie, alienation and ennui, ajungle of brick, stone and smoke, with its greedypredators and apathetic victims, its brutal indiffer-ence to either communal value or individual feeling.(Nochlin 1971: 151)

Many would argue that these anti-urban sensi-bilities have not disappeared from Americanculture, and much of this is due to the impactof images of dystopia we see in a variety ofmedia, cinematic, literary, artistic and photo-graphic representations of the American city.Davis (1998: 276) points out that Los Angeleshas been destroyed 138 times in various motionpictures since 1909, and a look at recent moviesset in New York such as Seven (1995), Clockers(1995), Sleepers (1996) and The Bone Collector(1999) would suggest to the public that the cityis a place of violence, suffering, crime and �lthwhich should be avoided altogether. This iscon�rmed by Janet Abu-Lughod, who pointsout the following with reference to thedystopian �lms set in New York:

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A cursory survey of �lm titles highlights recurringthemes: death, terror, stranger, phantom, wrongman, wrong number, lost, no way out, screaming,crying, alone, dark corner, victim, strangers, killer,double life, silence, shadows, crime, jungle, middleof the night, naked city, force of evil. (1999: 184–185)

Lees and Demeritt (1998: 335) provocativelyterm this anti-urban discourse as ‘Sin City’,something ‘only ever realised discursively,through powerful and materially productivepractices of representation’.1

In this paper I will look at some of the worksof the quintessential American ‘Realist’ painter,Edward Hopper (1882–1967), to examine theways in which this immensely popular artistrepresented the city, speci�cally New York,and assess how far the poetics and politics ofrepresentation (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987)—or what Barnes and Duncan (1992: 5) refer toas ‘the cultural practices of signi�cation’—havecontributed to the production and reproductionof the discourse of anti-urbanism in Americansociety. The words of White and White ade-quately summarize the impetus for this paper:

Not only has the anti-urbanism of our intellectualtradition directly in�uenced the popular mind, butthe tradition has probably had an even greater effecton ordinary Americans as it has been transmitted bywriters who �ourish somewhere between the highestreaches of our culture and the popular mind. (1962:203)

I am interested in how anti-urbanism has beentransmitted not by a writer but by an artistwith a huge following, whose paintings areoften seen as crystallizations of American land-scapes, values and society at the time theyappeared. However, I argue that the meaningsconveyed by Hopper’s art are not bound to anytime period; they live on through the legacy of

anti-urban sentiment by which he wasin�uenced and to which he contributed. Acloser reading of his portrayals of city life isnecessary for a fuller understanding of suchsentiments past and present. To provide thenecessary theoretical framework for a consider-ation of Hopper’s work, I will begin by convey-ing and unpacking some of the complexity ofthe term ‘Realism’ in the visual arts, beforeexploring some biographical material on theartist to demonstrate the dawning of his anti-urban feelings and how they translated into hisunique brand of Realism. The discussion willthen proceed into a reading of four key Hopperimages, before concluding with some com-ments on how work along these lines might bea useful and productive way of tracing andperhaps eradicating unfounded urban fearsthrough sensitive and thorough attention toartistic representations of the city.

Realisms, representation and the city

A newcomer to the term ‘realism’ is faced witha bewildering array of meanings and concepts,and realism has consistently escaped tidy andsimple de�nition. On one hand, this is due tothe many different forms of Realism2 withinarts and literature (Social Realism, BaroqueRealism, Photo Realism, New Realism and soforth), and on the other, the agonizingly com-plex history and nature of the philosophy, the-ories, methodology and practice of realism inWestern scienti�c thought. In human geogra-phy, engagement with realist philosophiesreached a peak in the 1980s, but as Cloke, Philoand Sadler (1991: 134) observed, there wasconsiderable suspicion that some realist workwas ‘founded on a less than full recognition ofits complexity’ and that this led many authorsto fall into a trap of ‘subscribing to the realistposition in name but not in nature’. This is the

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�rst of two reasons why realist approachesdeclined in number and signi�cance during the1990s. The second reason has been neatly cap-tured by Derek Gregory in his entry on realismin the most recent edition of the Dictionary ofHuman Geography:

[O]ne needs to remember that ‘realism’ refers notonly to a twentieth century philosophy but also to amode of representation in the visual arts and litera-ture which was particularly prominent in Europeand North America in the nineteenth century. This isnot to say that realist philosophies require a realistaesthetics—they almost certainly do not—but simplyto note that the attentiveness to theoretical workwhich realism succeeded in making so important foranalysis during the 1980s was, in the next decade,extended to equally searching theoretical re�ectionon description . (2000: 675; emphasis in the original)

Gregory is referring to the ‘crisis of representa-tion’ that has been a central concern of muchhuman geographical inquiry since the culturalturn of the discipline. Realism as a philosophyof science was invaluable to the development ofa more sophisticated understanding of the waysin which space is a key determinant in thestructuring of social relations, but as timeschanged and post-structural sensibilities grewto question such structuring through its blur-ring of the boundaries between representationand reality, material and discursive, realismwas nudged into the sidelines and ‘its starseemed to wane’ (Gregory 2000: 675).

One purpose of this essay is to consider howan engagement with Realism(s) in the visualarts, as opposed to realism as a philosophy ofscience, could inform cultural geographersseeking to understand and describe the materialworld through the discourses embedded withinartistic representations of cityscapes. While thesame undercurrent of a ‘real’ world of physicalthings existing independently of our senses and

perceptions is central to both artistic and philo-sophical forms of realism, there is much that isdifferent about these forms that is well beyondthe focus of this essay. It is the historicalfoundations of artistic Realism in the nine-teenth century, and how these fed into earlytwentieth-century American Realism whichwas prevalent when Edward Hopper began hiscareer, which provide an appropriate startingpoint for the analysis of his art.

Many people look at a Realist work of art,describe what they see as ‘realistic’, and with-out any questioning of the scene they have justobserved think ‘that is how it is there’. Arthistorians, however, would be quick to informus that this is naõ¨ve, and that Realism is farmore complicated than simply a copycat image:

The commonplace notion that Realism is a ‘styleless’or transparent style, a mere simulacrum or mirrorimage of visual reality, is another barrier to itsunderstanding as an historical and stylistic phenom-enon. This is a gross simpli�cation, for Realism wasno more a mere mirror of reality than any otherstyle. (Nochlin 1971: 14)

For Nochlin, the aim of Realist painting was‘to give a truthful, objective and impartial rep-resentation of the real world, based on meticu-lous observation of contemporary life’ (1971:13). Throughout her landmark survey of nine-teenth-century Realism, Nochlin reiterates theRealists’ desire for verisimilitude, and that theircommon tendency to see things ‘as they were’was ‘inseparable from their general beliefs,their world, their heritage and the very qualityof what they were divesting themselves of andrebelling against’ (1971: 51). Gustave Courbet,perhaps the most famous Realist of all, oncewrote that

painting is an essentially concrete art and can only

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consist of the presentation of real and existing

things. It is a completely physical language, thewords of which consist of all visible objects; anobject which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, isnot within the realm of painting. (quoted in Nochlin1971: 23)

It is hardly surprising then, given the preoccu-pation with the physical, that many nineteenth-century Realists often chose to document thebuilt environment of the city. Rarely, however,did Realists present us with close-ups of urbandwellers and the minutiae of social life within ametropolis. The classic nineteenth-century Re-alist depiction of the city is from a distance, thecityscape or vista, which precludes moral com-ment on the people within the city, and bolstersthe notion of the Realist as a spectator of urbanlife rather than a more involved participant init—something which had a profound in�uenceon the city views of Impressionists such asManet and Renoir (Nochlin 1971: 168–169).

Realist representations of the city were noless plentiful at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, but they took a quite different form totheir nineteenth-century antecedents. TheAmerican ‘Ash Can’ School of painters, some-times referred to as ‘The Eight’, were a groupof urban Realists who had worked as illustra-tors for Philadelphia news journals before ar-riving in New York to study with theportraitist Robert Henri. The cityscapes ofartists such as John Sloan, George Bellows andEverett Shinn produced between 1900 and 1913were notable for their tendency to deploy thewide panoramas of the nineteenth-century Re-alists, but with far more attention to urbansubjects and the crowded spaces of the trans-forming metropolis that surrounded them. Thiscould have been a critical reaction to someImpressionist work, where people were oftenreduced to mere brush strokes because of thevery distant perspectives employed by the

artists. According to Prendeville (2000: 24), itwas Bellows in particular whose paintings‘most programmatically ful�l Henri’s injunc-tion to his students to paint the life [my empha-sis] of the modern city, implicitly that of itspoor and immigrant communities’. Bellowswas perhaps the chief reason why the paintersof the Ash Can School came to be called the‘New Realists’. What was new was a celebra-tory commitment to painting ‘ordinary’ peopleliving en masse within the city, or as Prendev-ille puts it, a sustained attempt to portray ‘thecity’s physical substance uniting with the hu-man life it contains to comprise a commonmaterial, a social fabric’ (2000: 31). Ash Canartists did not shun earlier forms of Realism;they too were concerned with the quest for‘truth’ and were equally as meticulous in theirattention to detail and rejection of abstraction,but the tenets of nineteenth-century Realismwere re�ned and extended to provide a frame-work for an increased sensitivity to the humanaspects of unprecedented urbanization. Whilenot as concerned with social inequities andurban injustice as the Social Realists of the1930s, the Ash Can artists’ lasting in�uence isthe uni�cation of the physical and the humanin the urban milieu.

Douglas Tallack’s suggestive essay on theattempts of the Ash Can School to represent arapidly changing New York is notable for itsargument that the artists within the Schoolwere so caught up in an effort to ‘know’ thecity that they often chose ‘�ctional’ points ofview from which to document their manythoughts and impressions derived from being‘caught up in the routines of the city’ (2000:30). Thus the social fabric which Prendevilleposits is, to Tallack, an amalgam of differentscenes blended together into one representationof ‘an urban environment which threateneddefeat for individuals and groups who couldnot get some epistemological grasp on it’ (2000:

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26). It was this ‘threatening’ urban environ-ment that saw the permanent settlement ofEdward Hopper in 1910. Hopper studied withRobert Henri from 1902 to 1906 at the NewYork School of Art, which has often led toerroneous associations of Hopper with the AshCan School (the fact that George Bellows wasa classmate of Hopper’s adds to the confusion).Hopper’s Realism, however, is unique, and aswe shall see later in four of his paintings, verydifferent from that of the Ash Can painters,and also different from the overt displays ofsocial concern and political protest of 1930sSocial Realists such as Reginald Marsh andPhilip Evergood. The reasons for Hopper’s id-iosyncrasies can be discerned from some bio-graphical material, to which I now turn.

Edward Hopper

[T]o understand … representations fully we mustknow something about the context of its authorsand audience. (Barnes and Duncan 1992: 4)

Great art is the outward expression of an inner lifein the artist, and this inner life will result in his [sic]personal vision of the world. (Edward Hopper 1953,quoted in Hobbs 1987: 64)

This paper began with some comments on theantipathy towards urban places common toAmerican intellectuals (Beauregard 1993; Kazin1983; White and White 1962). Hopper was alsoa man of great intellect, somewhat of a reclusewho spent a lifetime reading poetry, literature,drama and philosophy, absorbing what helearned from books and observed from life, andapplying it to canvas. His childhood was spentin an upper-middle-class Dutch settlement nearthe Hudson River in New York State, a worldaway from the expanding metropolis to thesouth where he would make his name and live

permanently from 1910 to his death in 1967.The roots of his approach to the city can beseen in a compelling discussion of his child-hood by Gail Levin (1995a), who shows us thatthe place in which he was raised was one wherenature, community, religious education, patri-otism and duty were seen to lead to a ‘solidmoral existence’. However, the author pointsout that the 1890s, the decade of Hopper’sadolescence, marked ‘the passage from thestrong moral principles of rural and small-townAmerica into the beginning of urban and indus-trial development that eroded the traditionalways of life and produced growing alienation’(1995a: 12). Levin identi�ed this period as theroot of the con�icts that Hopper lived through-out his life:

All his life Hopper felt acutely the con�icts betweentraditional and modern, rural and urban, Americanand foreign ways. He would return to explore themagain and again in his work. (1995a: 111)

Crucial to the development of Hopper’s atti-tude towards the city were the writings ofRalph Waldo Emerson and Henry DavidThoreau, two individuals who were known fortheir dislike and distrust of city life in favour ofromantic notions of the entwinement of hu-mans with nature, and with whom Hopper feltclose intellectual af�nity (Schmied 1995: 10).On Emerson, Hopper once told an interviewer‘I admire him greatly. I read him a lot. I readhim over and over again’ (quoted in Hobbs1987: 65). Levin (1995b: 109) believes Hopperheld Emerson in such high esteem that he‘sought to express the Emersonian vision bytransforming reality into art’. White and White(1962: 30) call Thoreau’s classic Walden [1854]a ‘bible of anti-urbanism … The values it es-pouses are essentially those of the isolated indi-vidual, living in nature and free of socialattachments’. This is interesting, for most of

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the people in Hopper’s urban paintings areisolated individuals who appear out of place,detached from the city both socially and spa-tially as it changes around them, and seeminglybewildered by the threat to ‘nature’ posed bythe built environment (Hobbs 1987; Lyons1995). Thus the concept of intertextuality inartistic representation—that texts draw onother texts which are themselves based on yetmore texts (Barnes and Duncan 1992: 2)—be-comes clearer and credible when consideringthe works from which Hopper drew inspi-ration. Another writer who harboured an ap-proach to the city to which Hopper could relatewas Henry James, whose The American Scene(1907) was full of negative portrayals of a NewYork placed in cultural opposition to Europeancities, not least because James had been absentfrom America for a quarter of a century. Hop-per spent his early twenties in Paris, which hedescribed to be ‘very graceful and beauti-ful … after the raw disorder of New York’(quoted in Levin 1995a: 279), and the yearJames’s book was published was the same yearHopper returned to New York from Paris.Levin informs us that The American Scene wasavidly consumed by Hopper as it viewedmodernity and urbanization with suspicion,and returning to New York after a lengthyabsence made rapid urban change all the moretangible and unsettling to the artist (1995a).The appearance of skyscrapers in New York’scityscape was seen by James and then Hopperas representative of encroaching, unwelcomemodernity—a theme which is never far from aHopper painting and usually depicted withtrepidation and uneasiness. Take the followingobservation, again by Levin:

He [Hopper] rarely represented skyscrapers at all,and when he did, he reduced them to fragmentaryglimpses or intrusions on the cityscape … His recur-rent visual ironies on the manifestations of modern

life suggest his highly ambivalent attitude toward thechanges occurring in twentieth-century society; it ishis profound alienation from contemporary life thatmakes his art so characteristic of modernity itself.(1995a: 229)

Hopper lived through a time of continuouschanges to the cityscape, and changes in theneighbourhood where he lived, Greenwich Vil-lage, were as profound as in any area of thecity. Hopper was dismayed by the ‘crushing ofWashington Square’ by the erection of tallbuildings around the park which he saw as‘huge coarse and swollen mounds—blunt,clumsy and bleaching the sunlight with theirdismal pale yellow sides’ (Levin 1995a: 247).Such signs of unruliness and dislocation wereserious violations of all that he had beenbrought up to believe, that humans should bein harmony with nature and situated awayfrom anything which would disrupt this mostVictorian, even puritan, way of existence. Theworkings of modernity were antithetical to aman who disapproved of social and structuralchange, of overcrowding, of disorder. In fact,one wonders why he wanted to live in such aheavily populated area at all after reading theremarks of his long-suffering wife, Jo:

Ed is anything but a social being and he won’tbother himself with people at all. He’s not a bit niceand gracious to the people I’ve introduced himto—people we meet on the street—he won’t goanywhere to meet any of my friends. (quoted inLevin 1995a: 177)

Although not an outright misanthrope, Hopperwas a deeply private man lost in the worlds ofhis art and his passion for reading. He lived inNew York City for most of his adult life, yet itis hard to �nd a Hopper painting where thiscity is celebrated or loved, or presented withany optimism. Much of this arose from his

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observations of social life in New York duringthe inter-war years of Prohibition and De-pression; strikes, unemployment, protest, pov-erty and uncertain futures had a profoundeffect on his vision of the city. Hopper sawwhat could happen to a city when its growthwas explosive, when its economy collapsed,when some of its people were left behind andstruggled to make sense of the transformingworld in which they lived.

How, then, do all these in�uences andchanges translate into the unique form of Re-alism for which Hopper is renowned? Broadlyde�ned, Hopper’s urban work is a twentieth-century joining of nineteenth-century transcen-dentalist beliefs with nineteenth-centuryRealism’s tendency to document and interpretcity scenes in a relentless quest for a hidden‘truth’. The products are far from convivial‘stills’ of the American city that evoke senses ofloss, loneliness, alienation and despair—mournful commentaries on the unhappy ma-terial consequences of rampant, erosivemodernity. Hopper scholar Robert Hobbs elab-orates:

Seen by themselves, these stills are mysterious andhaunting. They evoke a desire for the rest of thenarrative, and they powerfully convey the break-upof the storyline, the disjunction that is characteristicof modern life. In this manner they awaken in theviewer a desire for the whole, and thus elicit feelingsof isolation and loss. The feelings of lonelinessexperienced by viewers of Hopper’s art … comefrom the fact that a continuum has been broken.The machinery of industrialism is no longer operat-ive, and the illusion of progress as a motivating lifeforce is no longer believable. By stripping modernlife of its illusions of momentum, Hopper leaves hisviewers isolated; he shows the breakdown of tra-ditional spiritual underpinnings in the modern worldand reveals a poverty of a society that has forsaken

a meditative calm for a frenetic view of progress.(1987: 18)

Hopper’s besmirchment of the entire modernage attracted attention because it appealed tothe anti-urban imaginings of much of middle-class America. His work struck a chord withAmericans seeking to express their nostalgicyearnings for past times and places:

Hopper presents glimpses of private lives of quietdespair lived within the public arena. And thoughmuch of his art is centered on the failed relationshipsbetween people or the alienation of people fromtheir environment, Hopper can also get an almostinexplicable sense of yearning and loss … Some ofhis appeal may lie … in the desire to see somethingAmerican, and by inference, something virtuous, in alandscape that now only exists in small remnants.(Lyons 1995: xiii)

The American landscape idealized by Emerson,Thoreau and their many followers was erodedby modernity’s leading edge of urbanization,and in the visual arts it is the work of EdwardHopper that documents this process with themost regular and solemn introspection. Perhapsit is Prendeville (2000: 79) who provides themost precise summation of Hopper’s Realismwhen he states that the locations the artistdepicts are ‘in-between’ places, which ‘we arefamiliar with yet not at home in’.

With this highly abbreviated summary of hismain in�uences and select character aspects inplace, I now want to look at four of hiswell-known pieces, Night Shadows (1921),Nighthawks (1942), Approaching the City(1946) and Sunday (1926) as examples of repre-sentations of the American city as a place ofisolation, fear and loss. They are paintingswhich are suggestive of the anti-urbanism men-tioned throughout this discussion, and theirpopularity has perhaps served to uproot the

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discourse within the spaces of the artwork andsend it away from New York, intensifying theanti-urban sensibilities that have pervadedAmerican culture for so long.

Night Shadows

Night Shadows (1921, see Figure 1) is at �rstglance a simple sketch of a lone �gure advanc-ing along a deserted sidewalk under astreetlight, a somewhat innocuous, gritty anddreary image that does not warrant immediateintellectual scrutiny. However, if we pay closerattention to the meanings and messages be-neath the image, or ‘textualize’ the streetscapein order to view it as ‘a signifying systemthrough which a social system is communi-cated, reproduced, experienced and explored’(Duncan 1990: 184), Night Shadows becomesas eerie as its title suggests. The contrast be-tween the areas under the streetlight and theshadows caused by the presence of the cornerstore is particularly striking, showing Hopper’stendency towards using different degrees oflight to enhance the threatening, alienating pos-tures of buildings, and how they separate the�gures in his scenes from the worlds in whichthey �nd themselves. The �gure in the image isanonymous and mysterious, a night-timewalker with a large shadow doubling the men-acing effect of the unknown. Rolf Renner ob-serves that the shadow of the streetlight postcutting across the brightest area ‘generates anunmistakable sense of menace … as if theman’s walking route were taking him beyond adivide and into a danger zone’ (1990: 41). Thedramatic juxtaposition of darkness and light,the former used to legitimate the ‘norm’ of thelatter and strengthen the comfort and safetythat comes with a sense of the familiar, perhapshints at Hopper’s suspicious and cautious ap-proach towards urban places.

Hopper scholars have commented on thehigh viewpoint of Night Shadows, suggestingthat it is the most important factor in thegeneration of the painting’s haunting mood,‘creating a sense of tension that is almost cine-matic in its effect’ (Levin 1995b: 117). Hopperwas a frequent patron of cinema and theatre(Levin 1995a; Lyons 1995), and much of thiscan be seen in his ‘stills’ of New York, wherehe ‘achieves an effect akin to that of a trackingmovie camera whose frame impassively unitesits contents’ (Prendeville 2000: 79). The divid-ing shadow of the streetlight post leaves us onthe edge of our seats, wondering what the nextframe will be. Where is the pedestrian going?Why is he there? What will happen to him?What is around the corner in the darkness? AsPrendeville neatly summarizes, the emptiness ofHopper scenes ‘illustrates what is generally thecase: rather than imagining situations, hispaintings offer spaces for imagination’ (2000:79). The anti-urbanism in Night Shadows iscommunicated not so much by what we cansee, but by what we cannot see—that which isleft to our imaginings, to which the pedestrianis approaching. Hopper thus follows a trend innineteenth-century Realism, where paintings‘were socially in�ammatory not so much be-cause of what they said … but because of whatthey did not say’ (Nochlin 1971: 46). The sim-plicity of the sketch, nothing more than light,building and �gure, bolsters this effect, lendingclarity to a simple yet stern suggestion thaturban spaces at night are to be approachedwith caution. Along these lines, Hobbs (1987:50) shows the power of the discourse embeddedwithin the scene when he argues that the ‘ordi-nary nature of the buildings and street endowsthe work with poignancy since it suggests thatdrama could occur anywhere in the UnitedStates’. The time of day and the anonymity ofboth �gure and location conspire to send ananti-urban message away from where it was

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Figure 1 Night Shadows. Edward Hopper (1921). Etching. Reproduced with permission of the SanDiego Museum of Art (Museum purchase through the Edwin S. and Carol Dempster Larsen Memorial

Fund).

produced, tapping into an American imagin-ation already imbued with unruly images ofwhat lurks in cities at night.

Nighthawks

Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneli-ness of a large city. (Edward Hopper, quoted inLevin 1995a: 349)

A New York night is once again the setting forHopper’s most famous work, Nighthawks

(1942, see Figure 2), and once more the appar-ent simplicity of the painting masks its hiddendiscursive undercurrent. Hopper contestedthose viewers who looked beneath the surface,saying that the work showed little more than ‘arestaurant on Greenwich Avenue where twostreets meet’ (quoted in Renner 1990: 80), butthere are some key indicators that help us togenerate disquiet in a scene which has a calmsurface appearance, and thus situate the com-position �rmly within the anti-urban mould.Like Night Shadows, it is a scene of contrasting

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qualities of light, but this time between insideand outside. The only light for the emptystreets comes from within the restaurant, am-plifying the motif of darkness outside and in-tensifying the painting’s communication ofloneliness. Nowhere is this more effective thanin the darkness behind the couple at the coun-ter, which sits uneasily with the restaurant’sbland cream interior and its glaring lighting.Hobbs contends that it is the use of light thatis responsible for the mood of the entire scene:

Circular in form, this building is an island thatbeckons and repels; and the �uorescent lighting isintimidating, alienating, and dehumanising. It cre-ates an unreal and arti�cial feeling of warmth, anatmosphere that is clinical and more in tune with alaboratory than a restaurant. (1987: 129)

There is contrast within the restaurant too—the third character at the counter with his backto us, nearest the street, seems more in tunewith outside than inside relative to the others,and less of an extra on a deserted stage, per-haps because of his positioning and solitude.This creates a sense that the couple facing usare alienated from their surroundings, literally‘out of place’ in a space which stands for littleother than isolation.

Hopper was fascinated with cinema, and it isno coincidence that Nighthawks was painted ata time when the �lm noir genre was beginningto penetrate American public discourse. Levin(1995a: 408) notes that the genre’s ‘potent dra-matic scenes and generally pessimistic outlookon life appealed to Hopper’, and the Hoppercity has much in common with the noir city asarticulated by Frank Krutnik’s subtle referenceto Marx:

Dark with something more than night, the noir cityis a realm in which all that seemed solid melts intothe shadows, and where the traumas and disjunc-

tions experienced by individuals hint at a broadercrisis of cultural self-con�guration engendered byurban America. The noir thrillers replace the cer-tainties of It’s A Wonderful Life with a more nu-anced, more disorganized, much bleaker vision.(Krutnik 1995: 99)

Krutnik brilliantly reveals how �lm noir em-bodied and fed the anti-urban sentiments ofmovie-goers through its depiction of cities asdisorderly, diseased, corrupted, dark, abysmal,threatening, and most relevant to this essay,‘curiously empty’ (1995: 91). While many ofHopper’s urban representations could be stillsfrom a noir thriller, it is in Nighthawks wherereferences to the noir city can be discerned withmost ease—the strong theatrical light, the curi-ously empty streets, the mysterious �gure withhis back to us, the dark, forbidding spaces ofthe corner and buildings behind the diner. Thetitle of the painting also suggests noir themes ofpeople preying on others in the dark spaces ofthe unsafe city. The interlocking scripts ofalienation, isolation, loneliness, fear and asuggestion that something disorderly might oc-cur outside immediately generated a sympath-etic response from art critics and the publicalike—the painting was soon recognized as animportant American artefact and sold to theArt Institute of Chicago soon after its com-pletion, where it remains today. Nighthawksalso demonstrates a technique which Hopperused again and again in his work. He couldhave painted a far more threatening city, withmore dubious characters, with litter on thestreets, signs of crime, more suffering—yet herefrained, preferring to avoid extremities andthus suggesting, as he did with Night Shadows,that these scenes might be around the corner byway of the emptiness of the cityscape. Anempty city at night, captured at standstill, isalways more threatening, more sinister, than ananimated or extreme portrayal of urban fears.

146 Tom Slater

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Fear of the city 147

Figure 3 Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Gottfried Helnwein (1987). Reproduced with kind permissionof the artist.

Nighthawks is one of the most famous paint-ings in the history of American art, full of theanti-urban messages which pervade Americanpublic discourse. It has received numerousadaptations, underscoring its in�uence and thesympathetic response of the public to the ‘noc-turnal urban disquiet’ it communicates (Levin1995b: 115). Among the more famous of theseis the 1987 poster of the Austrian artist Got-tfried Helnwein (see Figure 3). This parody isinteresting for the characters that Helnweinchooses to occupy the diner in place of Hop-per’s anonymous �gures. James Dean,Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and ElvisPresley are American icons whose private liveswere as tragic as their public lives were remark-able, and all four of them can be seen toembody the Hopper theme mentioned earlier, of

‘private lives of quiet despair lived within thepublic arena’ (Lyons 1995: xiii). It says muchabout the mood of Nighthawks that thesecelebrities all had lonely lives and tragic deaths,and were isolated from the world around themthroughtheiradulationandstatus.Theworldout-side the diner is the arena in which the dreamsof these celebrities and their followers werebroken, and in this interpretation the diner canbe viewed as providing Hobbs’ ‘unreal andarti�cial feeling of warmth’ (1987: 129), a briefrespite from the world that ultimately defeatedthem. By placing four American icons into anicon of American art, Helnwein opens upNighthawks to closer iconographic inspection,exposing the symbolic meanings of the paintingto cement its position as a landmark of twenti-eth-century anti-urbanism.

148 Tom Slater

Approaching a City

I’ve always been interested in approaching a big cityby train; and I can’t exactly describe the sensations.But they’re entirely human and perhaps have noth-ing to do with esthetics [sic]. There is a certain fearand anxiety, and a great visual interest in the thingsthat one sees coming into the city. (Edward Hopper,quoted in Levin 1995a: 388)

The ‘fear and anxiety’ to which Hopper re-ferred when approaching a city by train wereexplored in another popular composition, Ap-proaching a City (1946, see Figure 4). Hoppershowed a connection to earlier Ash Can Re-alism when he referred to this work as ‘impro-vised memories pieced together’ (Levin 1995a:388), and the painting certainly has the broad,wide-angle lens vista of the urban Realist tra-dition, but what is different from earlier Re-alism is the complete absence of a humanelement to the city. Here is a landscape thatwas created by humans, but from which theyare now absent—is Hopper commenting thatwhat they created is in fact unliveable anddehumanizing? The scene is suggestive of iso-lation, of emptiness—we are presented with ableak, deserted cityscape that creates, yet again,a mood of loneliness. Street life is eliminated bythe high wall bordering the rail tracks—again,we are left wondering and imagining what canbe in the spaces beyond the frame we areviewing. What is it that Hopper has omitted,and why? Part of the appeal of Hopper’s worksand, it could be argued, of many negativerepresentations of the city, is their tendency topose questions which only the viewer can an-swer. As Hobbs (1987: 70) says with referenceto the artist’s later works, their success ‘de-pends on the way viewers are forced to leavetheir seats and perform the roles he has scriptedfor them’. The city is presented as static, await-ing our attention, everyday life freeze-framed

into a mournful world of lament at the modernage and its material expression in rampanturbanization. The viewer is left intrigued as towhy the artist chose to ignore the millions ofpeople involved in such rapid development andbustling ‘progress’—the sea of humanity whichone normally associates with New York. Hop-per’s New York, as shown in Approaching aCity, is a dormant place which people haveeither abandoned or not yet graced with theirpresence. When questioned about this recurrenttheme of his cityscapes, Hopper replied ‘I don’tknow why [I do this] except that they say thatI am lonely’ (quoted in Levin 1998: 6).

The architecture shown in the piece makes asigni�cant contribution to this mood—thebuildings are bland in colour, stained withpollution, especially the industrial colossus thatdominates the picture, and the rooms withinthe buildings are devoid of both light and life.The rail tracks dive into a tunnel that disap-pears from view; for Hopper, city life did nothave a light at the end of the tunnel. Instead weare left with the impression that approaching acity is all about entering darkness, uncertainty,a world where human warmth, nature andemotion are swallowed whole. We are ac-corded a glimpse of blue sky, but the in�uenceof nature is shut out by a scene which isdominated by the built environment—the lat-ter, as in all of Hopper’s city portraits, defeatsthe painter’s transcendentalist attachment tothe former to leave us with a scene that ishaunting for both its inhospitability and itsplaintive musings on urban life (or lack of it).Time, like space, is also suspended—nothing isapproaching the city other than the viewer, andthere is little in this scene that gives grounds foroptimism or excitement as we approach. Theeerie silence of the scene, rather, fosters varyingshades of unease in our approach—tension,trepidation, tentativeness.

Fear of the city 149

Figure 4 Approaching a City. Edward Hopper (1946). Oil on canvas. Reproduced with permissionof The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Sunday

Figure 5 shows a solitary man in contemplativemood sitting in front of a store. Hunchedforward and appearing bored and disconsolate,it is a forlorn and lonely scene which againdeals with themes of emptiness, isolation andloss. Although the man is shown on Sunday,his day of rest, the store behind him is empty,lacking window displays or any other sugges-tion that it is ever open for business. We areleft wondering if this is the storeowner, hislivelihood in tatters, who is living his life inperpetual Sunday, re�ecting on his losses andworrying about what to do next. While thepainting pre-dates the Depression, it is a por-

trayal of an individual bypassed by the opti-mism and opulence of the Jazz Age, someonestruggling to make sense of what has happenedto him and his business as the world haschanged around him. Hopper’s profound sus-picion of modernity is suggested by the nine-teenth-century storefronts—they have becomethe walls of a twentieth-century ghost town,and like the man who sits before them, relics ofan age which Hopper preferred, an age ofsmall, modest businesses and architecture of amore human scale.

While it could be argued that the paintinghas a ‘small town’ feel, it was in fact based onHopper’s frequent sojourns to the city ofHoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson

150 Tom Slater

Figure 5 Sunday. Edward Hopper (1926). Oil on canvas. Reproduced with permission of The PhillipsCollection, Washington, DC.

River from New York (Levin 1995a: 197).Levin documents that early reactions to Sundaywere notable for their tendency to describe its‘Americanness’ in both place and subject. Per-haps this is because the title has universalsigni�cance, or because the location isunidenti�able—this could be any city in theUSA. Most relevant to this discussion, perhapsthe Americanness comes from the depiction ofa city street that has come to exclude andalienate one of its residents. The storekeeper isleft helpless and idle, exhibiting vulnerabilityrather than con�dence by staring into a space

to which he no longer belongs, and the vieweris left almost wanting to console him. It is thisside of the painting which tells us much aboutHopper’s unique brand of Realism. The viewerbecomes more involved than in earlier Ameri-can Realism for two reasons. First, the city iscompletely devoid of any optimism, depressingrather than liberating, lamented rather thancelebrated; and second, city people appearemotionally weak and lost in their own melan-choly thoughts, detached from the worldaround them in a near-catatonic state. Is thisman socially isolated because he is suffering

Fear of the city 151

from Durhkeim’s condition of anomie? In astudy of the New York photographs of AndreKertesz, many of which have a Hopper themeof the individual imprisoned in the moderncity, David Seamon (1990: 48) follows Heideg-ger’s phenomenology to call this second reason‘presence-to-hand’, or ‘situations where wemeet the world as an entity separate from us,as a thing of concern’. The effect on the viewerof one Kertesz photograph entitled BatteryPark (1948), where two isolated �gures survey ableak view from a wintry wharf, is as follows:

Our attention moves to the solitary man and wesense a mood of melancholy and solitaire. Thebleakness of the weather, the isolated stance of thehuman �gures … evoke a feeling of loneliness anddraw us, the beholders, into this emotional sphere,while at the same time we look on, perhaps relatingthe scene to a similar moment in our own lives orimagining the inner situation of the man on thewharf. (Seamon 1990: 49)

While the form and content of the image is, ofcourse, different from Hopper’s Sunday, thereis much in Seamon’s analysis that is applicableto an iconography of Hopper’s cityscapes. InSunday, we certainly imagine the ‘inner situ-ation’ of the man on the boardwalk, how thecity may have fashioned that situation, andwhy this man appears to have been left behindby the optimism of the time. Again, a Hopperpainting provides spaces for imagination, notleast because it is concentrated Hopper—lonely, silent, re�ective, melancholy, empty.

Conclusion

As geographers, the textualized behaviour that con-cerns us is the production of landscapes; how theyare constructed on the basis of a set of texts, howthey are read, and how they act as a mediating

in�uence, shaping behaviour in the image of a text.(Duncan and Duncan 1988: 120)

Some time ago now, James Duncan and NancyDuncan (1988) argued that the ‘riddle of land-scape’ may be solved by viewing landscapes aspart of ‘discursive formations’.3 They con-tended that if we leave landscapes unques-tioned, then ‘concrete evidence about how asociety is organized can easily become seen asevidence of how it should, or must be orga-nized’ (1988: 123). For these pioneers in thecultural geography of visual images, the dis-courses embedded within landscape representa-tion are part of a system of social reproductionand regulation, and landscape needs to be re-read with a sensitivity to discourse if we are tounderstand and address the social and culturalimplications of forms of representation. In thisessay I have attempted to reveal and elaboratethe anti-urban discourse embedded within thecityscapes of Edward Hopper, but have saidless about the material effects of this discourseon American society. An appropriate con-clusion, then, is to consider how Hopper’swork might have contributed to the wider an-tipathy to cities which can be witnessed in theUSA, and how this antipathy is materialized ina negative approach to urban affairs.

The quotation that begins this concludingsection is particularly useful in thinking aboutHopper’s legacy. The texts on which his sceneswere constructed were anti-urban—Jeffersonand the pastoral ideal, Emerson and the tran-scendentalist imagination, Henry James andthe suspicion of modernity, �lm noir and thecity as empty, threatening and dehumanizing.Through this intertextual inscription of his ur-ban fears, Hopper offered his viewers spacesfor imagination, ensuring that ‘how they areread’ is usually a sympathetic mixture of yearn-ing for past times and things lost, and trepi-dation with which we view the urban arena

152 Tom Slater

where his lonely and mournful characters waitfor our attention. It is his isolated individualswho ‘act as a mediating in�uence’, as the be-holders can identify with and imagine theirloneliness, which then ‘shapes our behaviour’.We imagine that this is what the city does topeople—it alienates, excludes, diminishes oursigni�cance—and thus the city is now feared,avoided and vili�ed. Whether it was Hopper’sintention to tap into the anti-urbanism of hisviewers is open to debate, and indeed some-thing we may never know, but there can belittle doubt that Hopper fed the ‘Americanimagination’ (Lyons and Weinberg 1995) withthe anti-urban discourse that can be detected inhis art.

Gregory (1994: 11) de�nes a discourse as ‘theways in which we communicate with one an-other, … that vast network of signs, symbols,and practices through which we make ourworld(s) meaningful to ourselves and to oth-ers’. Following Habermas, Gregory argues thatsuch communications are context bound, ‘em-bedded in a particular here and now’ (1994:13), but shows that there has been little to stopdiscourses ‘travelling’ and disconnecting fromthe social and spatial contexts in which theyemerged. In this paper I have argued that Ed-ward Hopper made a signi�cant contributionto the production and dissemination of an anti-urban discourse, and it needs to be demon-strated that this discourse is not just developedin place but something which takes place awayfrom its context. As Henriques, Holloway,Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine (1984: 106) ar-gue, every discourse is ‘the result of a practiceof production which is at once material, discur-sive and complex’. The poetics and politicsunderpinning Hopper’s representations of theAmerican city are not con�ned to the image—adiscourse has emerged which informs others ofthe American city and the material effect of thisdiscourse is to shape attitudes towards urban

affairs. As far back as 1962, White and Whitestated that

[t]he fact that our most distinguished intellectualshave been on the whole sharply critical of urban lifehelps explain America’s lethargy in confronting themassive problems of the contemporary city in arational way. (1962: 200)

Thirty years later, Beauregard (1993) traced thediscourse of decline and reached a similar con-clusion, arguing that the sheer volume of nega-tive journalistic and intellectual representationsof city life was inhibitive towards a sensible,sustained agenda of tackling America’s urbanproblems. It is the central argument of thisessay that, through a unique form of urbanRealism, Edward Hopper has contributed tothe fear of the American city generated byother major �gures before, during and after histime. In a superb exploration of New York’sliterary history, Shaun O’Connell (1995) docu-ments an ambivalent attachment to the cityfrom the cumulative effect of two kinds ofwriting—those which show the place to be‘remarkable’ and those which show it to be‘unspeakable’. There is nothing remarkableabout Hopper’s New York—looking atNighthawks, unspeakable things may bearound the corner; Approaching a City is allabout a journey into unspeakable darkness,where Night Shadows rule and the streets al-ways seem to have the forlorn emptiness ofSunday.

‘Landscape’, argues Don Mitchell (2000:144), ‘is part of a system of social regulationand reproduction because it is always an insep-arable admixture of material form and discur-sive sign’. The lethargy in addressing urbanaffairs identi�ed by White and White (1962)still persists in America, and sustained atten-tion by cultural geographers to the materialeffects of discursive practices of signi�cation is

Fear of the city 153

important if we are to demonstrate that urbanrepresentations may not be indicative of anexternal reality, and that landscapes in factproduce and reproduce a ‘reality’ which in-hibits reform, obscures the positive aspects ofurban life, and augments the individual andinstitutional fear of the American city.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Leah Andrews and WinifredCurran for helpful comments on earlier draftsof this paper, and to Loretta Lees, James DeFil-ippis and Jennifer Hall for suggestions on �ne-tuning. Three referees provided some excellentcritical feedback, and Rob Kitchin’s advice andencouragement were invaluable. The usual dis-claimers apply.

Notes

1 So powerful, in fact, that negative urban images fromAmerica serve to legitimate urban reform in Canadiancities.

2 To avoid confusion, Realism in the visual arts will bepresented with a capital ‘R’, realism as a philosophy inlower case.

3 For a more extensive discussion, see Mitchell (2000:142–144).

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Abstract translations

Peur de la ville 1882–1967: Edward Hopper et lediscours anti-urbaniste

Cet article mesure en quoi certains des paysagesurbains du peintre «realiste» americain EdwardHopper ont contribue a la production et al’articulation du discours anti-urbaniste de la cultureamericaine. Faisant suite a un survol introductif dece discours, l’article examine le developpement duRealisme dans l’art americain et voit en quoi lesrepresentations urbaines en decoulant sont des re-ponses aux changements rapides ayant affecte lesvilles americaines au debut du XXe siecle. En vued’explorer les in�uences intertextuelles derrieres cessentiments anti-urbains et en quoi ceux-ci setraduisent en une forme de Realisme qu’on accordea Edward Hopper, je fais un court expose bi-

ographique du peintre. Ceci prelude a une lecture dequatre pieces cles dans l’œuvre de Hopper, soitautant d’exemples evocateurs du discours anti-ur-bain: Night Shadows, Nighthawks, Approaching aCity et Sunday. Le pouvoir des representations et lapopularite de l’artiste ont nourri le discours anti-ur-baniste—un discours ayant un effet materiel sur lavie urbaine aux Etats-Unis.

Mots clefs: discours, anti-urbanisme, paysage ur-bain, Edward Hopper, representation.

Temor de la ciudad 1882–1967: Edward Hopper y eldiscurso del anti-urbanismo

Este papel examina hasta que punto algunas de lasgrandes representaciones del paisaje urbano del pin-tor realista estadounidense, Edward Hopper, hancontribuido a la produccion y la articulacion deldiscurso sobre el anti-urbanismo en la cultura de losEstados Unidos. Despues de la informacion in-troductoria sobre este discurso, el papel habla deldesarrollo del Realismo en el arte estadounidense yde como las representaciones urbanas que salieronrespondõ´an a los grandes y rapidos cambios quetenõ´an lugar en las ciudades americanas a principiosdel siglo veinte. He incluido una breve historiabiogra�ca de Edward Hopper para poder explorarlas in�uencias õ´nter textuales detras de sus sen-timientos anti-urbanos y para mejor entender comoestos eran traducidos en la forma tan unica delRealismo por lo cual Hopper es reconocido. Luegohay interpretaciones de cuatro de las obras claves deHopper que ejempli�can el discurso anti-urbano:Night Shadows (Sombras Nocturnas), Nighthawks(Gavilanes Nocturnos), Approaching a City (Acercaruna Ciudad) and Sunday (Domingo). Los poderes derepresentacion y la popularidad del artista han lle-gado a formar parte del discurso sobre el anti-urban-ismo—un discurso que tiene un efecto material sobrela vida urbana en los Estados Unidos.

Palabras claves: discurso, anti-urbanismo, paisajeurbano, Edward Hopper, representacion.