These few contrasting examples -- Jacob Riis and Moses King, Stephen Crane and Frederick Howe, Henry James and Jane Addams -- illustrate the contest over the meaning of the city, which lay at the center of American self-awareness at the turn of the century. Where to locate Edward Hopper among these competing attitudes? Let me respond by returning to 1893 and the Columbian Exposition, where Frederick Turner gave that lecture on the frontier.

Several million visitors attended the fair in the six months it was open, dividing their time between the highminded exhibits in the main buildings and the earthier pleasures of the midway carnival. (The latter included Sam Jack's "Creole Show," and exotic dancer Little Egypt.) At a large display of recent American painting, fairgoers were asked to choose their favorite picture, and they selected Thomas Hovenden's Breaking Home Ties, painted in that climactic year, 1890.

Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties (1890)

Awash in sentiment, Hovenden's picture is a revealing artifact in the history of taste. More important for our purposes, Breaking Home Ties commemorates the moment that the frontier ended and the city began. A traditional genre scene, obviously set in a modest rural homestead, the painting prophecies the move to the city. The young man at the center of the composition is going to seek his fortune . . . which means that he is necessarily going to the city. The young man is the Hopper subject in the making: leaving the multigenerational, affectionate, protective circle of the family to join the lonely crowds of Chicago or New York.

Everything that defines this young man is going to be stripped away. In short, by the sort of subtraction I referred to earlier, the painting's content anticipates Hopper. So also does its narrative technique, the relationship it implies between its subject and its audience. In a word, the story told in Hovenden's painting is easy to read, while Hopper's paintings resist and even cancel narrative.

For example, I wager that every one of us standing in front of a painting like Hotel Room (1931) has invented a story to answer our own questions.

Edward Hopper, Hotel Room (1931)

Is the letter in the woman's hand good news or bad? Has she just received it, or has she written it? Is it a letter at all? Is she packing or unpacking?

But the point of Hopper's presentation is precisely that there are no answers to those perfectly ordinary questions. The picture's imagery is suspended stubbornly outside of narrative time, arousing expectations that are deliberately left unfulfilled. It is not surprising that Hopper produced only two history pictures in over half a century of painting.) The title itself, Hotel Room, like Automat, Room in New York, Chop Suey, and half-a-dozen other Hopper paintings, willfully directs our interpretative energies away from the human subjects toward the settings in which they are contained.

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