Hotel Management, March 1925,
cover by Edward Hopper
Culturally resonant, Hopper's choice of the hotel as subject also had quite personal sources, in the bitter years he spent as a commercial illustrator. His most dependable commissions came from a magazine called Hotel Management, for which he produced a whole series of colorful covers. Carefree, lively, and affluent, the laughing men and women who play golf, drive fast cars, and dance across these covers have almost nothing in common with the haunting and haunted characters who inhabit Hopper's paintings. They are, in short, icons of fake happiness, produced on salary to suit the demands of various employers. [Click for HOTEL MANAGEMENT Nov. 1924, Jan. 1925, Aug. 1925, Sept. 1925

The truncated, claustrophobic interiors of Hopper's most distinctive pictures express his revenge on his own earlier work. He answered his peppy drawings, which had held out the promise of abundance, with images of diminishment, loss, and deprivation. It is not that the people in Hopper's city paintings seem actually poor. But their spiritual vacancy testifies to an impoverishment that transcends matters of class.

Hopper's underfurnished, spooky rooms are also a strategy of control, a way of managing urban turmoil by denying it. The recurrent keynote of nineteenth-century landscape painting had been the horizon, stretching as far as the eye could see. The horizon, emblem of limitless space and unprecedented mobility, survived at least in shrunken form even in the cityscapes of Hopper's predecessors, in the work of John Sloan, whom Hopper admired [JEFFERSON MARKET], and of George Bellows, whom he considered a rival [LONE TENEMENT].

previous frame next frame