Hopper’s Cool: Modernism and Emotional Restraint

Abstract

Long recognized as a painter of “modern life,” Edward Hopper remains one of America’s most celebrated artists. This essay argues that Hopper’s enduring popularity relates to his visualization of modern American feeling, and in particular, his navigation of an “emotional regime” that governed twentieth-century American lives. Hopper’s brooding and restrained pictures personify an emotional style that surfaced around 1900, flourished through the 1950s, and remains an iconic representation of modern American character today.If, broadly speaking, late nineteenth-century Americans embraced particularly intense affective modes from passionate declarations of romantic love to obsessive rituals of mourning and grief, early twentieth-century American emotional life was tempered by expectations of disciplined self-control. New patterns of social regulation and economic organization helped shape this modern culture of emotional self-restraint and social policing. New kinds of consumerism developed as compensatory outlets, encouraging Americans to transfer their passions for pleasure, indulgence, and excess to modernism’s regulated realms of shopping, entertainment, and spectator sports.Born in 1882 (d. 1967), Hopper directly experienced this transition in emotional life and depicted its social and cultural imprint on himself and others in modern times. Drawing on popular and vernacular sources including advertising and the movies, Hopper distilled the subjects and scenes of this newly cool American scene into emotionally restrained pictures that reflected the conditions of class, intimacy, and communication in twentieth-century America.