Edward Hopper’s Women is at the Seattle Art Museum, and so I stood there, staring at his stared-at women. They were all the same, all his wife, I learned, a painter herself who set aside her art for him to put her body in the pose of the women he’d happened upon. Hopper painted a portrait of his wife just once, a work she hated for the thick skin and cartoonishly luxurious hair he gave her.
Hopper sought the real, which to him meant the visited. As he once said to a critic, “To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re traveling.” In Hopper’s Places, art historian Gail Levin embarked on a crusade to locate and photograph as many of Hopper’s exteriors as she could, and set her photos of the buildings (from the 1970s and 80s) next to his paintings. It’s interesting to see the sea farther out, and the fat GM cars in her photos which add an unintended layer of nostalgia since the book’s 1985 publication, though the occasions on which nothing structural had changed between Hopper’s painting and her photograph felt oddly triumphant.
In the library where I found this book there was posted a list of rules for visitors, among them “No Staring.” I went there after the museum for a planned afternoon of writing with two other poets and mothers. Five stories below us, a car commercial was being filmed and the two cars, the new one and the one with the video camera, accelerated and reversed on the blocked-off street for hours as dozens of paid onlookers adjusted the lightboxes so that it was always midday for the cameraman. We scrawled out our poems fast in the crowded library, something I didn’t think I could do before I was a mother and paid for my time by the hour.
Levin tells the story of arriving at one site to find a man housepainting: “Did you know that Edward Hopper once painted this house?” she asked him. “All I know is that I’m painting it now,” he answered.