Several weeks ago, I was in NYC for a quick visit with old friends and a whirlwind circuit through some favorite art museums—the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. (And I was very disappointed that the Frick was closed that day.) I was scheduled for an Amtrak run from DC (where my daughter and her family live) to New York and back, but a coal train derailed near Aberdeen, MD, so I ended up taking a $35 bus up into Chinatown, a ride in an alternative universe. Once there, I stayed at a hostel for Christian ministers on the Upper West Side (Hephzibah House), a place at which we SBTS profs sometimes “crashed” when we were teaching at the MNYBA building, not far away.

The next evening, I was able to spend a couple of hours at the Whitney, well down Manhattan’s Hudson River Shore, not that far from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where I caught my return transportation. In my hurried walk through the gallery, I came across an old friend, a self-portrait by Edward Hopper (1882-1967). I’d seen it in earlier in the Whitney, when it was located on the Upper East Side, and also in Madrid at the Thyssen-Bornemisza (an easy walk from two other art museums, the Prado and the Reina Sophia). It was there that Sharon and I got to see an amazing exhibition, including his early work as a magazine cover illustrator and also a tableau with physical objects keyed to his painting, Morning Sun. In it, a mannequin sat on a bed looking through a sunlit window (the sun being a floodlight), and a frame stood on a stand outside the cutaway room. Looking through it, you “saw the painting.”

Hopper is probably best known for his Nighthawks (with folks seen sitting at a restaurant counter) and The House by the Railroad (drawn from a Victorian mansion in Haverstraw, NY, and serving as inspiration for the Bates house from the Hitchcock movie, Psycho, a building that still stands on the Universal lot near LA). 

Hopper was a fascinating character, and quite unlike many of his contemporaries. As a child, he lived in a devoutly Baptist home in Nyack, NY and attended a Baptist church founded by his great great grandfather in 1854. On his first trip to check out the artistic scene in Paris, his mother and the church set him up with lodging above a Baptist mission near the Seine. It’s hard to sort out what role “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” played in his adult life. He was a fairly grumpy guy, and I don’t get the sense he attended church in his last decades. (I’ve started the 700-page Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, and I hope to learn more in this connection.)  Unlike most artists, he was a political conservative. He made sure to vote against FDR, and he held the Federal Art Project of the New Deal in low regard, calling it “a sop to mediocrity.” Also, once he’d married fellow artist Josephine Nivison, she became his life model, nudes included. 

Then, at the Whitney, I came across a 1948 Hopper called Seven A.M. (That was the year I was born.) The description to the side says  it “depicts an anonymous storefront cast in the oblique, eerie shadows and cool light of early morning.” Hopper’s wife Josephine “described the store as a ‘blind pig,’ a front for some illicit operation, perhaps alluding to the painting’s forbidding overtones.” My birth may have also had “forbidding overtones” for some folks, but I’m grateful I was born into a devout Baptist home myself, and with parents who accompanied me rather than sent me to Paris where we, too, linked up with a Baptist mission.