GLOUCESTER — The pervasive reek of fish, and a sky filled with gulls are signature elements of summer here in the heart of Cape Ann; I firmly believe those not beguiled by its rough charms and desolate beauty just haven’t been here yet. (Full disclosure: I live just a few miles down the road.) Gloucester’s easy sense of self makes it unpretentiously authentic down to its bones — a “real” place, as someone I know once called it, an unvarnished anomaly, resolutely true to itself..
Was it that grounded unfussiness that struck Edward Hopper as he stepped off the train here in the summer of 1923? He had been once before, in 1912, on the urging of his friend the artist Leon Kroll, and returned home to New York to a decade of futility. By the time his train pulled into Gloucester in 1923, he had only ever sold a single oil painting, a 1911 picture of a heeling sailboat at the 1913 New York Armory Show, where European radicals like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse would make their American debuts. For Hopper, that first modest success must have felt like his last — suddenly, instantly outdated and parochial-seeming amid the shock of the new. One thing’s sure: Hopper, 41, unmarried, and scratching out a living in commercial illustration, had come to Gloucester in 1923 in search of something that must have felt like a last chance.
That’s just one of the rich stories to be found in “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating a Landscape,” a new exhibition that opened at Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum this week. In the handsome catalog that accompanies it, curator Elliot Bostwick Davis tracks the arc of one of the most significant careers in American art — one that came close to never-was. With its 60-plus works, about half of them on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Davis positions that Gloucester summer as a pivot point where Hopper, finally, started to become Hopper. Gloucester, bustling, gruff, and workaday, its weatherbeaten clapboard houses piled into a rocky nook of coast, gave him what he had been looking for at last.
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Despite the show’s relatively small scale — mostly watercolors, versus the 200-piece opus, bursting with big oil paintings, at the Whitney last fall on Hopper’s deep connection to New York city — Bostwick argues convincingly on behalf of Cape Ann’s outsize impact not only on his career but on his life. It opens with a selection of mostly unremarkable oils from that 1912 sojourn that captures the artist, unsure. “Briar Neck, Gloucester,” a sunny scene of waves lapping the rocks, feels uncharacteristically bucolic; “Gloucester Harbor,” an image of the bright houses tucked along the gentle slope to the shore, is outright picturesque, an affront to the legacy of Hopperian severity.
1923 was make or break. His self-doubt had only grown; he had gone from a young painter with promise, a student of the socially conscious Ashcan School founder Robert Henri to a middle-aged near-washout – a semi-realist painter with few prospects as an experimental brand of uniquely American Modernism inspired by that 1913 Armory Show had taken firm hold.
In Gloucester that summer — inspired, or desperate? — something changed. Those early oils give way to a roomful of eerie watercolors replete with the sharp angles and harsh light so distinctly Hopper’s that it feels he should own a copyright. A trio of them greets you immediately inside, all but vibrating with that Hopperian dread, like a Hitchcock film paused a half-second before disaster.
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On the left, “The Mansard Roof,” best-known of his Gloucester works, captures a many-gabled captain’s house, ominous in the bright and searing sun, the pale canvas of its awnings flapping in the sea breeze. “House in the Italian Quarter,” bleak with foreboding, drifts alone, its mustard clapboards pinned to a sickly gray sky. In between is one of the best, most Hopper Hoppers I’ve seen: “Portuguese Church in Gloucester,” its spires poking up from across the pavement of a bleached-out schoolyard like a stolen glance. You can all but feel the white heat of summer, unimpeded by tree or cloud; an American flag dangles on the left, creating its own shadow in the feeble breath of wind.
What happened? Hopper’s shift was as much due to whom he encountered that summer as what: Also up from New York that summer was a much more successful artist who, buoyed by her inclusion in an upcoming watercolor exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, decided to join the growing New York crowd that had made Gloucester a favorite art-world retreat.
Josephine Nivison — Jo, to almost everyone — was everything Hopper was not: gregarious, optimistic, and cheery. She was 40, also not married, but greatly attached to her cat, Arthur, who went missing one day. Hopper helped track him down. Soon after, he and Nivison started on early morning sketching sessions together, and the rest is history: They were married in 1924, with Nivison holding Gloucester hostage in the balance (back in New York, she agreed to go back that summer, forgoing her preferred Provincetown, if Hopper married her there and then. He did).
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It’s a revelation that “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann” is as much a love story as an art exhibition. Nivison, so promising when they met, recognized her husband’s potential and paused her own career a few years later to act as his promoter. It was a sacrifice Hopper never failed to honor. She was his principal model in all of his best-known pictures, an anonymous everywoman in pictures like “Nighthawks;” but when he painted her as Jo, he painted her painting, a tribute to her sacrifice. The exhibition honors her, too: A small gallery is installed at its heart, devoted to her and her work.
The Hoppers would spend just four summers together in Gloucester, ultimately decamping in 1930 to Cape Cod, where they would spend three decades of summers together painting. But Cape Ann was critically formative to their married and artistic life.
It was there that Jo urged Hopper to embrace watercolors more fully — he would evolve into America’s indisputable modern master of that medium. But it’s also where Hopper’s sensibility sharpens into what we now see as his hallmarks: strict, sharp-angled compositions of workaday buildings, rail cuts, and power lines, the knife’s edge between shadow and light that crystallizes his vision of a world in the throes of overpowering change. “Parkhurst’s House (Captain’s House),” 1924, is a desolate wonder of that sensibility emerging, eschewing pretty for plainspoken, captured in unforgiving glare.
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In a Hopper picture, built form feels imposed on a world that seems to explicitly resent it. It’s notable that his Gloucester images barely acknowledge the sea that surrounds it, focused almost wholly on the man-made elements scratched into its rocky shores. What Hopper found in Gloucester was a petri dish of the unrelenting grind of modernity, its alienating, transformative power, that would fuel his life’s work.
The city had been a busy port since the 17th century — this summer is its quadricentennial — bustling with the fishing and shipping industries that by then had begun to taper, replaced with such enterprises as box factories and railways that cut bluntly through the landscape.
Hopper’s brilliance was in his calculated portrayals of that malaise, a world upended by accelerating change. It’s why he still matters now. His formative years had been spent learning with the socially conscious artists of the Ashcan School, focused on scenes of immigrant life in New York; but he had little appetite for their dramas of the human condition. Hopper found his way as an artist through the haphazard mechanics of urbanity, and the chaos of transition; in Gloucester, he painted the tumbledown houses of the Italian and Portuguese quarters as anti-immigrant sentiment was rising, and the old trawlers that were being replaced by industrial-scale fishing.
By 1928, he and Jo’s last summer there, Hopper was painting big oils again with the confident severity he had honed in his watercolors. The show includes a masterwork from that final summer, a departure point from which he would never look back: “Freight Cars, Gloucester” is so iconically Hopperian it could be a calling card: The Gothic spire of St. Ann’s Church looms over a cluster of modest houses blocked by a freight train rumbling through the heart of town. In full unforgiving sun, the piece emanates gloom, the shadowy hide of the boxcars glowering against a fiery yellow foreground of weeds blazing in the sun.
A telegraph pole bisects the frame unevenly, an exclamation point on the haphazard incursions of the modern world. There is nothing more Hopper than that. On Cape Cod, Hopper would continue to hone that vision, though he often complained the softness of its dunes lacked the severity he had so appreciated in Cape Ann. He and Jo would never return, but Gloucester would stay with him forever.
EDWARD HOPPER & CAPE ANN: ILLUMINATING A LANDSCAPE
July 22-Oct. 16. Cape Ann Museum. 27 Pleasant St., Gloucester. 978-283-0455, capeannmuseum.org.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.