Room in Brooklyn is a 1932 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper. It depicts a woman in a rocking chair looking out a bay window at a cityscape, with sunlight entering the room. Hopper improvised and completed the work at his Greenwich Village studio around the same time as its possible companion piece, Room in New York.
The painting evokes the style of Caspar David Friedrich through its use of the Rückenfigur motif and also shows the influence of fellow realist John Sloan, whose interior city scenes Hopper admired. Continuing his long-running exploration of figures in sunlit rooms, Room in Brooklyn is his only major painting to include flowers, since Hopper generally disliked painting them.
The work was first exhibited that year at the Modern American Paintings show at the Carnegie Institute, alongside his previous painting, Chop Suey (1929). It is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Description In an interior scene, a woman wearing a blue garment, possibly a dressing gown, sits, on the left side of the painting, in a yellow-brown rocking chair facing a bay window overlooking brick-red buildings and chimneys; she is seen only from behind. Her head is leaning forward as if reading, sewing, or sleeping, but her hands are not visible. A table covered with red cloth sits behind her.
The room is mostly unadorned, the floor covered with a green carpet. The windows are fringed by three green shades which let the sun in; the shade in the center is open more than the other two, revealing the blue sky above the cityscape. The central focus of the painting is a vase full of pink and white flowers. It sits near a window on a round table with a blue covering. Sunlight streams in and falls on the table and the vase, continuing across the left side of the room with a patch of sunlight falling on the floor. In the lower right corner, the painting is signed "Edward Hopper".
Background The early 1930s were a productive and successful time for Hopper, full of sales and recognition for his art. Artist and critic Guy Pène du Bois sang Hopper's praises in the literature, commending both Hopper and his colleague Charles E. Burchfield, who were often compared. Hopper had himself previously interviewed Burchfield and published an article about his work. In 1931 alone, Hopper sold 30 paintings. The next year, Hopper and his wife Josephine Nivison ("Jo") moved into a larger, top-floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village with a view facing Washington Square Park, and remained there for the rest of their lives.; .
The National Academy of Design announced in March 1932 that they had elected Hopper to their ranks, but Hopper declined their membership. Hopper had long been unhappy by the way he was treated. The Academy, a conservative gatekeeper of new American art, had spent many years turning down his submissions. This time of his life, lasting roughly 15 years, was described as one of "disappointment and discouragement". By the early 1920s, Hopper had only sold two paintings, but there was still demand for his etchings, with Hopper producing dozens from 1915 to 1923. When the Academy elected Hopper, The New York Times reported that the organization "considered a stronghold of conservatism, departed from its traditional paths ... by electing ... an artist of the modern school, Edward Hopper."
Jo was instrumental in helping Hopper jump-start his career, though in later years he was reticent to admit it. Previously, in 1923, they painted watercolors together in Gloucester, Massachusetts, becoming romantically involved that summer. Jo exhibited her watercolors in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum, persuading the organizers to let Hopper participate. They accepted, with the critics mostly ignoring her submissions and praising Hopper instead. They married the following year. After his first showing at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in 1924, Hopper was able to quit commercial art and devote himself to fine art full-time.
Museums first began acquiring his work in 1925 with Apartment Houses (1923) entering the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) added House by the Railroad (1925) in 1930. Room in New York appeared at the first Whitney Biennial in the fall of 1932. The MoMA hosted Hopper's first retrospective exhibition in 1933.
Development
Hopper started painting Room in Brooklyn at the beginning of 1932. It was improvised, although Jo's story behind the work is disputed by curator Carol Troyen. Jo said Hopper had planned to paint the Brooklyn Bridge outside the window, but when it came time, he discovered it would not work. Hopper was worried about "clutter", recalls Jo, forcing him to eliminate the bridge idea. Jo said that it was entirely unclear if any remnants of Brooklyn remained in the final painting once Hopper decided not to paint the bridge. Troyen is skeptical of this explanation, since there was little room in the painting to accommodate a bridge.
Hopper completed the painting in February along with its possible pendant, Room in New York. The latter painting depicts a couple sitting in the same room, distant from each other. The man is seen reading a newspaper while the woman sits across from him with a bored look, about to strike a key on a piano.
Style Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, described the painting, along with Hotel Room (1931), as sharing precise, well-defined forms ("the whetting of edges") and vivid color that created a formal intensity ("approaching harshness"). Critics have described Hopper as a modern realist painter, portraying realism in his subject matter while expressing modernism in his formal compositions. Troyen argues that Barr initially presented Hopper as a modernist for political reasons in an attempt to appeal to factions seeking both contemporary and more radically modernist works for the museum's collection. In the same catalog, however, Hopper dismissed abstract art as merely decorative. Troyen maintains that Hopper's modernist style at this time more closely resembled the late-19th-century work of Paul Cézanne and the Precisionism of Charles Sheeler.
Caspar David Friedrich
The painting is suggestive of the style of several different artists. Many art historians have noted the influence of the style of Caspar David Friedrich on Hopper's work. Friedrich, a 19th-century German Romantic painter, was known for his use of the Rückenfigur, a motif showing a solitary figure seen only from behind who gazes out at a landscape. David Anfam believed that Hopper was aware of Friedrich. "Hopper's taste for German culture", writes Anfam, "may have alerted him more than most to the then-obscure Friedrich." Hopper had studied the German language, made use of German motifs in his early work, and displayed knowledge of the German art tradition.
Hopper traveled to Europe three times. In his first trip, he spent ten months in Europe from the fall of 1906 until the summer of 1907. He visited Paris, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Brussels. Hopper was in Berlin in July, spending less than a week in the city. This was at a time when the German public had just rediscovered Friedrich, whose work was shown in the one year earlier. Scholar Margaret Iversen compares Room in Brooklyn with Friedrich's Woman at a Window (1822).
John Sloan John Sloan was influential in Hopper's life from around the time of World War I until the early 1920s. Hopper wrote positively about Sloan in 1927, anticipating his own embrace of many of Sloan's themes. According to art historian Robert Hobbs, Sloan was known for portraying everyday people engaged in solitary activities within buildings, in eating establishments and theaters, and in seascapes and scenes from modern city life. While Hopper draws from much of Sloan's work, and they were both realists associated with the Ashcan School, a term they mutually disliked and disavowed, they were also very different people.
Echoes of Sloan's etchings and paintings can be found in several of Hopper's works during this time. His etching of Evening Wind (1921) evokes Sloan's Turning Out the Light (1905), while Room in Brooklyn is reminiscent of Sloan's The Women's Page (1905), notably as a source for the figure of the woman in the chair. Hobbs argues that the woman in the chair is similar to the popular image of women sewing from 18th- and 19th-century art, except Hopper turned the image away from the viewer. For Hobbs, Hopper "makes her anonymous as the mass of undifferentiated Brooklyn tenements outside the window".
In works such as A Window on the Street (1912), Sloan drew on the Pre-Raphaelites and earlier Renaissance traditions, focusing on women in interiors. Hopper stripped this tradition bare, favoring a stark modern realism of urban spaces and unidentified people in apartments. These differences extended to their personal lives: Sloan supported left-wing causes and workers' rights in illustrations for socialist newspapers, while Hopper made his living as a commercial illustrator.
Although his commercial work promoted business interests, he also undermined similar ideas in his fine art. Hopper avoided expressing political positions in his own work.; . Regarding the etching East Side Interior (1922), he told a curator in 1956, "No implication was intended with any ideology concerning the poor and oppressed. The interior itself was my main interest—simply a piece of New York, the city that interests me so much."
Themes Art historian Theodore Stebbins once described the painting as a "lonely urban scene". Scholar Paweł Marcinkiewicz explores the origin of this idea by taking an urban cultural and literary studies approach to the painting. He follows up on the previous work of Hana Wirth-Nesher (1996) and Richard Lehan (1998) and places the painting in the historical context of the cityscape in art, arguing that Room in Brooklyn inherited an earlier style that arose in the 19th century. This style is only one of many, however, with Wirth-Nesher contrasting Hopper's style with Manet's The Balcony (1868), which portrays the same idea from a different perspective.
Marcinkiewicz shows that Hopper's style and depiction of isolation comes out of both the changing design of cities, such as Haussmann's renovation of Paris, and new ideas that arose at the same time about the nature of the crowd. In the example of Paris, the redevelopment diminished and in some cases eliminated the older communal and ethical values, dividing communities in the service of more efficient transportation.
These changes, argues Marcinkiewicz, led to the increasing isolation of the individual from the crowd, with the crowd taking on a new association with the city itself. According to Lehan, these ideas were expressed in the work of George Simmel, Max Weber, and Walter Benjamin. "What gets lost in mass society", writes Marcinkiewicz, "is the individual, who feels alienated from the crowd". He argues that this notion influenced art, with paintings like Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) depicting a new kind of isolated figure in the city for the first time, eventually growing into a dominant theme by the early 20th century in works by Frits Van den Berghe, Giorgio de Chirico, and Raoul Dufy.
Dufy's work in particular shows what Marcinkiewicz calls an "extension of human solitude". In the painting Interior With Open Window (1928), Dufy presents an empty room with windows looking out on to the city, with a chair and a vase of flowers. Marcinkiewicz believes Hopper draws upon this same, new way of seeing the city in Room in Brooklyn. Levin notes that Jo's "few surviving works suggest her affinity with fauvist color and the paintings of Raoul Dufy." Hopper himself compared Jo's watercolors favorably with Dufy's.