Edward Hopper: Glancing at Gaze with a Wink at Tourism - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 56

Hopper is that by looking at his paintings you
can remake a travel narrative anchored on a tri-
partite division, which is at the basis of tourism:
place, transport and accommodation. The rela-
tion to travel is overtly exposed in his choice of
representing lonely roads and even the car as
part of the travel experience - a commodity cer-
tainly cherished by travellers (Urry, 2002). A
signifi cant group of Hopper's paintings, imbed-
ded in his wider artistic production, accrue to
become a recognizable tale within the tourism
semiotic code.
The secluded, unspoilt landscapes Hopper
produced, sometimes watercolours resulting
from spur of the moment inspiration, could be
promotional invitations aimed at the tourist. As
stated above, the allusion to travel is denoted
by the inclusion of roads in some paintings as in
Route 6, Eastham (1941) or High Road (1931)
where the roads, crossing the canvas diagonally,
evoke the travel experience leading the viewer's
eyes well away to a fi nal destination beyond the
picture: perhaps the untouched countryside,
seeming to herald quaint inns, bracing air and
vast, deserted landscapes ready for tourist con-
sumption. The same could be stated about
Highland Light (1930), Gloucester Beach, Bass
Rocks (1924), Seawatchers (1952) or Jo Sketch-
ing on the Beach (1925-1928), which, together,
depict the sunny non-crowded beach that sun
and sea lovers yearn for.
Hopper's experience as a commercial illus-
trator may account for the message implicit in
the images. Economic constraints at an early
stage of his career forced Hopper to hire out his
skills to several business magazines. Commer-
cial illustration must have demanded two things
from Hopper: a realistic approach and the
capacity adequately to pass on the commercial
message inherent to the information he illus-
trated. Despite abhorring the commercial illus-
tration profession, he continued for about a
decade. In this time, Hopper developed skills -
a precision in depiction, accuracy in trace and
the capacity of conveying a message resorting
to little detail - which became assets he subse-
quently employed in the development of a
mature personal style (Levin, 1980; Schmied,
2005). As Kate states '(. . .) it was in the pages
of magazines like System that he would have
observed fi rsthand the doctrines of selling and
display' (1995, p. 170). Among the magazines

that Hopper worked for, up to the mid-1920s,
we can name Sunday Magazine , System , The
Magazine of Business , Country Gentleman ,
Wells Fargo Messenger and Dry Dock Deal
(Levin, 1980).
Curiously enough, one of the last maga-
zines he worked for was Hotel Management -
the cover of the September 1924 issue, for
instance, was illustrated by Hopper. In this case,
you can unarguably establish a parallel between
his commercially oriented work and his rendition
of leisure moments in two paintings he dedi-
cated to sailing: Ground Swell (1939) and The
Lee Shore (1941). Comparison of the maga-
zine's cover and the paintings reveals how
commercial illustration did become a clear
infl uence.
Hopper's sharp artistic sense did not allow
local colour to go unnoticed either. His trips to
Mexico furnished the local atmosphere that
resulted in paintings like Adobe Houses (1925)
and El Palacio (1946). The former is a rendering
of a ramshackle dwelling you might want to pre-
serve as an illustrative memoir of your trip. The
latter, by contrasting sharply with Hopper's ren-
derings of New York and New England, stands
apart. El Palacio shows the diagnosing tourist's
eye at work. Though hues have been combined
to awaken a positive impression in the viewer, a
certain undertone of poverty seems to be con-
veyed by the plainly drawn and undecorated
buildings, where a sense of ruin is denoted
through damage in one of the houses. Contrast-
ing with this sense of poverty, the local hotel is
ironically called 'Palacio', the word itself an
ironic token of the foreignness of the territory.
Perhaps hitting out at the 'going global' of major
corporations, a Ford sign can be seen in the
foreground, among the buildings - almost a
post-tourist image.

En route

As stated above, the roads featured in Hopper's
paintings can be interpreted as a sign of travel
(as indexes, from the semiotic point of view).
The same happens to the gas stations he fea-
tured, which embody the (independent) travel-
ler's experience. Two paintings, Gas (1940) and
Four Lane Road (1956) expose the theme of