Edward Hopper is known by academics, critics, gallerists and publics as the great America realist, master of light and solitudes. This vision is however a myth. On the occasion of the 113 anniversary of his birth this July 22nd we interview Carter Foster, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in its new headquarters at the East margin of the Hudson River and west of the High Line Park in the island of Manhattan.

Carter Foster has shown diverse interests as a Whitney curator for more than 10 years, and one invariable thoroughness. This quality has translated into the memorable exhibition “Real/Surreal” or the treatment of the gravitational experiments of Aleksandra Mir; although his biggest satisfaction has probably been becoming one of the greatest world experts in Edward Hopper.

The reason why is clear and distinct. The Whitney Museum, the house of the artists, was Edward Hopper’s house as well. Hopper’s first solo show was at the Whitney Studio Club, precursor institution of the actual Whitney Museum, founded and protected by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. “Early Sunday Morning” itself was bought just a few months after it was painted. Therefore Hopper felt the support of the museum from the early days of his career until he became a successful painter crowned with honorific doctorates and all sorts of awards. Hopper became close friends with the curator Lloyd Goodrich, who was eventually appointed Director of the Whitney for more than a decade. The imbrication of artist and museum, museum and artist, got to a point that in his death the whole artistic estate of Hopper was donated by his widow to the Whitney Museum, which houses today the biggest and most important Hopper collection in the world.

This is the treasure Carter Foster found ten years ago when he arrived at the Whitney. He approached it and its worth with his own values at hand, studding every picture and drawing meticulously. The analysis one by one of the two thousand and five hundred drawings of the collection in parallel with the paintings that they studied and inspired, along with the desire to understand the material process of Hopper’s artistic elaboration, have produced a book where Carter Foster defies the assumptions of current historiography.

Manuel Rodríguez: Edward Hopper has been largely deemed a realist. But in your latest book “Hopper Drawing” you discover a whole creative process that departs from what is normally considered realism.

Carter Foster: Yes, I would never call Hopper a realist. You could call him a representational painter. But in no way he accurately describes what the world looks like. He tries to view the world through his own subjectivity. He’s very free to use his own imagination and I think there is a complicated balance between recognizable reality and something beyond that, something that gets to a kind of interior landscape, a symbolic landscape. You can see that developing in his drawings. It’s an interesting thing that he needed to use the observable in order to get to something much more universal than just looking at the world.

MR: I’m very interested about that: his variations. He is very detailed, he copies patterns, exact lay outs of rooms and facades with precision.

CF: It’s amazing how specific he can get in some of his drawings and something that seems very minor, or something that he wanted to understand. And remember, also, he worked back at his studio, and he only painted after a substantial amount of drawings. And on the painting he starts again.

MR: But there are variations.

CF: Yes, there are always variations. He never copied from his drawings. He uses them but he never copies them.

MR: So he departs from the real image. What is your take on these variations? Do you think he made them trying to purposely achieve some impression or certain message, or are they all about composition or pure whim?

CF: He talked about having an initial image when he thought about a painting. He said that once he started to paint that mental image started to degrade. He was trying to get a mental image onto the canvas but it wasn’t a mental image of the world but an image in his mind taken from his experience of the world. I think he was trying to get his paint some kind of expression of how he felt about what he was painting and there is some sort of tension between what he remembered about that subject and how he was able to paint it. And whatever tension you get in his work, and you get a substantial amount of tension in his work (I think that is one of the hallmarks of it), it’s I think from that kind of toughness in trying to get some psychological draw into the subject, even if it’s a very mundane thing like an interior of a room or a house. He painted mundane things in many ways but the way he both applied the pain and allowed the composition to develop, all the things that we associate with painting, all the formal qualities and all the qualities of touch, they are all used by him in order to get into a particular feeling and atmosphere, that’s basically how we all experience ourselves in the world. He was interested about the self in the world and he used everyday objects to get to all that. There is always a variation and a difference and an evolution of certain subject that goes from the tiny first conceived to the tiny final that get onto the canvas itself.

MR: So those words of Pablo Picasso “I don’t paint what I see but I paint what I think” really apply to Edward Hopper.

CF: I think that’s true. He painted what he thought. He was deeply empathetic of other people. What we know about him personally is that he was a fairly quiet person, and perhaps because he didn’t talk so much, he became a careful observer and a sensitive interpreter.

MR: What then, would he try to transmit with still figures and those inscrutable faces?

CF: That’s one of the reasons people actually like his work. People enjoy the ambiguity of it because that way they can set the story themselves. Hopper even said it explicitly about his work. He said that he was not giving any defined story or narrative, and I think people genuinely enjoy that about his work. Gestures and expressions are equally ambiguous for the same reason.

MR: Continuing with the key elements of Hopper’s work. I’ve been recently wandering around Greenwich Village, where Hopper lived almost all his life and where he found inspiration for a great number of his paintings, and it’s an incredibly diverse area, there are fountains and parks, alleys, stations, playgrounds… but he insisted in the same objects: the empty room, the solitary façade but moreover the window. Why is that?

CF: Windows are crucial to him. Windows are a dismembering between you and the world. And of course a window is a very powerful and long standing metaphor for painting since the Renaissance or perhaps before. It’s also related to interior spaces, because when you look at a window from the outside you are looking at an interior space. He was very interested in this idea of dismembering the interior from the exterior space. I think he was using it as a metaphor for the self in the world. The interior representing you and the mental estates that are echoed by that interior and the window represents of course the outside world.

And also windows are related to letting in light, and light is one of his great interests in subjects. Having an interior space with a window letting in light allowed him to work different qualities of light and he was very interested in that. He stated it many times. That light was something that interested him. The symbolism of the window is something that he loved. And of course windows allow for another of the features of Hopper’s paintings which is his voyeurism, looking at other people lives, especially in an urban environment when you’re walking around or even riding the elevated train. It’s one of his greatest motifs.

MR: All these elements make a very defined and persistent style throughout his career. Is this a limitation of his work?

CF: He had a very long career; his life was in a sense parallel to the one of Picasso. They were born around the same time and died around the same time. Picasso produced tens of thousands of works of art, and thousands of paintings, Hopper produced only about 350 paintings. He painted extremely slowly and very deliberately. Each painting is an example of him getting to where he’s trying to get. He paints the same subjects over and over again trying to infuse them something slightly different every time, so it’s narrow, but in that narrowness there is infinite subtlety and variation.

The reproductions of his works are popular, and yes you can look at them and recognize what the subjects are doing and think it makes sense, but what does not reproduce well at all is the subtlety of the way he put down paint and how delicate and incredibly nuanced the way he put down paint was. But you have to see the painting in person to see that and in that sense there is a consistency throughout his whole life.

MR: And he has had a huge influence in contemporary painters.

CF: He does have a big influence now. It’s interesting, for a painter that is as popular and well known as he was, he didn’t influence other painters of his time so much as he influenced popular culture, and then now he is really influencing through film, photography and all kinds of media. Now he’s more influential in young painters than he was in his lifetime. He never had direct followers that became important because in a way what he was doing was painting such mundane things that anyone wanted to do that. What artists pick up now is that sense of mood and atmosphere and also the idea of deflection, nuance, and ambiguous narrative. Artists like Gregory Krutzen obviously or Wim Wenders and so many others.

George Segal, Ralph Goings, Jouce Carol Oates, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander… I wonder if the upcoming celebration of the 133 anniversary of the birth of Edward Hopper will make Carter Foster reach out to some Hopper’s worthy heirs for that next Whitney Biennial that is and will be simmering until March 2017.