Ground Swell

Abstract

How do we return Edward Hopper to history? The process is difficult, since Hopper worked hard to defeat any obvious sense in which his pictures are about any particular topic. Yet it is possible to connect Hopper’s Ground Swell, an enigmatic picture of 1939, to political and cultural developments of that year. Rather than “solving” the picture, as though it were a code to be cracked, the aim of such analysis is to open the painting up—to make us see that the mystery of the work is less a riddle Hopper poses to us than a set of questions he asks himself: what is the relation of his art to world events? to technology? to popular audiences?

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