The Blue Eagle & Edward Hopper

Ever since I first started learning about clinical depression, I’ve always thought it curious that we use the same word to describe a protracted economic downturn and the neurochemically based mood disorder. But perhaps there are deeper connections that beg to be elucidated. In both states, people have lost their livelihood, their confidence, that animating spark that lights up their brain, that propels them through the world. In both conditions, they feel isolated, locked inside the prison of self, struggling to connect. Every depressive state, the British psychoanalyst D,W. Winnicott once observed, has within itself “the germ of its own recovery,” and yet the nature of the depressive and the person who has lost his job or his home is that he feels down with no way out. Traveling in the wrong direction down a one-way street, and regardless of whether he turns around or keeps going, he feels a sense of dread.

In the middle of the Great Depression, FDR created the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was designed to do something that had never been done before: regulate the marketplace. NIRA, which was also called the National Recovery Act, set wages, production quotas, and price controls, measures that were called “communistic” and even “Hitler-like” by Republicans. Its symbol was a blue eagle (technically a thunderbird but that bird was not as emblematically patriotic). With its wings outspread, its right talon clasping a sprocket wheel, its left resting upon a thunderbolt, the creature was a force not to be trifled with. Above its head blazed the word, member, in blue letters; the red letters of the acronym NRA filled the top of the poster, and the slogan ‘We do our part’ blazed at the bottom. The bird was blue because of a practice originating in World War I where soldiers wore a bright blue badge on their shoulders to prevent being fired upon by other American soldiers. Like that impossible-to-miss blue insignia, the Blue Eagle would signal to others—the jobless, the broke, the hungry--that they were not alone, that someone was looking after them.

When the Blue Eagle flew in shop windows and factories across the country in the summer of 1933, Edward Hopper was in his early fifties, having finally achieved financial as well as critical recognition. The classic “Early Sunday Morning,” of sunlight falling on a deserted brick storefront on Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, was purchased by the Whitney Museum a few months after it was completed, proof that Hopper, who had eked out a living as a commercial illustrator, had finally arrived. But this good fortune was sadly no protection against Hopper’s continuing periods of despair and a lethargy so great that he often could not work. Hopper once said that all he really wanted to do was paint “sunlight on the side of a house.” But when Hopper couldn’t generate the focus and passion to paint, his existence felt random as a hobo’s all-night ride on a boxcar, other people as untrustworthy as the figures hunched over their coffee in the diner of “Nighthawks.”

In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Blue Eagle and its hundreds of bureaucratic codes unconstitutional (there were 765 codes that regulated even the production and sale of dog food). enH The mighty thunderbird, which Henry Ford had derisively called Roosevelt’s ‘buzzard’, was banished to the dust-heap of history. But FDR was a fighter; he was not about to abandon the battle to end the Depression. (He once observed that after not being able to wiggle his toes for a month--he had contracted polio in 1921 at the age of 39--everything else was easy.) FDR continued to create jobs for the unemployed through programs like the CCC, the CCV, and the WPA. In 1935, he also signed into law the historic Social Security Act, guaranteeing an income to older Americans. Under FDR’s watch, child labor laws were instituted, and the work-week was reduced from six days to five days.

Edward Hopper, like FDR, was a problem-solver. (Oddly enough, Hopper did not approve of the WPA program, which employed many out-of-work artists, as he felt it encouraged mediocrity. No doubt Hopper would have felt differently if he had needed the money or the work.) Hopper was flush enough in the Depression years to purchase an automobile as well as build a summer home and studio on Cape Cod. A change of scene helped the artist’s dark moods, as did frequent automobile trips out West and to Mexico. Hopper also filled his unproductive hours with reading and movie-going.

Throughout all these restless changes of scenes and activities, his marriage to fellow artist Jo Nivison was often tense, no doubt worsening his depression as much as alleviating it. Husband and wife were together constantly in New York, in Truro, and on their car trips. So much closeness drove them crazy; they fought over everything from Jo’s devotion to her cat, Arthur, to Hopper’s lukewarm support of Jo’s work as an artist (he said she possessed a “pleasing little talent”). In her diary, Jo confided: “if I’m on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I’m not.” Once, according to Hopper’s biographer, Gail Levin, Jo got so mad, she bit her husband’s hand to the bone.

And yet Jo Nivison, who acted as artist’s model for nearly all of her husband’s paintings that included human figures, remained devoted to her mate, claimed that he was the center of her universe and often spoke of Hopper’s paintings as their “children” (the Hoppers had married in their forties and were childless). When Hopper died in 1967 at the age of 84, Jo donated all his works to the Whitney Museum. Ten months later, she passed away herself. “We don’t know what she died of,” says Barbara Novak, one of a very small number of their close friends, “I think she died for lack of him. And he would have died for lack of her. It really was a folie a deux.”

One of Hopper’s most famous works, “The Long Leg,” was painted in 1935 and is done almost entirely in blue. It features a solitary, wooden sailboat racing against the wind across Cape Cod Bay, its wooden hull leaning into the water, its crew obscured by the full sails. In the distance Long Point Lighthouse perches in solitary grandeur at the foot of a headland, surrounded by dunes. What dominates the painting, which is absent of human beings, is water and sky—the blue of the sea a few shades darker than the sky, which is washed pale with clouds. But unlike other Hopper landscapes, where the absence of people evokes a quiet gloom, here one feels only the presence of energy and possibility, as if we could sit for an afternoon in the cockpit of that boat, we could sail away from all that was petty and contrary within ourselves.

“The Long Leg,” was recently chosen as a stamp for the U.S. Postage system (it will be available later this summer), and it’s easy to see why. In this era of job losses, home foreclosures and government bailouts, Hopper’s lone boat sailing effortlessly in the bay suggests that we need look no further than nature itself for the answer to our anomie. The blue of water and sky will heal us, if only we take in their presence--like sails filling with wind.