Building a McMansion on Hopper's Landscape

In May, a wealthy couple bought nearly 10 acres of land on Cape Cod for $6.75 million with plans to build a sprawling manse, and it's created a tempest in the town of South Truro situated on the Cape Cod Bay. Their property is part of the so-called Hopper Landscape, the view on to which American artist Edward Hopper looked while painting at his summer home, and residents say that Donald and Andrea Kline's proposed 6,000-square-foot house (complete with five-car garage, pool, and wine cellar, according to various reports) will be a blight on a cultural treasure. (The Klines' intentions came to light as an exhibition of Hopper's work opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, about 75 miles away.)

Some people have argued that vista doesn't have significant bearing our appreciation of Hopper's work — on the one hand because it's Hopper's interior scenes that are his artistic legacy, and on the other because it's his visual interpretation of the view, not the view itself, that is important.

Both of these arguments miss the mark.

Maybe it is Hopper's lonely, voyeuristic glimpses of physical and psychological interiors that most people associate with the artist. Maybe these were even the subjects that Hopper was most interested in painting. But using this to discredit the self-appointed guardians of the artist's South Truro view is dangerous because it circumscribes his output to paintings like Nighthawks and Early Sunday Morning, which is like shoving aside Van Gogh's portraits because it's his sunflowers and irises and Starry Night that most people love best.

And while the way an artist interprets a view is ultimately what matters, experiencing the view itself can be an instructive way to think about the work and what it means. Why do people go to Giverny? Because they want to see the inspiration for so much of Monet's work. Probably not as many people have been to Olana, Frederic Edwin Church's estate in the Hudson River Valley, but it exists for the same reason.

It seems unlikely that the commission charged with reviewing this ruckus will put a halt to the development of the Hopper Landscape, and the Klines will have made enemies out of their new neighbors.