New York through an artist's eye

I get to New York in the middle of the night UK time, starving for food and drink - the perfect excuse to search for Nighthawks, that scene of late-night strays nursing coffee mugs in the bright light at a deli counter, their backs to the silent street outside. But - wouldn't you know it - everything is shut in the neighbourhood; chairs are stacked on tables and it's only 11.30pm. Instead of nighthawks I find Korean grocery stores selling heaps of impossibly gorgeous and radiant eats: technicolour salads, multi-million calorie ready-meals, aisle upon aisle of temptation to spend. Very expensive by the way, and utterly tasteless.

I get to New York in the middle of the night UK time, starving for food and drink - the perfect excuse to search for Nighthawks, that scene of late-night strays nursing coffee mugs in the bright light at a deli counter, their backs to the silent street outside. But - wouldn't you know it - everything is shut in the neighbourhood; chairs are stacked on tables and it's only 11.30pm. Instead of nighthawks I find Korean grocery stores selling heaps of impossibly gorgeous and radiant eats: technicolour salads, multi-million calorie ready-meals, aisle upon aisle of temptation to spend. Very expensive by the way, and utterly tasteless.

This is not Edward Hopper at all. People in the know remember his enthusiasm for the simple diner meal from Steak 'N Shakes or Hot Shoppe Mighty Mo Drive-Ins when on the road or in the automat just around the corner from his Washington Square studio, where food was dispensed directly from a coin-operated display. No human contact necessary. Very Edward Hopper, who was known not to speak at all if there was nothing to be said.

Modern Washington Square appears to have dispensed with the automat. They are obviously not cool enough for today's bustling students from New York University, whose material concerns seem to be health stores and green living. Organic is very big. What would Hopper have made of it, gazing down from his top floor studio 74 steps up at number 3 Washington Square North - itself now part of NYU's contagion of buildings? He lived there for 54 years, alternating between summers on Cape Cod and travels across the States by car, as New York hustled its way through the 20th century, ever more raucous and frenzied. But Hopper's paintings, considered icons of America, tell nothing of the glamour and vibrancy of the big city, nothing of the bright lights, the noise, the sheer excitement.

Edward Hopper's New York is pretty quiet. Figures lost in thought, often with a book open beside them, stare out of windows or wait for the theatre to start, not talking, not engaging with anyone. What energy there is comes from the wind blowing a curtain, or from a violent shaft of sunlight. Railway tracks stretching away to either side of the canvas are more important than the passengers waiting on the platform, a half-glimpsed scene in a far window is almost incidental to the building framing it. Odd shafts of light create strange geometries, while one building crowds the next and creates dramatic cut-offs in the framing.

To trace Hopper is a wonderful invitation to avoid "doing" the usual round: no Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall this time, no books from Barnes and Noble (though Hopper may not have approved of that, being an avid reader all his life), no Tower Records, not even the foodie heaven of Dean and Deluca - itself a major act of self-denial. Hopper invites you to look at the city in a different way - to consider it beyond its in-your-face blare. He even invites you to look beyond reality - his paintings are not specific portraits, more careful compositions of separate visual incidents that make an intriguing dramatic situation, or a heavily cropped view that creates a single incident of light on a wall or a corner of architecture.

We spent time looking out for the row of houses on Seventh Avenue that could make up the parade of shops in Early Sunday Morning: a red-painted, two storey march-past of windows and shop-fronts, the only identifying features a barbershop pole and fire hydrant lit from the side by the sun's early rays. There was something like it down below 22nd Street, but I'm sure the buildings were higher and had fire escapes. (When did fire escape ladders become such a distinguishing feature on New York tenement buildings? Was it after the 1911 disaster in a top floor sweatshop near Washington Square when 140 workers were killed in a blaze? Fire escapes are pretty rare in the Hopper scheme of things.)

The Whitney Museum of American Art on Madison and 75th is the first stop-off for a bit of Hopper orientation. A champion of Hopper's work from the 1930s (when it opened in Greenwich Village), it boasts the biggest single collection of his works, bequeathed by Jo Hopper on her death - only ten months after her husband's. Early Sunday Morning is there, along with Hopper's self-portraits and early paintings (including several from his study trips to France between 1903 and 1906) and some of his strange late views.

A Woman in the Sun, from 1961, has a gigantic nude standing smoking in a shaft of low lemon sunlight, low hills framed in a window beyond. A year earlier Hopper painted Second Storey Sunlight, which features two women on the balcony of a fiercesomely pointed white building, gothic in the pitch of the roofs. On one side an older woman in a chair, severely dressed, stares blankly out beyond her newspaper, while on the opposite balustrade a younger woman in a swimsuit stands with her head arched over her shoulder in a Miss World pose. Behind her the blinds are half drawn - half disapproving, half peeping. Both pictures are utterly improbable, yet they set the mind whirring and re-focus the eye on the New York you find in the street.

It was foolish to even think of finding the diner in Nighthawks - empty of anything except salt and pepper, the sugar pourer and a tissue holder. Where the hell are the ketchup, mustard and mayo - the milk even? There's no menu, no special offers chalked on the glass. The shop across the road may have a till but it has nothing to sell. Painted in 1930, it's thought of as a metaphor for the Depression years after the 1929 Wall Street crash. But if the diner itself doesn't exist, you can certainly encounter the downbeat mood if you care to look.

Down on 22nd Street and 10th Avenue, the Empire Diner is a must for New York tourists - open round the clock and with a line of hungry customers waiting out on the pavement at peak feeding time. Along with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State it has a certain period style (black and chrome and mirrors), while Mark the maitre d' presides as a high-class, and camp, nanny: "We do NOT sit at dirty tables. Will you just stand up so the waiter can clean. That's so you don't sue us if something drops on you - food spills and we get complaints! And the postcards are free."

It's raucous and cramped, but great for people-watching. At the next table is a perfect Hopper dysfunctional - she's with a group of friends but doesn't engage with them - they talk around her while she stares vacantly beyond. As in so many Hopper paintings she's a somewhat past-it blond, her hair not quite the shining shoulder length she'd once tossed at passing fancies. Quite clearly she's put her face in the dishwasher too many times. But it's her eyes that have that strange Hopper quality of looking but not seeing: huge, a little too moist for comfort but not wet enough for weeping, they have an impossibly bright blue intensity. We agree the colour isn't from lenses, and she gives us all the spooks. When she gets home I know she's going to take off all her clothes and stand soaking in that rectangle of Hopper sunlight that pours into her anonymous room for half an hour in the late afternoon. Incidentally, my burger comes with strange flaccid discs that turn out to be fried slices of potato (instead of the supposedly still unacceptable French fries). The meat is a serious disappointment - mushy with no resistance to the jaw - the bun is soggy and so is the salad. There's no satisfaction in chewing, so why bother?

What was Hopper doing eating in diners? When he was in Paris soaking in the art didn't he eat something decent as well? Perhaps food wasn't terribly important, unlike coffee which features in several of his paintings. This behaviour is not very New York at all, where eating is the signature activity. At the end of his life, in his eighties, Hopper was apparently cadaverous, with very little meat on his six-foot-four frame. Wicked thoughts occur that his wife Jo might have starved him for punishment - they had a famously difficult marriage, she feeling that her talent as an artist was undermined by his. There are cartoons by Hopper showing mealtimes with him as a skeleton, on all fours, holding up his plate for food while she ignores him and reads the paper.

What would he have thought of Grand Central Station, which, after its multi-million dollar face-lift, now includes four new eateries and the most astonishing food market of delicacies from around the world alongside local meat and fish? Not forgetting the oyster bar, where the mind boggles at the choice of mollusc - literally dozens from up and down both seaboards. Those who can eat them say they're delicious. Those who can't will find the clam chowder perfect material for gluing wallpaper.

Trains feature heavily in Hopper's work - the track, carriages, views from the carriage. The Hoppers would certainly have set off from Grand Central to go upstate to Nyack, Hopper's home town where he kept the car, before taking off for the summer in their house in South Truro, Cape Cod. He also loved cross-country drives past gas stations, Best Western motels, diners and strange mansions like House by the Railroad, an example of the kind of architecture long unfashionable by the Twenties but which so electrified Hitchcock for Psycho in 1960. Incidentally both the Nyack house (at 82 North Broadway) and the one in Cape Cod are largely unchanged, and the Nyack house is now open to the public as an arts centre.

Built in 1913, Grand Central is a relatively recent landmark in the Hopper canon. Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883, a year after he was born, while the Williamsburg Bridge was finished in 1903 - he'd have seen it going up as he studied at the New York School of Art. Hopper's obvious enjoyment of looking into other people's windows is blatant in his 1928 painting Williamsburg Bridge. The parapet dissects the architecture of four buildings - we get the top two or three storeys only, their windows again more or less blanked off with blinds, fancy lintels, cornicing and the odd chimney - while right at the top, in the sun, a small figure sits in a window.

Look into other people's windows and you catch some intriguing situations: night-time half-views of a woman bending over in her slip, the boss and his secretary at the filing cabinet, some office girl glimpsed at street level. You can still get that kind of treat, even though Hopper's ideal vehicle, the 3rd Avenue "El" (an elevated commuter railway that was perfect for peeping), is no longer part of New York. These days the best bet is the bus , even though it's the cross streets rather than the avenues which offer the most promising prospects. As with Hopper's paintings, it's about the drama in the glimpse of an event, something which has been going on before you saw it and will continue after. Whatever "it" may be is up to your imagination, although Hopper would prefer it if you didn't "read" any particular story into it.

While looking for Hopper you begin to understand - if only a little - that he needed a kind of click to get from what he saw to the heart of his work. As the external world changed it became more difficult to make that essential link between what he saw, (in his quiet way, standing back and simply observing) and an interior response. It's quite frustrating now in the noise and pace of New York to find those serendipitous moments that might have turned Hopper on.

Taking the Circle Line tourist trip provides a sense of detachment from the frenzy. You certainly get close to those astonishing bridges, now rusting badly when seen from below, and you're numbed by the sightless windows of apartment blocks overlooking the river. Other amazing sights include mad architectural follies, rooftop water towers, slums that can't have changed for decades, and right up by University Heights bridge, what looked like an El station. Hurrah! And then I remembered the Hopper maxim: "Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world." The inner life of the human being is a vast and varied realm. In Hopper's studio I met 95-year-old Joseph Solman, an old painting acquaintance of the artist who arrived as a three year old from Vitebsk and grew up bursting to break open the establishment view of American art. He branded Hopper a "tight Yankee", tight as in frugal, part of the old order of America whose family arrived way back and who kept to unostentatious New England ways - reading; going to the films and theatre; holidaying quietly in Cape Cod. The resort is still a tranquil escape from the mad rush and provides an opportunity for another kind of Hopper experience - of light and sky and clapboard houses harbouring deep black secret shadows. Solman couldn't believe that Hopper rode in buses even when famous and delivered his paintings himself, and to the end climbed up those 74 steps with buckets of coal for the pot- bellied stove that was his only heat. This is not part of the New York dream where success must scream its precise dollar value.

Hopper's "eye" really stopped in the Thirties and Forties, and was certainly out of favour as post-war New York began its frantic capitulation to celebrity and consumerism. His later paintings get more enigmatic, the drama of the city pared away, the architecture overwhelming, the human figure feeling more strangely alone then ever. At the end he painted Two Comedians, sightless pierrots bowing out on an unknown stage with a hint of greenery to the right. At his funeral there might have been seven or eight around the graveside in Nyack.

As the taxi sped away to Kennedy airport, I wondered morosely whether we'd been a bit sentimental pursuing a Hopper "trail". Then we hit the Queensboro Bridge and saw the parape, slicing through architecture, the windows beyond their blinds half down or up. And was that a woman sitting in the sunset in the top floor window?

Natalie Wheen broadcasts for Classic FM weekend afternoons at 4pm. On Sunday 6 June she will feature music to go with themes and images from Edward Hopper. The Edward Hopper exhibition at the Tate Modern (020-7887 8008, www.tate.org.uk) runs from 27 May- 5 September.

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE By Sophie Lam

GETTING THERE

The writer travelled courtesy of Tate Modern and American Airlines (0845 778 9789; www.americanairlines.co.uk) which has six daily flights from Heathrow to JFK from £430 in June. American Airlines has sponsored the Edward Hopper exhibition at London's Tate Modern (020-7887 8008; www.tate.org.uk).

Other airlines which fly direct to New York from the UK include British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com), Virgin Atlantic (0870 380 2007, www.virgin-atlantic.com) and Continental (0845 607 6760; www.continental.com). The cheapest fares are likely to be through a discount agent such as Trailfinders (020-7292 1888) which has flights for around £300 with Air India from London Heathrow to JFK.

STAYING THERE

The newly opened Hotel Gansevoort (001 212 206 6700; www.hotelgansevoort.com) at 18 9th Avenue and 13th Street in SoHo has doubles from $350 (£219) including breakfast.

The Habitat Hotel (001 212 753 8841; www.habitatny.com) at 130 East 57th Street, in Midtown, has doubles from $108 (£68) with a shared bathroom, room only.

EATING THERE

The Empire Diner (001 212 924 0011) at 210 10th Avenue and 22nd Street is open 24 hours, apart from Tuesdays when they close from around 4am until 8.30am.

The Market Diner (001 212 695 0415) at 572 11th Avenue and 43rd Street is open 24 hours.

The newly restored Lunchbox Food Company (001 646 230 9466) at 357 West Street is open for breakfast and lunch from 9am-4pm Monday-Friday and dinner from 6pm-11pm Sunday-Wednesday, and until 12pm Thursday-Saturday. The diner is open for brunch at weekends from 9am-4pm. The Grand Central Oyster Bar (001 212 490 6650; www.oysterbarny.com) is open for lunch and dinner 11.30am-9.30pm Monday-Friday and on Saturday 12pm-9.30pm, closed Sundays.

MUSEUMS

The Whitney Museum of American Art (001 212 570 3600, www.whitney.org) at 945 Madison Avenue and 75th Street is open Wednesday-Sunday 11am-6pm, except Friday when it is open 1pm-9pm. Admission is $12 (£7.50).

The Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack (www.edwardhopperhouseartcenter.org; 001 845 358 0774) at 82 North Broadway is open Thursday-Sunday from 1pm-5pm. MoMA (001 212 708 9400; www.moma.org) is being renovated. Exhibits have been re-housed at MoMA QNS at 33 Street at Queens Boulevard and also at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center at 22-25 Jackson Avenue (001 718 784 2084; www.ps1.org). MoMA QNS opens Thursday-Monday from 10am-5pm and until 7.45pm on Friday. Admission $12 (£7.50).

Interesting? Click here to explore further