[Office at Night] was probably first suggested by many rides on the “L” train in New York City after dark, and glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind. I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended. —Edward Hopper
Although Edward Hopper refuses an obvious reading of his painting Office at Night, I found an age-old story, and I take a position: I believe the secretary.
She stands in an unnaturally bright office, at night. The boss sits at his desk intently working when a gust of wind disturbs his papers. The secretary turns from her task at the filing cabinet, now considering an ambiguous action: will she bend, picking up a piece of paper that drifted to the office floor?
Hopper paints us into a corner. We become voyeurs, eternal witnesses to the possibility of misconduct.
From the time the Walker Art Center acquired this painting in 1948 to its display in the Walker’s current exhibition Five Ways In: Themes from the Permanent Collection, the work has challenged audiences with the unsettling suggestion of wrongdoing in the workplace. By staging a familiar tension between the secretary and boss, Office at Night alludes to the inappropriate behavior that women often confront in professional spaces.
Hopper completed this painting in the 1940s—a moment when women began entering the labor force in large numbers to keep the workforce afloat during Second World War. This bit of history was included in a timeline for Women at Work, an interpretive exhibition that the Walker mounted in 1996. Using Office at Night as a jumping-off point, the interactive display told the history of women in the workplace through the decades.
Among other issues, the exhibition specifically addressed the inequities in “pink-collar” work or jobs that are typically performed by women, involve care-oriented tasks, and earn low wages. As a culture, we undervalue household work: from child-rearing and relationship-building to maintenance and routine tasks. The “pink collar” attaches itself to any kind of “domestic work” that is performed outside the home. So naturally, the dynamic between men and women at home brings itself to work.
In Office at Night, we feel the uncertain power of the working woman: above all, she is a threat. The paycheck that she earns becomes agency in her relationships, economic mobility, and influence in the public sphere. In his picture, Hopper paints the secretary standing tall, as big as the filing cabinet. Her physical presence exerts force. On the other hand, Hopper reminds us of her reproductive potential—she wears a tight dress and twists at an angle that manages to emphasize all her curves. Will she overpower the man by threatening his earning potential or by the powers of seduction? It is the real-life power imbalance between men and women fuels the tension in Hopper’s painting.
Few things demonstrate this more clearly than the Walker’s object file for Hopper’s painting. Spread across four folders and overflowing with paperwork, one can literally grasp the obsessive interest in Hopper’s work. For decades, individuals and institutions have steadily requested to borrow the painting for exhibitions or use its image in publication. And whether reproduced in a monograph or an academic essay, this painting always materializes a clash between our subjectivities and formal qualities or “the facts.”
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Exhibition view of Women At Work, 1996. Courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives
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Exhibition view of Women At Work, 1996. Courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives
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Exhibition view of Women At Work, 1996. Courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives
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Exhibition view of Women At Work, 1996. Courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives
In 2019, 70 years after the Walker acquired Office at Night, I think about workplace misconduct and exploitative workplace behavior in the context of #MeToo. Leading from the perspective of survivors, the movement brings together resources, organizing efforts, and communities to combat sexualized violence at the office and beyond.
The movement also parallels this painting in that they both eschew any serious engagement with race and its intersection sexualized violence in the workplace. #MeToo first gained momentum unattached from the name of its founder, Tarana Burke—who is a Black woman, advocate, and organizer. Keeping the omission in mind, I question: who does the domestic labor while Hopper’s secretary is at work? Historically, that person would be a woman of color. Where is her agency? Where is her voice? #MeToo brings perspective and visibility where before, as in Hopper’s painting, things are hidden or only incidentally seen.
With all of this in mind, when I read Office at Night, I think: the secretary is in a vulnerable position as she stands at the filing cabinet. Her desk is subordinated to the bottom left corner of the picture, while the man is obscured and protected by his executive-style desk. In Hopper’s composition, secretarial work puts the woman in a physically compromising position. She is either squeezed into an unseen, impossibly small space or completely exposed. But what is the place of my subjectivity in Hopper’s painting?
I think that my subjectivity is part and parcel of Hopper’s painting. Hopper has an uncanny ability to transform mundane scenes into a minefield of intersecting dangers and desires. He submerges his viewers into psychological territory, where he then compels us to wrestle with ourselves. In what ways do we gender labor in the workplace? For whom is this painting purely formal? Should we use our own experiences in our interpretation? (Is there anything to stop us from doing so?) Why is the tension in this painting still relevant? What does that say about our culture?
The story in Hopper’s painting is always current and contemporary because he places his viewers in the position of a voyeur: a seat for speculation and passive participation. Each viewer/voyeur uses their understanding of history and culture, as well as their own experiences, to fill the narrative.
So I am granting myself permission to be subjective. I believe the secretary. I write a story that is, otherwise, forever unsaid.
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