Edward Hopper - Gas

The gas station in this painting sits beside a narrow road empty of traffic, away from the rushing urgency of a highway. It is dusk and the light within the building and above the three signal-red pumps and particularly the light that illuminates the Mobilgas sign, stand as beacons to welcome travellers. The station is a refuge, a place of safety at which to stop and rest a while, and also a place where a longer journey may be sustained; refuelling facilitates the voyage onwards and serves that mythic American impetus to be ‘on the road,’ to seek, to explore. Visitors to this place will stop, but just a while. Halts here may be temporary, but the painting speaks of a more general temporality.

Edward Hopper, Gas (1940), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York

The attendant / owner is dressed in a collar and tie and indicates that this place as a mom-and-pop business. He is intently and diligently rearranging what might be cans of oil for sale, his hands hidden from our view. In this he dutifully maintains standards. But in his solitude (no other figure is visible), he seems vulnerable, more so to modern eyes that anticipate the gas station robbery trope familiar to us from film and TV dramas. With his balding head, unbuttoned vest, and gaunt aspect, he cuts a lonely figure. The gas pumps tower above him (Hopper deliberately exaggerated their actual size at the time) so that he operates supplicatingly at their service rather than the other way round. The clapboard cabin’s red roof, its dovecote or belfry and its weathervane makes it look like a New England church or a temple, but one which glorifies only the god of commerce - the unholy petroleum spirit. The debased sanctity theme is echoed in those pumps. They are like latter-day totem poles that have supplanted those made by the indigenous peoples who would once have erected their monuments to family lineage, history, and the supernatural. These new pillars signal progress, movement, but also the annihilation of ancient respect for nature. Despite this, something otherworldly lingers in the scene.

At one level, the painting functions as a celebration of Americana, with its iconographic symbols of ‘big oil’ (Mobil was one of the ‘seven sisters’ a group controlling global oil supply), those mighty corporations which extracted abundant natural resource from the earth and marketed it to power the US economy to heights never seen before and to give freedom, autonomy and identity to the everyman in the ‘golden age’ of the automobile.  The colours of nationality, red, white, and blue, feature significantly and the figure depicted is thus celebrated as a tiny cog in that behemoth of a machine that was the US domestic economy. At another level, the painting unsettles through the contrast between its commercial and jarringly colourful chauvinism and the brooding unknowability of nature, the green forested wilderness beyond the road.

As in many of Hopper’s works, the distillation of detail and the figural seclusion invokes an uncanniness to the scene. What would have seemed a familiar sight in 1940s rural America and a welcome one to the motorist, is somehow made unfamiliar even spooky. It feels like something is about to happen, and not something good. The evident silence of the woods and the absence of customers feel ominous. Although the light from inside the building reaches out across the forecourt ground and onto the large tree beside the lamppost, its comfort has its limits. Soon it will be fully dark and the shadows it has created will deepen and the stillness of the forest will become even more oppressive.

Like a throwback to a medieval joust tournament, a Mobilgas pennant bearing the Pegasus logo is held by the lance-like lamppost pointed up into the twilit sky. The lower quarter of this pole is painted the same colour as the fuel pumps and logo to reinforce brand identity, but also making it look like a giant dipstick, subliminally prompting motorists to check their engines and also signalling an abundant oil level below ground.

But to mix historical references, Pegasus was actually the winged horse of ancient Greek myth, a carrier of thunder and lightning, flashing at unfeasible speed between the realms of heaven and earth. This particular Pegasus is rather more prosaically mercantile but I’m sure that by choosing such an image for their brand, the marketing men of Mobil wanted to project or borrow something inspirational from its flight, its effortless energy and miraculous movement, as it slips ‘the surly bonds of earth.’ It reinforces the idea of the traveller’s individual liberty, agency, and self-determination. The winged horse summons the idea of journeying the open road as an odyssey, where its gas station auxiliaries stand sentry along its way.

Hopper (having once worked as a commercial illustrator) undoubtedly recognised this and was moved by the way this incarnation of Pegasus soars aloft into the sky while a further phalanx of them stands in attendance atop the gas pumps. At the same time, the totemic pumps that stand in front of the chapel-like kiosk call to mind the roadside shrines seen in many cultures and which often commemorate the dead or provide waypoints on pilgrimage routes. Either way, the painting seems to gesture, ironically or not, to quasi-divine interventions that can provide comfort or guidance to weary wayfarers. By this reading, the attendant is like an officiant or celebrant, mediating between the almighty oil majors and their motorist congregation, humbly ministering to their needs; meanwhile he bows before the halo-headed roundels of the ‘divine’ fuel fountainheads.

The strangeness conjured by the conjunction of electric light and the still light evening sky reminds me of the work by René Magritte, The Empire of Light, multiple versions of which he made between 1939 and 1967. Their effect is oddly both compelling and discombobulating, inviting the viewer to anticipate the cosiness and order inside the nighttime house while outside the fine, fair-weather daylit sky prompts a psychic dissonance.

René Magritte, The Empire of Light (1954), Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels

Gas is set at a similarly liminal time of day with all the impossible logic of a surreal dreamscape.

The painting is also about uncertain time in another way. The attendant is waiting for a customer to appear, if he is not to lose any more hair or become even more stooped through work and worry, his efforts to make an honest living. Has the long-awaited American dream failed to arrive for him yet? Then there is the yawning unknowability of geological time. Those trees in the painting may have been of the same kind that died aeons ago and were buried and compressed to form coal, just as ancient marine life was transformed over millennia to form the oil now extracted to make energy and profit. There is a gulf that lies between the quotidian impermanence of a single life spent in subsistent service to a corporation and nature’s infinite timelessness.

The brevity and ambiguity of the painting’s title, Gas, underlines the sense of ethereality that imbues it, as if any solidity we observe in it is impermanent. Gasoline itself will of course evaporate but known in physics as a fundamental state of matter, a gas has no fixed shape or volume, and its disorder is prone to entropy. Similarly, the attendant’s seeming self-effacement is like a haunting premonition of what will become a reality in time, his erasure. The boarded building will weather and decay, new totems may come but they too will fall and Pegasus will fly away, leaving only ghosts and nature to reclaim it all.