Everyone on the set of Psycho remembers it differently.
Production designer Robert Clatworthy said that he based the design of the Bates Motel on Edward Hopper’s 1925 painting, House by the Railroad.1 Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay, “told [Anthony Perkins] that [he] felt that Norman Bates, if he were a painting, would be painted by Hopper.”2 Robert F. Boyle, who worked with Hitchcock on a number of movies, was directly influenced by the American painter — but Boyle didn’t work on Psycho.3 Hopper alleged to have been “delighted to learn” that Hitchcock was inspired by his work,4 but it’s hard to track down any such remark from the director. For his part, the pear-shaped Brit told slender French director François Truffaut that “the actual locale of the events is in northern California, where that type of house is very common. They’re either called ‘California Gothic,’ or, when they're particularly awful, they're called ‘California gingerbread.’”5
But probably even that wasn’t right: the famously-thrifty director actually just hauled in an existing set from a previous movie. Lock, stock, and barrel, the Psycho house is Jimmy Stewart’s haunt from Harvey, the screwball comedy about an invisible bunny.6
Production designer, script-writer, director, or mere happenstance — the film confirmed for the 20th-century imagination just exactly what a haunted house looks like: a derelict Victorian mansion, passed-over by road to the future.
II. Left to Rot Alone in the Abandoned Countryside.
Hopper gets a lot of credit for House by the Railroad, and he deserves a lot of credit, but whatever was in the water on the set of Pscyho had already entered the zeitgeist completely by the time Hitchcock got to it. The image of the Haunted House was essentially hashed out in a debate over the modernism around 1930. Hopper’s picture suggests the basic shape: an antiquated hulk of a house sits empty, the sun setting on it as a railroad passes it by. Here is one American dream that gets left by the wayside on the grand journey of progress.
It’s also a symbol of the battle of what modernism would be. This is an early Hopper oil when the painter was struggling to break in, making his only money from sales through a dealer named Frank Rehn. Rehn showed “realism”: scenes of local life, moody or charming. The year House by the Railroad was painted, Hopper got married to a realist painter, with a realist painter as his best man; and he sold a major oil to another member of the Rehn stable: George Bellows. Rehn had just cemented Bellows’ fame by flogging Bellows’ (relatively) inexpensive etchings of boxing scenes. Hopper was encouraged to do the same — sell etchings and watercolors of evocative regional scenes. Hopper would stay with Rehn for the rest of his career, and he lived to see his way of painting — one big, realist oil painting a year — entirely eclipsed by abstract expressionism. He couldn’t have known it in 1925, but Hopper himself became a kind of house by the railroad: an overlarge mansion passed over by the shiny new modernity.
But in the 1920s, Rehn’s project was still gathering steam, and in 1929 he added the Cleveland/Buffalo painter Charles Burchfield to the stable. Burchfield shared with Hopper a love of a spooky house. While Hopper was painting House by the Railroad, Burchfield was at work on his own terrifying vision of a hulking, Victorian mansion: House of Death. His dealer compelled him to change the title to the softer House of Mystery before it was ultimately sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, but that gothic flair wasn’t the height of the painter’s eccentricities.
Burchfield had developed a personal language of symbols in 1917, making him one of the first abstract painters in America and a visionary of global significance. But he set aside his codices of “Conventions for Abstract Thought” the following year when he was pressed into service by Uncle Sam. His job was disguise, not revelation: he designed camouflage. He later lamented not being good at it: “It was impossible for me to do straight camouflage. I had to have a poetic idea back of my designs.”7 But when his tour ended, he found another distraction from his abstract art, designing camouflage for the home. From the end of his service until he joined Rehn, he designed wallpaper. Rehn encouraged Burchfield to continue to paint charming regional scenes — in inexpensive watercolor rather than oil.
Now stablemates, Burchfield and Hopper became good friends. They continued to paint lonely houses with windows for eyes and black doorways yawning, almost entirely in watercolor.8 The “Haunted Regional” style was becoming famous: in 1930, MoMA bought House by the Railroad; Grant Wood painted American Gothic; and the next year Lincoln Kirstein dragged a young photographer named Walker Evans on a tri-state-area tour of dilapidated Victorian mansions. Evans complained of being essentially a “only a paid photographer,” but when finished it toured the country as his Victorian Series. One art historian described why Evans’ “paid photography” captured the modern imagination:
“Evans's Victorian houses were ciphers of such transience, silent glimpsed reminders of the vanishing world in the wake of the skyscrapers that now towered like anachronistic totems of greed in the unravelling Machine Age.”9
The Victorian mansion was now the face of America haunted by its discarded past — so much so that New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams lampooned the spooky-house craze with a long-running series that grew into the vast Addams Family franchise.10
III. The Modernism Was Coming From Inside The House!
Burchfield failed as a camoufleur because he wanted to reveal, not hide, his innermost thoughts. The hold that Rehn and Realism held over the painter ultimately waned for the same reason. Burchfield’s faustian bargain did keep him solvent, but the real corpus that he yearned to express remained buried.
And what does every horror movie teach us about buried secrets?
Eventually, Burchfield’s demons got out — and when they did, his work transformed into a magic far beyond the scope of abstract art. When in the late 1940s he returned to his Conventions for Abstract Thought, it was as if waking from a decades-long nightmare. Burchfield picked up exactly where he left off. He identified 1917 as his Golden Year, rummaging sheets out of the attic and continuing to work on the same pieces of paper he had begun that fantastical year. He added to compositions, pasting on additional sheets of paper, adding layers of black ink, filling page after page with his strange, abstract runes, hinting at dark impulses and cosmic loneliness. His final decade was perhaps his most productive. It’s interesting to wonder how the story of American art would have been different if this visionary had not been diverted for three decades by military, commercial, and dealer insistence that he bury his awkward feelings behind the facades of haunted houses.
Happy Halloween (a couple days late)! Join us for our first in-person exhibition, Paul Shore’s ManhattoLand at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, a co-production of Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art and C. G. Boerner at Blackburn 20|20, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, November 2-20, 2021, Tuesday - Saturday, noon-6 pm. Masks and vaccination required.
As quoted in the Alfred Hitchcock Geek blog, here.
This interview with Boyle, from the Criterion collection, is really cool.
As quoted in Hitchcock/Truffaut, Simon and Schuster, 1984.
As quoted in Charles Burchfield By Design.
Hopper’s pace slowed, and Burchfield stopped painting in oil after about two dozen canvases.
Barnaby Haran, “Homeless Houses: Classifying Walker Evans's Photographs of Victorian Architecture,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2010.
Sarah Burns, “Better for Haunts: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination,” American Art, vol. 26, no. 3, 2012, pp. 2-25.