The last time I saw anything at all about Hopper was years ago, and that was at the Metropolitan Museum as I remember...
Here is more about one of 20th Century America's most influential artists...who did the "Noir" side of Norman Rockwell's Happy American Paintings...
Here is an odd note: one of the first big breaks Hopper got with showing his work in Manhattan came in 1920, when they chose to give him a one-man show at "The Whitney Club"--which later became the Whitney Museum...So it appears the Whitney has had a long association with him.
Again, Wikipedia article is great but way too long, so I tried attaching part of it and removing some paragraphs that I found boring...which somehow did not work due to some electronic glitch -will try now again..but I find it so hard to delete information, the more I read it the more it grips me.
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.[1]
Biography
Early life
Hopper was born in upper Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River north of New York City.[2] He was one of two children of a comfortably well-off, middle-class family. His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant, and his wife Elizabeth Griffiths Smith.[3] 6] His birthplace and boyhood home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. Today the house is the Edward Hopper House Art Center.[7] It serves as a non-profit community cultural center featuring exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances and special events.[8]Hopper was a good student in grade school and showed talent in drawing at age five. He readily absorbed his father’s intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian culture. He also demonstrated his mother’s artistic heritage.[9] Hopper’s parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books. By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil—drawing from nature as well as making political cartoons.[10] In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove. It showed his early interest in nautical subjects.[11]
In his early self-portraits, Hopper tended to represent himself as skinny, ungraceful, and homely. Though a tall and quiet teenager, his prankish sense of humor found outlet in his art, sometimes in depictions of immigrants or of women dominating men in comic situations. Later in life, he depicted mostly women as figures in his paintings.[12] In high school, he dreamed of being a naval architect, but after graduation he declared his intention to follow an art career. Hopper’s parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income.[13] In developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Hopper was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He later said, “I admire him greatly…I read him over and over again.”[14]
Hopper began art studies with a correspondence course in 1899. Soon, however, he transferred to the New York Institute of Art and Design. There he studied for six years, with teachers including William Merritt Chase, who instructed him in oil painting.[13] Early on, Hopper modeled his style after Chase and French masters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.[15] Sketching from live models proved a challenge and a shock for the conservatively raised Hopper.
In 1905, Hopper landed a part-time job with an advertising agency, where he did cover designs for trade magazines.[19] Hopper came to detest illustration. He was bound to it by economic necessity until the mid-1920s.[20] He temporarily escaped by making three trips to Europe, each centered in Paris, ostensibly to study the emerging art scene there. In fact, however, he studied alone and seemed mostly unaffected by the new currents in art. Later he said that he “didn’t remember having heard of Picasso at all.”[16] He was highly impressed by Rembrandt, particularly his Night Watch, which he said was “the most wonderful thing of his I have seen; it’s past belief in its reality.”[21]
Hopper began painting urban and architectural scenes in a dark palette. Then he shifted to the lighter palette of the Impressionists before returning to the darker palette with which he was comfortable. Hopper later said, "I got over that and later things done in Paris were more the kind of things I do now.”[22] Hopper spent much of his time drawing street and café scenes, and going to the theater and opera. Unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated the abstract cubist experiments, Hopper was attracted to realist art. Later, he admitted to no European influences other than French engraver Charles Méryon, whose moody Paris scenes Hopper imitated.[23]
Years of struggle
In 1913, at the famous Armory Show, Hopper sold his first painting, Sailing (1911), which he painted over an earlier self-portrait.[28] Hopper was thirty-one, and though he hoped his first sale would lead to others in short order, his career would not catch fire for many more years to come.[29] Shortly after his father’s death that same year, Hopper moved to the Washington Square apartment in the Greenwich Village section of New York City where he would live for the rest of his life.
At an impasse over his oil paintings, in 1915 Hopper turned to etching, producing about 70 works, many of urban scenes of both Paris and New York.[32] He also produced some posters for the war effort, as well as continuing with occasional commercial projects.[33] When he could, Hopper did some outdoor watercolors on visits to New England, especially at the art colonies at Ogunquit, Maine, and Monhegan Island. His etchings around 1920 began to get public recognition and expressed some of his later themes, as in Night on the El Train (couples in silence), Evening Wind (solitary female), and The Catboat (simple nautical scene).[34] Two notable oil paintings of this time were New York Interior (1921) and New York Restaurant (1922).[35] He also painted two of his many “window” paintings to come: Girl at Sewing Machine and Moonlight Interior, that show a figure (clothed or nude) near or gazing out a window of an apartment or viewed from the outside looking in.[36]
Although these were frustrating years, they did not go by completely without recognition. In 1918, Hopper was awarded the U.S. Shipping Board Prize for his war poster, “Smash the Hun,” and he was able to exhibit on three occasions: in 1917 with the Society of Independent Artists, in January 1920 (a one-man exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club, which was the precursor to the Whitney Museum), and in 1922 (again with the Whitney Studio Club). In 1923, Hopper received two awards for his etchings: the Logan Prize from the Chicago Society of Etchers, and the W.A. Bryan Prize.[37]
Breakthrough and mature career
With Nivison’s help, six of Hopper’s Gloucester watercolors were admitted to an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 1923. One of them, The Mansard Roof, was purchased by the museum for its permanent collection for the sum of $100.[39] The critics generally raved about his work; one stated, “What vitality, force and directness! Observe what can be done with the homeliest subject.”[39] Hopper sold all his watercolors at a one-man show the following year and finally decided to put illustration behind him.
The artist had demonstrated his ability to transfer his attraction to Parisian architecture to American urban and rural architecture. According to Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator Carol Troyen, "Hopper really liked the way these houses, with their turrets and towers and porches and mansard roofs and ornament cast wonderful shadows. He always said that his favorite thing was painting sunlight on the side of a house."[40]
At forty-one, Hopper received further recognition for his work. He continued to harbor bitterness about his career, later turning down appearances and awards.[38] His financial stability now secured, Hopper would live a simple, stable life and continue creating art in his distinctive style for four more decades.
His Two on the Aisle (1927) sold for a personal record $1,500, enabling Hopper to purchase an automobile, which he used to make field trips to remote areas of New England.[41] In 1929, he produced Chop Suey and Railroad Sunset. The following year, art patron Stephen Clark donated House by the Railroad (1925) to the Museum of Modern Art, the first oil painting it acquired for its collection.[42] Hopper painted his last self-portrait in oil around 1930. Though she posed for many of his paintings, Josephine modeled for only one oil portrait, Jo Painting (1936).[43]
Hopper fared better than many other artists during the Great Depression. His stature took a sharp rise in 1931 when major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, paid thousands of dollars for his works. He sold 30 paintings that year, including 13 watercolors.[41] The following year he participated in the first Whitney Annual, and he continued to exhibit in every annual at the museum for the rest of his life.[41] In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first large-scale retrospective.[44] The Hoppers built their summer house in South Truro in 1934.
Hopper was very productive through the 1930s and early 1940s, producing among many important works New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City (1944). During the late 1940s, however, he suffered a period of relative inactivity. He admitted, “I wish I could paint more. I get sick of reading and going to the movies.”[45] In the two decades to come his health faltered, and he had several prostate surgeries and other medical problems.[45] Nonetheless, in the 1950s and early 1960s, he created several more major works, including First Row Orchestra (1951); as well as Morning Sun and Hotel by a Railroad, both in 1952; and Intermission (1963).[46]
Death
Hopper died in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on May 15, 1967. His wife, who died 10 months later, bequeathed their joint collection of over three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American Art.[47] Other significant paintings by Hopper are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.Hopper’s art
Personality and vision
Always reluctant to discuss himself and his art, Hopper simply summed up his art by stating, “The whole answer is there on the canvas.”[44] Hopper was stoic and fatalistic—a quiet introverted man with a gentle sense of humor and a frank manner. Conservative in politics and social matters, he accepted things as they were and displayed a lack of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was well-read, and many of his paintings show figures reading.[48] He was generally good company and unperturbed by silences, though sometimes taciturn, grumpy or detached. He was always serious about his art and the art of others, and when asked would return frank opinions.[49]Hopper's most systematic declaration of his philosophy as an artist was given in a handwritten note, titled "Statement", submitted in 1953 to the journal, Reality:
| “ | 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. No amount of
skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One
of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to
substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private
imaginative conception.
The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does
not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form
and design. The term life used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.[50] |
” |
Methods
Although he is best known for his oil paintings, Hopper initially achieved recognition for his watercolors and he also produced some commercially successful etchings. Additionally, his notebooks contain high-quality pen and pencil sketches, which were never meant for public viewing.Hopper paid particular attention to geometrical design and the careful placement of human figures in proper balance with their environment. He was a slow and methodical artist; as he wrote, “It takes a long time for an idea to strike. Then I have to think about it for a long time. I don’t start painting until I have it all worked out in my mind. I’m all right when I get to the easel".[52] He often made preparatory sketches to work out his carefully calculated compositions. He and his wife kept a detailed ledger of their works noting such items as “sad face of woman unlit”, “electric light from ceiling”, and “thighs cooler”.[53]
For New York Movie (1939), Hopper demonstrates his thorough preparation with more than 53 sketches of the theater interior and the figure of the pensive usherette.[54]
The effective use of light and shadow to create mood is also central to Hopper’s methods. Bright sunlight (as an emblem of insight or revelation), and the shadows it casts, also play symbolically powerful roles in Hopper paintings such as Early Sunday Morning (1930), Summertime (1943), Seven A.M. (1948), and Sun in an Empty Room (1963). His use of light and shadow effects have been compared to the cinematography of film noir.[55]
Though a realist painter, Hopper’s “soft” realism simplified shapes and details. He used saturated color to heighten contrast and create mood.
Subjects and themes
Hopper’s seascapes fall into three main groups: pure landscapes of rocks, sea, and beach grass; lighthouses and farmhouses; and sailboats. Sometimes he combined these elements. Most of these paintings depict strong light and fair weather; he showed little interest in snow or rain scenes, or in seasonal color changes. He painted the majority of the pure seascapes in the period between 1916 and 1919 on Monhegan Island.[57] Hopper’s The Long Leg (1935) is a nearly all-blue sailing picture with the simplest of elements, while his Ground Swell (1939) is more complex and depicts a group of youngsters out for a sail, a theme reminiscent of Winslow Homer’s iconic Breezing Up (1876).[58]
Urban architecture and cityscapes were also major subjects for Hopper. He was fascinated with the American urban scene, “our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo-gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not, with eye-searing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps.”[59]
In 1925, he produced House by the Railroad. This classic work depicts an isolated Victorian wood mansion, partly obscured by the raised embankment of a railroad. It marked Hopper’s artistic maturity. Critic Lloyd Goodrich praised the work as “one of the most poignant and desolating pieces of realism.”[60] The work is the first of a series of stark rural and urban scenes that uses sharp lines and large shapes, played upon by unusual lighting to capture the lonely mood of his subjects. Though critics and viewers interpret meaning and mood in these cityscapes, Hopper insisted “I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than any symbolism.”[61] As if to prove the point, his late painting Sun in an Empty Room (1963) is a pure study of sunlight.[62]
Most of Hopper's figure paintings focus on the subtle interaction of human beings with their environment—carried out with solo figures, couples, or groups. His primary emotional themes are solitude, loneliness, regret, boredom, and resignation. He expresses the emotions in various environments, including the office, in public places, in apartments, on the road, or on vacation.[63] As if he were creating stills for a movie or tableaux in a play, Hopper positioned his characters as if they were captured just before or just after the climax of a scene.[64]
Hopper’s solitary figures are mostly women—dressed, semi-clad, and nude—often reading or looking out a window, or in the workplace. In the early 1920s, Hopper painted his first such pictures Girl at Sewing Machine (1921), New York Interior (another woman sewing) (1921), and Moonlight Interior (a nude getting into bed) (1923). However, Automat (1927) and Hotel Room (1931) are more representative of his mature style, emphasizing the solitude more overtly.[65]
As Hopper scholar Gail Levin wrote of “Hotel Room”:
| “ | The spare vertical and diagonal bands of color and sharp electric shadows create a concise and intense drama in the night…Combining poignant subject matter with such a powerful formal arrangement, Hopper’s composition is pure enough to approach an almost abstract sensibility, yet layered with a poetic meaning for the observer.[66] | ” |
Levin interprets the painting:
| “ | Plato’s philosopher, in search of the real and the true, must turn away from this transitory realm and contemplate the eternal Forms and Ideas. The pensive man in Hopper’s painting is positioned between the lure of the earthly domain, figured by the woman, and the call of the higher spiritual domain, represented by the ethereal lightfall. The pain of thinking about this choice and its consequences, after reading Plato all night, is evident. He is paralysed by the fervent inner labour of the melancholic.”[68] | ” |
His second most recognizable painting after Nighthawks is another urban painting, Early Sunday Morning (originally called Seventh Avenue Shops), which shows an empty street scene in sharp side light, with a fire hydrant and a barber pole as stand-ins for human figures. Originally Hopper intended to put figures in the upstairs windows but left them empty to heighten the feeling of desolation.[72]
Hopper's rural New England scenes, such as Gas (1940), are no less meaningful. "Gas" represents "a different, equally clean, well-lighted refuge.... ke[pt] open for those in need as they navigate the night, traveling their own miles to go before they sleep."[73] The work presents a fusion of several Hopper themes: the solitary figure, the melancholy of dusk, and the lonely road.[74]
Hopper approaches Surrealism with Rooms by the Sea (1951), where an open door gives on to the ocean, without an apparent ladder or steps.[75]
After his student years, Hopper’s nudes were all female. Unlike past artists who painted the female nude to glorify the female form and to highlight female eroticism, Hopper's nudes are solitary women who are psychologically exposed.[76] One audacious exception is Girlie Show (1941), where a red-headed strip-tease queen strides confidently across a stage to the accompaniment of the musicians in the pit. Girlie Show was inspired by Hopper's visit to a burlesque show a few days earlier. Hopper’s wife, as usual, posed for him for the painting, and noted in her diary, “Ed beginning a new canvas—a burlesque queen doing a strip tease—and I posing without a stitch on in front of the stove—nothing but high heels in a lottery dance pose.”[77]
Hopper's portraits and self-portraits were relatively few after his student years.[78] Hopper did produce a commissioned “portrait” of a house, The MacArthurs’ Home (1939), where he faithfully details the Victorian architecture of the home of actress Helen Hayes. She reported later, “I guess I never met a more misanthropic, grumpy individual in my life.” Hopper grumbled throughout the project and never again accepted a commission.[79] Hopper also painted Portrait of Orleans (1950), a “portrait” of the Cape Cod town from its main street.[80]
Though very interested in the American Civil War and Mathew Brady’s battlefield photographs, Hopper made only two historical pictures. Both depicted soldiers on their way to Gettysburg.[81] Also rare among his themes are paintings showing action. The best example of an action painting is Bridle Path (1939), but Hopper’s struggle with the proper anatomy of the horses may have discouraged him from similar attempts.[82]
Hopper’s final oil painting, Two Comedians (1966), painted one year before his death, focuses on his love of the theater. Two French pantomime actors, one male and one female, both dressed in bright white costumes, take their bow in front of a darkened stage. Jo Hopper confirmed that her husband intended the figures to suggest their taking their life's last bows together as husband and wife.[83]
Hopper's paintings have often been seen by others as having a narrative or thematic content that the artist himself may not have intended. Much meaning can be added to a painting by its title, but the titles of Hopper's paintings were sometimes chosen by others, or were selected by Hopper and his wife in a way that makes it unclear whether they have any real connection with the artist's meaning. For example, Hopper once told an interviewer that he was "fond of Early Sunday Morning... but it wasn't necessarily Sunday. That word was tacked on later by someone else."[84]
The tendency to read thematic or narrative content into Hopper's paintings, that Hopper himself had not intended, extended even to his wife. When Jo Hopper commented on the figure in Cape Cod Morning “It’s a woman looking out to see if the weather’s good enough to hang out her wash,” Hopper retorted, “Did I say that? You’re making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she’s just looking out the window.”[85] Another example of the same phenomenon is recorded in a 1948 article in Time:
| “ | Hopper's Summer Evening, a young couple talking in the harsh light of a cottage porch, is inescapably romantic, but Hopper was hurt by one critic's suggestion that it would do for an illustration in "any woman's magazine." Hopper had the painting in the back of his head "for 20 years and I never thought of putting the figures in until I actually started last summer. Why any art director would tear the picture apart. The figures were not what interested me; it was the light streaming down, and the night all around."[86] | ” |
Place in American art
In focusing primarily on quiet moments, very rarely showing action, Hopper employed a form of realism adopted by another leading American realist Andrew Wyeth, but Hopper’s technique was completely different from Wyeth’s hyper-detailed style.[44] In league with some of his contemporaries, Hopper shared his urban sensibility with John Sloan and George Bellows but avoided their overt action and violence. Where Joseph Stella and Georgia O’Keeffe glamorized the monumental structures of the city, Hopper reduced them to everyday geometrics and he depicted the pulse of the city as desolate and dangerous rather than “elegant or seductive”.[87]Charles Burchfield, whom Hopper admired and whom he was compared to, said of Hopper, “he achieves such a complete verity that you can read into his interpretations of houses and conceptions of New York life any human implications you wish.”[88] He also attributed Hopper’s success to his “bold individualism… In him we have regained that sturdy American independence which Thomas Eakins gave us, but which for a time was lost.”[89] Hopper considered this a high compliment since he considered Eakins the greatest American painter.[90]
Hopper scholar Deborah Lyons writes, "Our own moments of revelation are often mirrored, transcendent, in his work. Once seen, Hopper's interpretations exist in our consciousness in tandem with our own experience. We forever see a certain type of house as a Hopper house, invested perhaps with a mystery that Hopper implanted in our own vision." Hopper's paintings highlight the seemingly mundane and typical scenes in our everyday life and give them cause for epiphany. In this way Hopper's art takes the gritty American landscape and lonely gas stations and creates within them a sense of beautiful anticipation.[91]
Though compared to his contemporary Norman Rockwell in terms of subject matter, Hopper didn’t like the comparison. Hopper considered himself more subtle, less illustrative, and certainly not sentimental. Hopper also rejected comparisons with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton stating “I think the American Scene painters caricatured America. I always wanted to do myself.”[92]
Influence
Hopper's influence on the art world and pop culture is undeniable. Though he had no formal students, many artists have cited him as an influence, including Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, and Mark Rothko.[56] An illustration of Hopper’s influence is Rothko’s early work Composition I (c. 1931`), which is a direct paraphrase of Hopper’s Chop Suey.[93]
Homages to Nighthawks featuring cartoon characters or famous pop culture icons such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are often found in poster stores and gift shops. The cable television channel Turner Classic Movies sometimes runs animated clips based on Hopper paintings prior to airing its films. Hopper's painting New York Movie was featured in the television show Dead Like Me; the girl standing in the corner resembles Daisy Adair. In a 1998 episode of That '70s Show titled "Drive In," Red and Kitty settle in at a diner and create a reproduction of Nighthawks.
Musical influences include singer/songwriter Tom Waits's 1975 live-in-the-studio album titled Nighthawks at the Diner, after the painting. In 1993, Madonna was inspired sufficiently by Hopper's 1941 painting Girlie Show that she named her world tour after it and incorporated many of the theatrical elements and mood of the painting into the show. In 2004, British guitarist John Squire (formerly of The Stone Roses) released a concept album based on Hopper's work entitled Marshall's House. Each song on the album is inspired by, and shares its title with, a painting by Hopper. Canadian rock group The Weakerthans released their album Reunion Tour in 2007 featuring two songs inspired by and named after Hopper paintings, "Sun in an Empty Room", and "Night Windows", and have also referenced him in songs such as "Hospital Vespers". Polish composer Paweł Szymański's Compartment 2, Car 7 for violin, viola, cello and vibraphone (2003) was inspired by Hopper's Compartment C, Car 193. Hopper's painting Early Sunday Morning was the inspiration for the sleeve of British band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's 1985 album Crush.
Each of the twelve chapters in New Zealander Chris Bell's 2004 novel Liquidambar (UKA Press/PABD) interprets one of Hopper's paintings to create a surreal detective story.
Hopper's influence reached the Japanese animation world in the dark cyberpunk thriller Texhnolyze. His artwork was used as the basis for the surface world in Texhnolyze[citation needed] as well as for much of the 2008 animated film Bolt.
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