Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 in Nyack - May 15, 1967 in New York) was an American painter, best known for his portraits of loneliness in contemporary American life.. He is considered one of the painters of the Ashcan school, which through Arshile Gorky led to abstract expressionism after World War II.

Biography

Night on the El Train (1918)

The beginnings

Born in Nyack, a small town on the Hudson River to a bourgeois family, Hopper entered the New York School of Art in 1900. In that institute he will coincide with other future protagonists of American art of the early fifties: Guy Pène du Bois, Rockwell Kent, Eugene Speicher and George Bellows.

However, the contacts that were essential for his training and development as a painter are three of the school's teachers: William Merrit Chase, who encouraged him to study and copy what he saw in museums; Kenneth H. Miller, who educated him in a taste for a sharp and clean painting, organized in an orderly spatial composition and Robert Henri, who helped to free the art of the time from the weight of academic norms, thus offering an example active young Hopper. After earning his degree, Hopper landed his first job as an advertising illustrator at C. Phillips & Company.

Travel abroad

In 1906, he traveled to Europe for the first time. In Paris, he experimented with a formal language close to that of the Impressionists. Later, in 1907, he traveled to London, Berlin, and Brussels. Hopper's personal and unmistakable style, formed by precise expressive choices, began to take shape in 1909, during a second six-month stay in Paris, also painting in Saint-Germain and Fontainebleau.

His painting is characterized by a peculiar and elaborate game between light and shadow, by the description of interiors, which he learned from Degas and perfected on his third and last trip abroad in 1910 to Paris and Spain, and for the central theme of loneliness. While Fauvism, Cubism and abstract art were consolidating in Europe, Hopper felt more attracted to Manet, Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Courbet, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec and a Spanish painter before the all of the above: Goya, whose works you see in the Museo del Prado.

The return to the United States

He returned permanently to the United States, where he settled and stayed until his death. In those moments Hopper abandons the European nostalgia that had influenced him until then and begins to elaborate themes in relation to daily American life, modeling and adapting his style to daily life. Among the subjects that he addresses, above all, representations of urban images of New York and of the cliffs and beaches of nearby New England abound.

In 1918 he became one of the first members of the Whitney Studio Club, the most dynamic center for independent artists of the day. Between 1915 and 1923 he temporarily abandoned painting, devoting himself to new expressive forms such as engraving, using drypoint and etching, with which he obtained numerous awards and recognitions, including some from the prestigious National Academy .

Success

Nighthawks (No., in Spanish), Edward Hopper's most famous painting.

The success achieved with an exhibition of watercolors (1923) and another of canvases (1924) made Hopper the author of reference for realists who painted American scenes. As is for example Room in New York. His evocative artistic vocation evolved towards a strong realism, which turns out to be the synthesis of the figurative vision together with the poetic feeling that Hopper perceives in his objects.

Through urban or rural images, immersed in silence, in a real and metaphysical space at the same time, Hopper manages to project on the viewer a feeling of distance from the subject and the environment in which he is strongly immersed, through of a careful geometric composition of the canvas, by a sophisticated play of light, cold, sharp and intentionally "artificial", and by an extraordinary synthesis of details. The scene appears almost always deserted; In his paintings we almost never find more than one human figure, and when there is more than one, what stands out is the alienation of the subjects and the resulting impossibility of communication, which exacerbates loneliness. Some examples of this type of work are Nighthawks or Office in a Small Town (1953).

In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him its first retrospective, and the Whitney Museum the second, in 1950.

Marriage and advancement

By 1923, Hopper's slow rise finally produced a breakthrough. He met up with Josephine Nivison, artist and Robert Henri alumnus, during a summer painting trip in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They were opposites: she was short, open, gregarious, sociable, and liberal, while he was tall, reserved, shy, quiet, introspective, and conservative. They married a year later. She commented: "Sometimes talking to Eddie is like throwing a rock down a well, except it doesn't hit when it hits bottom. " She subordinated his career to his and shared the lifestyle. lonely from her The rest of his lives revolved around his spare apartment in the city and his summers in South Truro on Cape Cod. She managed his career and interviews with him, was his main model and life partner. of the.

With Nivison's help, six of Hopper's Gloucester watercolors were inducted into 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. Critics generally raved about his work; one said: "What vitality, strength and directness! Look what you can do with the more homey subject.” Hopper sold all of his watercolors at a solo show the following year, eventually deciding to leave illustration behind.

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 towers and towers and porches and mansard roofs and trimmings, cast wonderful shadows." He always said that his favorite thing was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

At forty-one, Hopper received more recognition for his work. He continued to harbor bitterness about his career, later turning down appearances and awards.With his financial stability assured by steady sales, Hopper would live a simple and stable life and continue to create art in his personal style for four more decades.

His Two on the Aisle (1927) sold for a career-high $1,500, which allowed Hopper to buy a car, with which he often took excursions to remote areas of New England. 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 he had ever acquired for his collection. Hopper painted his last self-portrait in oil around 1930. Although Josephine posed for many of her paintings, she sat for a single formal oil portrait of her husband; Jo Painting (1936).

Hopper fared better than many other artists during the Great Depression. His stature increased dramatically 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.The following year he participated in the first Whitney Annual, and continued to exhibit in each annual at the museum for the rest of his life. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first large-scale retrospective.

In 1930, the Hoppers rented a cabin in South Truro, on Cape Cod. They returned every summer for the rest of their lives, building a summer home there in 1934. From there, they would travel by car to other areas when Hopper needed to find fresh material to paint. In the summers of 1937 and 1938, the couple spent extended periods at the Wagon Wheels Farm in South Royalton, Vermont, where Hopper painted a series of watercolors along the White River. These scenes are atypical among Hopper's mature works in that most are 'pure' landscapes, devoid of architecture or human figures. First Branch of the White River (1938), now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the best known of Hopper's Vermont landscapes.

Hopper was highly productive during 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). In the late 1940s, however, he suffered a period of relative inactivity. He admitted: 'I wish he could paint more. I get tired of reading and going to the movies'. Over the next two decades, his health faltered and he had several prostate surgeries and other medical problems. But, in the 1950s and early 1960s, he created several more important works, including the First Row Orchestra (1951); as well as Morning Sun and Hotel by a Railroad, both in 1952; and Intermission in 1963.

Death

Edward Hopper & Josephine N. Hopper in Oak Hill Cementery

Hopper died in his study near Washington Square Park in New York City on May 15, 1967. He was buried two days later in his family plot at Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack, New York, on place where was born. His wife died ten months later and was buried next to him.

His wife bequeathed their joint collection of more than 3,000 works to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other significant works by Hopper are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Work

Personality and vision

Always reticent to talk about himself and his work, Hopper simply said, "The whole answer is on the canvas." Hopper was stoic and fatalistic — a silent, introverted man with a kind sense of humor and frank demeanor. Hopper was drawn to an emblematic, anti-narrative symbolism, which "painted brief moments of configuration, saturated with suggestion". His quiet, restless encounters "touch us where we are most vulnerable," and have "a suggestion of melancholy, that melancholy being represented." His color sense gave him away as a pure painter. when he "turned the puritan into the purist, in his silent canvases where stains and blessings are balanced". According to critic Lloyd Goodrich, he was "an eminently native painter, who he was capturing more of the quality of America on his canvases than anyone else".

Conservative on politics and social issues (Hopper stated, for example, that "artists' lives should be written by people very close to them"), he accepted things as they were and displayed an absence of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was a well-read man, and many of his paintings show people reading. He was usually good company and was not disturbed by silence, though he was often morose, grumpy, or disinterested. He was always serious about his art and his art, and when asked he answered frankly.

Good art is the exterior expression of the artist's inner life, and his inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of talented invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much more abstract paintings is the attempt to replace the inventions of human intellect by a private imaginative conception.

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied field and does not deal only with stimulating provisions of color, shape and design.

The term life of a human being should not be used as a derogatory, since it implies all the existence and competence of art is to react and not to flee from it.

Painting will have to deal more completely and less indirectly with the life and phenomenon of nature before it can be great again.

Edward Hopper, "Statement." Posted as part of "Statements by Four Artists" in Reality, vol. 1, no. 1 (spring 1953). The sketch written by Hopper is reproduced in Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, p. 461.

Although Hopper claimed that he did not introduce psychological meanings into his paintings, he was deeply interested in Freud and the power of the unconscious. He wrote in 1939, "So much of every work of art is the expression of the subconscious that it seems to me that most of the important qualities are placed unconsciously, and few of importance by the conscious intellect."

Technique

Mostly known for his oil paintings, Hopper began to gain recognition for his watercolors and also produced some commercially successful etchings. Additionally, his notebooks contain high-quality pen and pencil sketches, which were not intended for public viewing.

Hopper paid particular attention to geographic design and the careful placement of human figures in balance with their surroundings. He was a slow and methodical artist; he wrote, “It takes a long time for an idea to come through. Then I have to think about her for a long time. I don't start painting until I have everything figured out in my mind. It's all good when I finally get to the easel.” He would often make preliminary sketches to elaborate his carefully calculated compositions. He and his wife kept a detailed book with his works with notes like "sad face of a faded woman" or.

For the “New York Movie” (1939), Hopper demonstrates his painstaking preparation with more than 53 sketches of the theater interior and the figure of the pensive usherette.

His effective use of light and shadow to create mood is central to Hopper's methods. Bright sunlight (as an emblem of introspection or revelation), and the shadows it casts also play symbolically powerful roles in Hopper's paintings such as "Early Sunday Morning" (1930), "Summertime" (1943), "Seven A.M. ” (1948) and "Sun in Empty Room" (1963). His use of light and shadow effects have been compared to the cinematography of film noir.

Selected Works

Title	Media	Date	Collection	Dimensions	Image
Girl sewing machine	Oil on canvas	1921	Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum	48 cm × 46 cm (19 in × 18 in)
Interior of New York	Oil on canvas	1921	Whitney Museum of American Art	62 × 75 cm (24 × 29in)
The Authomata	Oil on canvas	1927	Des Moines Art Center	71.4 cm × 91.4 cm (28 in × 36 in)
Chop Suey	Oil on canvas	1929	Collection Barney A. Ebsworth	81.3 cm × 96.5 cm (32 in × 38 in)
Early Sunday Morning	Oil on canvas	1930	Whitney Museum of American Art	89.4 cm × 153 cm (35.2 in × 60.3 in)
Macomb's Dam Bridge	Oil on canvas	1935	Brooklyn Museum, New York	90 cm × 153 cm (35 in X 60 in)
Office at Night	Oil on canvas	1940	Walker Art Center (Mineapolis)	56.356 cm × 63.82 cm (22.1875 in × 25.125 in)
No.	Oil on canvas	1942	Art Institute of Chicago	84.1 cm × 152.4 cm (33 1⁄8 in × 60 in)
Hotel Lobby	Oil on canvas	1943	Indianapolis Museum of Art	81.9 cm × 103.5 cm (32 1⁄4 in × 40 3⁄4 in)
Waste in a small town	Oil on canvas	1953	Metropolitan Museum of Art	71 cm × 102 cm (28 in × 40 in)