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Edward Hopper [American Scene Painter, 1882-1967]
Biography
Edward Hopper was an American painter best remembered for his eerily realistic depictions of solitude in contemporary American life. He was born in Nyack, New York. Hopper studied commercial art and painting in New York City. One of his teachers, artist Robert Henri, encouraged his students to use their art to "make a stir in the world." Henri, an influence on Hopper, motivated students to render realistic depictions of urban life. Henri's students, many of whom developed into important artists, became known as the Ashcan School of American art.
Upon completing his formal education, Hopper made three trips to Europe to study the emerging art scene there, but unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated the abstract cubist experiments, the idealism of the realist painters enamored Hopper. His early projects reflect the realist influence. Hopper's early paintings used dark colours, warm browns and grey and black predominated. His technique was partly derived from Rembrandt and Edouard Manet. Although, we might say there is no real connection with his work from the French period, we can see certain characteristics that he will obsessively use throughtout his career (landscapes, townscapes and female nudes.
While he worked for several years as a commercial artist, Hopper continued painting. In 1925 he produced House by the Railroad, a classic work that marks his artistic maturity. The piece is the first of a series of stark urban and rural scenes that uses sharp lines and large shapes, played upon by unusual lighting to capture the lonely mood of his subjects. He derived his subject matter from the common features of American life — gas stations, motels, the railroad, or an empty street. (continued on the bottom)
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The best known of these paintings, Nighthawks (1942), shows the lonely customers frequenting a downtown all-night diner. The diner's harsh electric lights set it off from the gentle night outside. The diners, seated at stools around the counter, are similarly isolated from one another, reflecting on themselves.
Other examples include Chop Suey, Rooms for Tourists, and Office in a Small City.
Hopper's rural New England scenes, such as Gas (1940), are no less meaningful. In terms of subject matter, he can be compared to his contemporary, Norman Rockwell, but while Rockwell exulted in the rich imagery of small-town America, Hopper depicts it in the same sense of forlorn solitude that permeates his portrayal of city life. Here too, Hopper's work exploits vast empty spaces, represented by a lonely gas station astride an empty country road and the sharp contrast between the natural light of the sky, moderated by the lush forest, and glaring artificial light coming from inside the gas station.
Hopper continued to paint in his old age, dividing his time between New York City and Truro, Massachusetts. He died in 1967, in his studio near Washington Square, in New York City. His wife, painter Josephine Nivison, who died 10 months later, bequeathed his work to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other significant paintings by Hopper are at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 2004, a large selection of Hopper's paintings toured through Europe, visiting Cologne, Germany and Tate Modern in London. The Tate exhibition became the second most popular in the gallery's history, with 420,000 visitors in the three months it was open. Also in 2004 British guitarist John Squire (formerly of The Stone Roses fame) released a concept album based on Hopper's work entitled Marshall's House. Each song on the album inspired by, and sharing its title with, a painting by Hopper.
Edward Hopper in Museums and Web Sites (Click on link to view image)
Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio
Pennsylvania Coal
Edward Hopper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The Lighthouse at Two Lights, 1929
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Gas, 1940
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Watercolor collection online
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Paintings collection online
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
4 works online
Edward Hopper at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
5 works by Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Exhibition: An Edward Hopper Scrapbook
Edward Hopper at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's database
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
Approaching a City, 1946 St. Francis' Towers, Santa Fe, 1925 Sunday, 1926
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Rooms by the Sea
Sunlight in Cafeteria
Western Motel
Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts
Railroad Train, 1908
Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928
Arizona State University Art Museum
House by a Road, ca.1942
Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
Night in the Park
Night Shadows
Art Institute of Chicago
Nighthawks
Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Cape Cod Afternoon, 1936
Roofs, Washington Square, 1926
Rock Pedestal, Portland Head, 1927
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
Sun on Prospect Street (Gloucester, Massachusetts), 1934
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
5 works online
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Ground Swell
Currier Gallery of Art, New Hampshire
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
Lighthouse Hill, 1927
Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
High Noon
Delaware Art Museum
Summertime
Fernando Botero Art
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma
House in Provincetown
Frida Kahlo Art
Harvard University Art Museums Database, Massachusetts
(Note: Database queries can be a bit slow)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
Biography and selected works
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
3 works online
Hunter Museum of American Art, Tennessee
House and Boats, ca.1923
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
Hotel Lobby
Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Portuguese Church in Gloucester, 1923
Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Monhegan Landscape
McNay Art Museum, Texas
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
East Side Interior, etching, 1922
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
Coast Guard Station, 1929
Muskegon Museum of Art, Michigan
The New York Restaurant, ca.1922
Edward Hopper at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
Self-portrait, drawing, 1903
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
August in the City, 1945
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
East Wind over Weehawken
Remedios Varo Art
Sheldon Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska
4 works online
Tate Gallery, London, UK
Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago
3 works online
The Huntington Library, California
The Long Leg, 1935
The Newark Museum, New Jersey
The Sheridan Theatre, 1937
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (opens in a new window)
Hotel Room, 1931
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
(Click on the image-getting-larger icon to zoom in)
The "Martha McKeen" of Wellfleet
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
House at Dusk, 1935
Walker Art Center, Minnesota
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Second Story Sunlight, 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts
Morning in a City, 1944
Edward Hopper in the Art Renewal Center
Edward Hopper in the Artchive
Artcyclopedia
Masterscan feature: Nighthawks
Artcyclopedia
Masterscan feature: Second Story Sunlight
Edward Hopper at CGFA
WebMuseum
Artyst, Peintures du Monde (in French)
Bert Christensen's Cyberspace Home
Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur (in German)
California State University WorldImages Database
El Poder de la Palabra (The Power of the Word) (in Spanish)
Humanities Web
Malek Gallery
18 paintings
University of Michigan SILS Art Image Browser
USC Annenberg School for Communication
In addition to spending some months in Paris, he visited London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. The picture that seems to have impressed him most was Rembrandt's The Night Watch (in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Hopper was able to repeat his trip to Europe in 1909 and 1910. On the second occasion he visited Spain as well as France. After this, though he was to remain a restless traveler, he never set foot in Europe again. Yet its influence was to remain with him for a long time: he was well read in French literature, and could quote Verlaine in the original, as his future wife discovered (he was surprised when she finished the quotation for him). He said later: '[America] seemed awfully crude and raw when I got back. It took me ten years to get over Europe.' For some time his painting was full of reminiscences of what he had seen abroad. This tendency culminates in Soir Bleu of 1914, a recollection of the Mi-Caréme carnival in Paris, and one of the largest pictures Hopper ever painted. It failed to attract any attention when he showed it in a mixed exhibition in the following year, and it was this failure which threw him back to working on the American subjects with which his reputation is now associated. In 1913 Hopper made his first sale - a picture exhibited at the Armory Show in New York which brought together American artists and all the leading European modernists. In 1920 he had his first solo exhibition, at the Whitney Studio Club, but on this occasion none of the paintings sold. He was already thirty-seven and beginning to doubt if he would achieve any success as an artist - he was still forced to earn a living as a commercial illustrator. One way round this dilemma was to make prints, for which at that time there was a rising new market. These sold more readily than his paintings, and Hopper then moved to making watercolors, which sold more readily still.
"Hopper had settled in Greenwich Village, which was to be his base for the rest of his life, and in 1923 he renewed his friendship with a neighbor, Jo Nivison, whom he had known when they were fellow students under Chase and Henri. She was now forty; Hopper was forty-two. In the following year they married. Their long and complex relationship was to be the most important of the artist's life. Fiercely loyal to her husband, Jo felt in many respects oppressed by him. In particular, she felt that he did nothing to encourage her own development as a painter, but on the contrary did everything to frustrate it. 'Ed,' she confided to her diary, 'is the very centre of my universe... If I'm on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I'm not.' The couple often quarreled fiercely (an early subject of contention was Jo's devotion to her cat Arthur, whom Hopper regarded as a rival for her attention). Sometimes their rows exploded into physical violence, and on one occasion, just before a trip to Mexico, Jo bit Hopper's hand to the bone. On the other hand, her presence was essential to his work, sometimes literally so, since she now modeled for all the female figures in his paintings, and was adept at enacting the various roles he required.
From the time of his marriage, Hopper's professional fortunes changed. His second solo show, at the Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924, was a sell-out. The following year, he painted what is now generally acknowledged to be his first fully mature picture, The House by the Railroad. With its deliberate, disciplined spareness, this is typical of what he was to create thereafter. His paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to paint, for instance, could not have been more out of fashion than it was in the mid-192OS, when he first began to look at it seriously. Though his compositions are supposedly realist they also make frequent use of covert symbolism. Hopper's paintings have, in this respect, been rather aptly compared to the realist plays of Ibsen, a writer whom he admired.
One of the themes of The House by the Railroad is the loneliness of travel, and the Hoppers now began to travel widely within the United States, as well as going on trips to Mexico. Their mobility was made possible by the fact that they were now sufficiently prosperous to buy a car. This became another subject of contention between the artist and his wife, since Hopper, not a good driver himself, resisted Jo's wish to learn to drive too. She did not acquire a driving license until 1936, and even then her husband was extremely reluctant to allow her control of their automobile.
By this time Hopper, whose career, once it took off, was surprisingly little affected by the Depression, had become extremely well known. In 1929, he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's second exhibition, Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, and in 1930 The House by the Railroad entered the museum's permanent collection, as a gift from the millionaire collector Stephen Clark. In the same year, the Whitney Museum bought Hopper's Early Sunday Morning, its most expensive purchase up to that time. In 1933 Hopper was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This was followed, in 1950, by a fuller retrospective show at the Whitney.
Hopper became a pictorial poet who recorded the starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for example, in his pictures of lighthouses and harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing deserted streets at night. Some paintings, such as his celebrated image of a gas-station, Gas (1940), even have elements which anticipate Pop Art. Hopper once said: 'To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling.'
He painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and also liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theatres, cinemas and offices. But even in these paintings he stressed the theme of loneliness - his theatres are often semi deserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage. Hopper was a frequent movie-goer, and there is often a cinematic quality in his work. As the years went on, however, he found suitable subjects increasingly difficult to discover, and often felt blocked and unable to paint. His contemporary the painter Charles Burchfield wrote: 'With Hopper the whole fabric of his art seems to be interwoven with his personal character and manner of living.' When the link between the outer world he observed and the inner world of feeling and fantasy broke, Hopper found he was unable to create.