Edward Hopper

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Born: 1882

Died: 1967

Summary of Edward Hopper

No one, like Edward Hopper, caught the solitude of the individual in the contemporary metropolis. His depiction of people in metropolitan environments goes well beyond their function as contemporary townscapes, revealing the underlying character of human life. While his work is technically under the realism rubric, it provides a far more vivid insight into the lives between the world wars. In fact, Hopper implies some psychological interior life of its objects by offering a minimal level of activity, by removing any indication of life or movement and adding dramatic ways of representation in tight settings with stunning illumination schemes, leading to abstract expressionism. He infused the importance and weight of the existential being of the person into what might otherwise seem to be simple pictures of daily life in the contemporary city or in rural life.

The imagery of Hopper is always restricted, with a portion of a narrative or a suggestive element. He pushes the audience to finish the narration by providing numerous hints but no precise solutions. This aspect of his art would have important consequences for postmodernist evolution, in which the spectator plays an important role in the interpretation of the artwork.

Hopper people, typically separated and detached from their surroundings by either glass windows or by formal methods, are expressions of the artist’s emphasis on contemporary life’s isolation. The strength of detail and unmodified revelatory light in many paintings creates a tension that draws the viewer’s attention away from the topic and suggests a lot about his emotional experience. Thus the artist’s work serves as a junction between the interest of the current Ashcan School in daily life and the study of mood by later existential painters.

Many of Hopper’s homes enlivened by creative methods, set away from the neighbourhood, shone with blank light that strikingly emphasises the film industry and throws it into the shadows, seen from evocative perspectives.

Childhood

Edward Hopper was founded in 1882, in Nyack, New York, in a prosperous middle-class family. His parents exposed Edward to the arts from the beginning of their lives and his elder sister Marion; they attended the theatre, concerts and other cultural events and visited museums. His dad operated a dry shop where Hopper worked occasionally as a teenager. Hopper characterised him as “an incipient intellectual… less at home with his books of accounts than with Montaigne’s essays.” Both his parents supported his creative tendencies.

As a kid, Hopper was reserved and silent. By his early teens, he was over six feet tall, had few acquaintances and spent most of his time with his literature and paintings alone. His residence in Nyack was on a hill overlooking the river Hudson, just north of New York City. Nyack was at the time a bustling centre for transportation and manufacturing. There was a busy railway station, three shipbuilding firms, a port for steamboats and the Hudson ferry crossing. Young Edward spent his days by the river, watching and sketching boats and constructing them in his hand. Numerous sketches of boats, ships as well as various handcrafted wooden model boats illustrate this early time. As a young person, he constructed a full-size catboat and contemplated a career in naval architecture briefly. When the artist started signing and dating his paintings, the seriousness with which he addressed his creative goals had already shown itself by age 10.

Early Life

Hopper’s parents pushed him, after completing high school in 1899, to pursue commercial illustration instead of fine painting. He therefore spent a year at the New York School of Illustration in Manhattan before he moved to New York School of Art to make his ambition come true. There were instructors from the U.S. impressionist William Merritt Chase (who established the school) and Robert Henri, a prominent Ashcan school figure, whose advocators argued that urban life should be more critical. George Bellows, Guy Pene du Bois and Rockwell Kent were students at Hopper’s school.

In 1905 Hopper started working for a New York City advertising firm as an illustrator but never loved to illustrate and to yearn for freedom to paint from his ideas. Unfortunately, success came slowly and for almost 20 years he was obliged to live as an illustrator until his painting career began.

From 1906 through 1910, Hopper visited Europe three times, spending two lengthy trips in Paris. The Impressionists’ inspiration drove him into the streets to sketch and paint outside, or, as Hopper put it, “from the fact.” Years later he would describe his art a kind of “modified impressionism.” from this era. He was particularly drawn to the unique arrangements of composition of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas in their portrayals of contemporary urban life. Hopper particularly liked Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, which he said “the most wonderful thing of his I have seen, it’s past belief in its reality – it almost amounts to deception.”

Hopper returned from his last tour abroad in 1910 and relocated to New York City continuously and resided at 3 Washington Square North in 1913. This was his house and his studio for the remainder of his life. That same year, at the Armory Show of New York, he sold his first work, Sailing (1911), for $250. Although he never quit painting, 11 years ago he sold another picture. During that period he continued to make his livelihood, illustrating himself and produced about 70 gravure and dry spots in 1915. Like his later-famous paintings, Hopper’s grafts convey a feeling of isolation and sadness. Night Shadows (1921), one of his most well known etchings, has a perspective on a bird’s eye, a dramatic use of light and shadow and a mysterious air that would inspire many of the 1940s’ film noir movies. Over the years, Hopper was widely applauded for his etchings and regarded them to be an important element of his creative growth. As he stated, “After I took up etching, my painting seemed to crystallise.”

Mid Life

In 1923, Hopper visited Massachusetts, Gloucester. There Josephine (Jo) Nivison, whom he met years before as an art student of Robert Henri, got acquainted. He worked in aquarel that summer, and later that year Jo persuaded him to attend an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. There he showed six aquarelles, including The Mansard Roof (1923), bought for $100 by the museum.

Hopper married Jo in 1924. She was his main model from that point on and became his most passionate admirer. In the same year, he had a single aquarelle show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York. For the remainder of his life, the exhibition sold out and the Rehn Gallery continued to represent him. This accomplishment eventually allowed Hopper to give up illustration.

Over the following several years Hopper’s painting technique has developed and his distinctive iconography has formed, ranging from solitary personalities in the public or private rooms to drenched sun, quiet streets and lighthouses on the shore. In 1930, the House by the Railway (1925) was the first artwork to be added to the newly established Museum of Modern Art permanently collection. At the beginning of the 1930s, in fact, Hopper had tremendous success with its sales to major museums and in 1933 a retrospective at the Modern Art Museum.

Despite its financial success, Hopper and Jo had a modest lifestyle, enabling themselves mainly to enjoy theatre and cinema. Hopper really liked filming. His first visit to Paris was recorded in 1909. As he put it, “If I don’t feel in the mood for painting, for a week or more, I go to the movies. I’m going on a regular film binge.”

The Hoppers spent the summer in new England, mostly Gloucester and coastal Maine, early in their marriage. They also travelled throughout Mexico, where they painted aquarelles side by side. They started spending summers at the home and studio of Hopper in South Truro, Massachusetts, from 1934.

Late Life

During the war years, Hopper was still prolific and remained untouched by the possible dangers after the Pearl Harbour assault. During that time he worked on his most famous picture, Nighthawks (1942). Through the 1950s and 1960s, despite the advent of Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism, Hopper saw appreciation and success in the New York art scene. His themes continued to attract an enthusiastic following with a global appeal.

Hopper wasn’t a painter prolific. He frequently found it difficult to cope with a topic of paint and then worked through many studies on the intricacies of the composition. He averaged just two oils a year at the end of his life. Hopper died on 15 May 1967 and just 10 months later Jo Hopper died, legating their creative property to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hopper is interred at Nyack’s Oak Hill Cemetery, together with Jo, his sister and his parents.

The word “Hopperesque” today is frequently used for connotations of pictures that recall Hopper’s moods and themes. Hopper has influenced many painters, photographers, cinemas, stage designers, dancers, authors and musicians. In the visual arts, Hopper influenced artists such as Mark Rothko, George Segal, Bansy, Ed Ruscha and Tony Oursler in a variety of mediums. The painter Eric Fischl said, “You can tell how great an artist is by how long it takes you to get through his territory…I’m still in the territory that he opened up.” When he was a student, Richard Diebenkorn remembered the significance of Hopper’s impact on his work, “I really accepted Hopper… It was his use of light and shadow and the atmosphere… rather soaked, full of emotion and his sort of austerity. It was the sort of job that appeared to have been done to me. I saw it and it was mine. It was my own.”

Famous Art by Edward Hopper

Nighthawks

1942

Nighthawks shows four people at night in a dining room minimally equipped. A single source of light lights the inside and flows to the outside. This painting, with its simple background and dramatic lighting, shows Hopper’s interest in the subjects of isolation, sadness and ambiguity. None of the four people in this image interact and we realise that it’s the usual and that a storey with minimal emotional growth is happening. Open stories of this type are characteristic of Hopper and require that the spectator play an active part to complete the tale.

Morning Sun

1952

This piece was created in Hopper’s late life at the age of about 70. It nevertheless contains the same elements of existentialism found throughout his work, linking him with current painters such as Andrew Wyeth’s similar attempts. Last of all, Christina’s exploration of the world has the same feeling and impact. A lady (his wife, Jo at age 68) is described in Hopper’s picture as sitting upright on a well made bed and looking towards the window. The morning light runs through the window and overlooks the figure and behind the white wall. The artist obscures her aged face and body with a clear lack of detail; the look is ambiguous, maybe thoughtful, perhaps regretful. Like many of his works, the character is featured to capture a mood or imply a psychological impact instead of serving as the picture of a particular person. In addition to incorporating dramatic methods for delineation as seen in other early Modernist works, using strong light, he takes the window theme to add psychological weight, as was done a hundred years earlier by Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich.

Second Story Sunlight

1960

In this painting, which focuses on a pair of gabled buildings in front of the early light, Hopper has lifted cityscapes to psychological portraiture, energising them positively and prominently. On the balcony of one home are two people, a somewhat covered young lady hanging over the railing and an older woman reading a book. The model for both figures was Hopper’s wife, Jo, as it was for almost all the characters featured in her later works. As Hopper pointed out, “In both figures, I don’t believe there’s any notion of symbolism… I was more concerned in sunshine than any meaning on the structures and the people.” Based on his distinctive characteristics of light on the shores of the Hudson River, Hopper was sensitive at an early age to what he believed to be “a certain elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.” 2nd storey Sunlight, painted late in his career, deals with issues that he has been seeking to make the sunlight elusive, changing and provocative. The definition of the strong white planes of the building facades and of the contrasts created in the shadow shows his efforts towards this objective.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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• No one, like Edward Hopper, caught the solitude of the individual in the contemporary metropolis.
• His depiction of people in metropolitan environments goes well beyond their function as contemporary townscapes, revealing the underlying character of human life.
• While his work is technically under the realism rubric, it provides a far more vivid insight into the lives between the world wars.
• In fact, Hopper implies some psychological interior life of its objects by offering a minimal level of activity, by removing any indication of life or movement and adding dramatic ways of representation in tight settings with stunning illumination schemes, leading to abstract expressionism.
• He infused the importance and weight of the existential being of the person into what might otherwise seem to be simple pictures of daily life in the contemporary city or in rural life.The imagery of Hopper is always restricted, with a portion of a narrative or a suggestive element.
• He pushes the audience to finish the narration by providing numerous hints but no precise solutions.
• This aspect of his art would have important consequences for postmodernist evolution, in which the spectator plays an important role in the interpretation of the artwork.Hopper people, typically separated and detached from their surroundings by either glass windows or by formal methods, are expressions of the artist’s emphasis on contemporary life’s isolation.
• The strength of detail and unmodified revelatory light in many paintings creates a tension that draws the viewer’s attention away from the topic and suggests a lot about his emotional experience.
• Thus the artist’s work serves as a junction between the interest of the current Ashcan School in daily life and the study of mood by later existential painters.Many of Hopper’s homes enlivened by creative methods, set away from the neighbourhood, shone with blank light that strikingly emphasises the film industry and throws it into the shadows, seen from evocative perspectives.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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