Edward Hopper (Nyack, July 22, 1882 - New York, May 15, 1967) was an American painter, famous above all 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 post-World War II abstract expressionism.
Edward Hopper's Biography
Early life
Born in Nyack, a small town on the banks of the Hudson River in a bourgeois family, Hopper entered the New York School of Art in 1900, where he coincided with other future protagonists of American art in the early 1950s: Guy Pène du Bois, Rockwell Kent, Eugene Speicher and George Bellows.
However, the contacts that proved fundamental to his training and to his development as a painter were 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 the taste for sharp, clean painting, organized in an orderly spatial composition; and Robert Henri, who contributed to freeing the art of the time from the weight of academic norms, thus offering an active example to the young Hopper. After earning his degree, Hopper got his first job as an advertising illustrator at C. Phillips & Company.
Foreign travels
In 1906, he traveled to Europe for the first time. In Paris, he experimented with a formal language close to that of the Impressionists. Then, 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, when he also painted in Saint-Germain and Fontainebleau.
Night on the El Train (1918)
His painting is characterized by a peculiar and intricate interplay 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 by the central theme of solitude.
While Fauvism, Cubism and abstract art were consolidating in Europe, Hopper felt more attracted to Manet, Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Courbet, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec and to a Spanish painter before all those mentioned: Goya, whose works he saw in the Prado Museum.
Edward Hopper's Return to the United States
He returned definitively to the United States, where he settled and remained until his death. At that time Hopper abandoned the European nostalgia that had influenced him until then and began to elaborate themes related to everyday American life, modeling and adapting his style to everyday life.
Among the subjects he addresses, depictions of urban images of New York and 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 time.
Between 1915 and 1923 he temporarily abandoned painting, devoting himself to new expressive forms such as engraving, using drypoint and etching, with which he won numerous awards and recognitions, including some from the prestigious National Academy.
The success
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. Such as, 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 united to the poetic feeling that Hopper perceives in his objects.
Nighthawks, Edward Hopper's most famous painting.
Through urban or rural images, immersed in silence, in a real and metaphysical space at the same time, Hopper manages to project in the spectator a feeling of detachment from the subject and the environment in which he is strongly immersed, by means of a careful geometric composition of the canvas, by a sophisticated play of lights, cold, sharp and intentionally "artificial", and by an extraordinary synthesis of the details.
The scene is 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 the loneliness. Examples of such works are Nighthawks or Office in a Small Town (1953).
In 1933 the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him the first retrospective, and the Whitney Museum the second, in 1950.
Edward Hopper's Marriage and advancement
By 1923, Hopper's slow rise finally produced a breakthrough. He was reunited with Josephine Nivison, an artist and former student of Robert Henri, 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 stone down a well, except it doesn't hit when it hits the bottom." She subordinated her career to his and shared his solitary lifestyle.
The rest of their lives revolved around their spare apartment in the city and their summers in South Truro on Cape Cod. She managed his career and his interviews, was his primary model and his life partner.
With Nivison's help, six of Hopper's Gloucester watercolors were admitted to an exhibition 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 can be done with the homeliest subject." Hopper sold all of his watercolors in a solo exhibition the following year and finally decided 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 Museum of Fine Arts Boston curator Carol Troyen, "Hopper really liked the way these houses, with their towers and turrets and porches and mansard roofs and ornamentation cast wonderful shadows. He always said his favorite thing to do was to paint sunlight next to a house."
At forty-one, Hopper received more recognition for his work. He continued to harbor bitterness about his career, then turned down appearances and awards. With his financial stability assured by steady sales, Hopper would live a simple, stable life and continue to create art in his personal style for four more decades.
His Two on the Aisle (1927) sold for a personal record $1,500, allowing Hopper to purchase an automobile, which he used to make 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 acquired for his collection. Hopper painted his last oil self-portrait around 1930. Although Josephine posed for many of his paintings, she sat for only one 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 work.
He sold 30 paintings that year, including 13 watercolors. The following year he participated in the first Whitney Annual, and continued to exhibit at 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 cottage in South Truro on Cape Cod. They returned every summer for the rest of their lives, and built a summer home there in 1934. From there, they would travel by automobile to other areas when Hopper needed to find fresh material to paint.
In the summers of 1937 and 1938, the couple spent long periods at 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, as 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 very 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 I 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 major works, including First Row Orchestra (1951); as well as Morning Sun and Hotel by a Railroad, both in 1952; and Intermission in 1963.
Death of Edward Hopper
Hopper died in his studio near Washington Square Park in New York City on May 15, 1967. He was buried two days later in his family's plot at Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack, New York, the place of his birth. His wife passed away ten months later and was buried next to him.
Headstone of Edward Hopper and Josephine N. Hopper in Oak Hill Cemetery
His wife bequeathed their combined collection of over three thousand 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.
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Edward Hopper's Artwork
Personality and Vision
Always reticent about talking about himself and his work, Hopper simply said, "The whole answer is on the canvas." Hopper was stoic and fatalistic - a quiet, introverted man with a gentle sense of humor and outspoken demeanor. Hopper was drawn to an emblematic, anti-narrative symbolism, which "painted brief moments of configuration, saturated with suggestion."
His quiet, uneasy spaces encounters "touch us where we are most vulnerable," and have "a suggestion of melancholy, that melancholy being depicted." His sense of color gave him away as a pure painter.
According to critic Lloyd Goodrich, he was "an eminently native painter, who more than anyone else was capturing more of the quality of America in his canvases".
Conservative in politics and social matters (Hopper stated, for example, that "the lives of artists should be written by people very close to them") he accepted things as they were and showed an absence of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was a well-read man, and many of his paintings show people reading.
He was generally good company and was not disturbed by silence, although he was often taciturn, grumpy or disinterested. Always serious about his own and other people's art, and when questioned he answered frankly.
Good art is the outward expression of the artist's inner life, and his inner life will result in his personal view of the world. No amount of talented invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of the much more abstract paintings is the attempt to substitute a private imaginative conception for the inventions of the human intellect.
The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied field and is not concerned only with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.
The term life of a human being should not be used as derogatory, for it implies the whole existence and the competence of art is to react and not to run away from it.
Painting will have to deal more fully and less indirectly with life and the phenomenon of nature before it can be great again.
Edward Hopper, "Statement." Published as part of "Statements by Four Artists" in Reality, vol. 1, no. 1 (spring 1953). The handwritten sketch 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. In addition, his sketchbooks contain high-quality pen and pencil sketches, which were not intended for public viewing.
Hopper paid particular attention to geographical design and the careful location of human figures in balance with the environment. He was a slow and methodical artist; he wrote, "It takes a long time for an idea to come. 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. It's all right when I finally approach the easel."
He often made preliminary sketches to work out his carefully calculated compositions. He and his wife kept a detailed book of his works with notes such as "sad face of dull woman" or .
For "New York Movie" (1939), Hopper demonstrates his meticulous 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 emblematic of introspect 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 effects and shadow have been compared to film noir cinematography.