"Gas" Edward Hopper, 1940
"Edward Hopper mined his uneventful life and found poetry in the prosaics of the modern world. After a few years of study with William Merritt Chase, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Robert Henri, followed by three trips to Paris in the years of 1906-1910 and a long stint as a commercial illustrator, Hopper 's life settled into the routine of a patient observer of change."
Hopper was born in New York in 1882 and died there in 1967.He married the painter Josephine Verstille Nivision in 1924, they lived in New York and in their summer house in South Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Hopper had always been a very talented artist, but in 1924," Hopper was given a one-person show at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery and all of the art in the gallery was sold," and that's when Edward Hopper became known throughout the world. "After this success Hopper now gave up his job as a commercial illustrator and totally concentrated on painting."Throughout his career Hopper was never in a hurry to finish a painting, he took his time, he usually only completed one to two paintings a year, but when he completed one it was remarkable.
"Hopper' s art follows the attitudes of Tonalism, a refined style
that reacts to the closing of the American frontier by accommodating itself
to twilight, intimate landscapes, and a type that questions the aspirations
of a materialistic industrialized world.Hopper' s art summarized the turn
of the century, with his art works of the land and all the objects on it.
People loved Hopper' s art, but Hopper does not give them clues that allow
them to become immersed in the landscape, to view it as sublime, or to feel
that it somehow represents a purer, untrammeled world and a higher morality.Nature
in Hopper' s art, is surveyed by a disinterested twentieth-century viewer
used to the continuum that constitutes both a drive in an automobile and
a film; and because it is little understood, nature becomes in the art a
mysterious force, a symbol of the other. Hopper is the first artist to recognize
that visual images in the twentieth century have become so common that they
have also become expendable.He plays on the way individual images become
prevalent in the twentieth century, and he memorializes in his art undistinguished
scenes available to everyone.Most frequently his images pay homage to the
ubiquitous victims of progress by picturing abandoned country houses, weeds
along railroad tracks, and desolate Victorian mansions."
"In his art Hopper stops the narrative that constitutes a drive in an automobile or the montage of a movie to focus on strangely isolated stills.Seen by themselves, these stills are mysterious and haunting.They evoke a desire for the rest of the narrative, and they powerfully convey the breakup of the storyline, the disjunction that is characteristic of modern life.In this manner they awaken in the viewer a desire for the whole, and thus elicit feelings of isolation and loss.The feelings of loneliness experienced by viewers of Hopper' s art, who sometimes use the term "desolation" to describe what they see, come from the fact that a continuum has been broken. The machinery of industrialism is no longer operative, and the illusion of progress as a motivating life force is no longer believable.By stripping modern life of its illusions of momentum, Hopper leaves his viewers isolated;he shows the breakdown of traditional spiritual underpinnings in the modern world and reveals the poverty of a society that has forsaken a meditative calm for a frenetic view of progress.The stills communicate a profound disbelief in the positive benefits to be obtained from constant movement.In Hopper' s stills there are never enough clues to provide a definitive narrative; his mature paintings always emphasize their fragmentary state: they remain unsolvable question marks that indicate a profound distrust of the entire modern age." This from the book "Edward Hopper- A Modern Master" by Ita g. Berkow.
More of Hopper' s works include:Office at Night(1940), A Woman in the Sun(1961), Seawatchers(1952), Second Story Sunlight(1960), Conference at Night(1949), Intermission(1963), The Louvre in a Thunder Storm(1909), and many, many more.
Report by
Billy Colcord
Bibliography
1.Hopper,Edward-A Modern Master by Ita G. Berkow,Copyright 1996 by Todtri Productions Limited.
2.Hopper, Edward by Robert Hobbs, Copyright 1987 by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.