cape cod evening smithsonian museum

Hopper was as pensive as the people he put on canvas. Indeed, the enigmatic quality of the paintings was enhanced by the artist’s public persona. Tall and solidly built with a massive balding head, he reminded observers of a piece of granite—and was about as forthcoming. He was unhelpful to journalists seeking details or anecdotes. “The whole answer is there on the canvas,” he would stubbornly reply. But he also said, “The man’s the work. Something doesn’t come out of nothing.” The art historian Lloyd Goodrich, who championed Hopper in the 1920s, thought that the artist and his work coalesced. “Hopper had no small talk,” Goodrich wrote. “He was famous for his monumental silences; but like the spaces in his pictures, they were not empty. When he did speak, his words were the product of long meditation. About the things that interested him, especially art. he had perceptive things to say, expressed tersely but with weight and exactness, and uttered in a slow reluctant monotone.”
As to controversy, there is little left anymore. Hopper’s star has long blazed brightly. He is arguably the supreme American realist of the 20th century, encapsulating aspects of our experience so authentically that we can hardly see a tumbledown house near a deserted road or a shadow slipping across a brownstone facade except through his eyes. Given Hopper’s iconic status, it is surprising to learn that no comprehensive survey of his work has been seen in American museums outside New York City in more than 25 years. This drought has been remedied by “Edward Hopper,” a retrospective currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through August 19 and continuing on to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art (Sept. 16, 2007-Jan. 21, 2008) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Feb. 16-May 11, 2008). Consisting of more than 100 paintings, watercolors and prints, most of them dating from roughly 1925 to 1950, the period of the artist’s greatest achievement, the show spotlights Hopper’s most compelling compositions.

Like many of Hopper’s paintings, Cape Cod Evening was not a preconceived composition, but the result of a long process of deliberation. Its evolution can be traced in the surviving preparatory drawings [fig. 1] &nbsp [fig. 1] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, fabricated chalk on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.182. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 2] &nbsp [fig. 2] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, graphite pencil on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.227. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 3] &nbsp [fig. 3] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, fabricated chalk on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.183a. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 4] &nbsp [fig. 4] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, fabricated chalk on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.183b. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 5] &nbsp [fig. 5] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, fabricated chalk on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.181. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 6] &nbsp [fig. 6] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, fabricated chalk on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.180. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 7] &nbsp [fig. 7] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, graphite pencil on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.164. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 8] &nbsp [fig. 8] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, graphite pencil on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.163. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art [fig. 9] &nbsp [fig. 9] Edward Hopper, study for Cape Cod Evening, 1939, graphite pencil on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.338. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art . From the outset, Hopper had a basic sense of the composition’s main components, with the grass field occupying the painting’s lower half, the house set in the upper right quadrant, and the locust grove in the upper left quadrant. He experimented with a number of different positions for the figures before arriving at their final disposition in a sketch that was blocked out for transferal to the canvas. The only significant difference between the last sketch and the painting is the placement of the windows in the second story of the house. The “changing organizing composing” to which Lahey alluded must have involved less noticeable alterations, such as the length of the woman’s dress, the window shade on the right, and the placement of the trees.
The theme of the natural world encroaching upon civilization predominates in Cape Cod Evening, with three-quarters of the composition devoted to the grass and trees. Hopper presents the viewer with an assemblage of carefully orchestrated dissonances that convey a generally pessimistic, skeptical attitude about humanity’s relationship with nature and human nature itself. Although Hopper may have selected imagery from the world around him, he was only superficially a realist. Taking external visual reality as his starting point, he transformed his subjects into “mental impressions of things,” reassembling them into deeply personal visions that lie beyond the reach of literal or psychological interpretations.

Directors’ Movie Night and talk with Wim Wenders and Wes Anderson in Zurich
Left: Edward Hopper, Summertime, 1943

Resources:

http://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.61252.html
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/art-film_wim-wenders-casts-edward-hopper-s-lonely-figures/45528592
http://www.wga.hu/html_m/p/piero/3/04flage1.html