edward hopper art
A few years later, Edward Hopper found his career had taken a turn for the better, and he was doing well in sales, and financially with the works he had created. He was invited to do a second one person exhibit, to feature new works, and to create a buzz about the work he had created in recent years. The Frank KM Rehn Gallery in NYC, was where this second exhibit took place, and it received far more attention and a much larger crowd, due to the location where the exhibit was taking place, and also because of the fact that more people were now aware of the works Edward Hopper had created.
In Edward Hopper’s most famous piece, Nighthawks, there are four customers and a waiter, who are in a brightly lit diner at night. It was a piece created during a wartime; and many believe that their disconnect with the waiter, and with the external world, represent the feelings of many Americans during this period, because of the war. The piece was set up in 1942, in the Art Institute of Chicago, and was seen by many people while it was on exhibit for a show.
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.
After his student years, Hopper’s nudes were all women. Unlike past artists who painted the female nude to glorify the female form and to highlight female eroticism, Hopper’s nudes are solitary women who are psychologically exposed. [92] One audacious exception is Girlie Show (1941), where a red-headed strip-tease queen strides confidently across a stage to the accompaniment of the musicians in the pit. Girlie Show was inspired by Hopper’s visit to a burlesque show a few days earlier. Hopper’s wife, as usual, posed for him for the painting, and noted in her diary, “Ed beginning a new canvas—a burlesque queen doing a strip tease—and I posing without a stitch on in front of the stove—nothing but high heels in a lottery dance pose.” [93]
A reflection of his inner world, Hopper’s works are so unsettling at times that they create a sense of trepidation and suspense. For that reason, he inspired countless film directors and photographers, from Alfred Hitchcock to William Eggleston and David Lynch.
Coincidentally, our period of history is beginning to echo the turbulent time that Hopper lived through: the 1918 Spanish flu, the electric energy of 1920s culture, and the sharp economic decline brought on by the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as two World Wars.
Hopper’s open-ended narratives have also appealed to writers and musicians. Tom Waits titled an album Nighthawks at the Diner and Madonna named a concert tour after the painting Girlie Show (1941). Joyce Carol Oates refers directly to Hopper in her poem, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks 1942. Many others have created whole collections of stories or poems using Hopper paintings as starting points.
His birthplace and boyhood home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. It is now operated as the Edward Hopper House Art Center. It serves as a nonprofit community cultural center featuring exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances, and special events.
Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, a small shipbuilding community on the Hudson River. The younger of two children in an educated middle-class family, Hopper was encouraged in his intellectual and artistic pursuits and by the age of 5 was already exhibiting a natural talent. He continued to develop his abilities during grammar school and high school, working in a range of media and forming an early love for impressionism and pastoral subject matter. Among his earliest signed works is an 1895 oil painting of a rowboat. Before deciding to pursue his future in fine art, Hopper imagined a career as a nautical architect.
(Later information from Josephine’s diaries presented by art scholar Gail Levin in the 1995 book Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography presented the marriage as becoming highly dysfunctional and marked by abuse from Hopper, though another couple who knew the two challenged such claims.)
Hopper was initially trained as an illustrator, but, between 1901 and 1906, he studied painting under Robert Henri, a member of a group of painters called the Ashcan School. Hopper travelled to Europe three times between 1906 and 1910, but he remained untouched by the experimental work then blossoming in France and continued throughout his career to follow his own artistic course. Although he exhibited paintings in the Armory Show of 1913, he devoted most of his time to advertising art and illustrative etchings until 1924. He then began to do such watercolours as Model Reading (1925), as well as oil paintings. Like the painters of the Ashcan School, Hopper painted the commonplaces of urban life. But, unlike their loosely organized, vivacious paintings, his House by the Railroad (1925) and Room in Brooklyn (1932) show still, anonymous figures and stern geometric forms within snapshot-like compositions that create an inescapable sense of loneliness. This isolation of his subjects was heightened by Hopper’s characteristic use of light to insulate persons and objects in space, whether in the harsh morning light ( Early Sunday Morning, 1930) or the eerie light of an all-night coffee stand ( Nighthawks, 1942).
Edward Hopper, (born July 22, 1882, Nyack, N.Y., U.S.—died May 15, 1967, New York City), American painter whose realistic depictions of everyday urban scenes shock the viewer into recognition of the strangeness of familiar surroundings. He strongly influenced the Pop art and New Realist painters of the 1960s and 1970s.
No one captured the isolation of the individual within the modern city like Edward Hopper. His imagery of figures within urban settings go well beyond their role as modern cityscapes, exposing the underbelly of the human experience. So while his oeuvre officially falls within the rubric of Realism, it offers a far more evocative look at life between the World Wars. Indeed, by providing a minimum of action, stripping away almost any sign of life or mobility, and adding dramatic means of representation with striking lighting schemes in claustrophobic spaces, Hopper suggests something of the psychological inner life of his subjects, leading the way towards Abstract Expressionism. He injected significance, and the weight of the individual’s existential being in the modern metropolis or in country life, into what otherwise might appear to be straight-forward images of everyday life.
Hopper’s Automat captures a woman who has stepped out of the busy urban scene incumbent with necessary human interaction, taking refuge in the respite provided by a local diner. This image perfectly captures Hopper’s brilliant depictions of the isolation of the individual within the modern urban city. The main figure is depicted sitting alone at a table, staring pensively down at her coffee. The fact that she still wears one glove, having removed the other, indicates this will be a brief stop and that she’ll soon hurry on to another destination. By definition, automats (self-service restaurants where the food and drinks were dispensed through vending machines) suggest isolated experiences, the opportunity to pick up a meal without exchanging pleasantries. This subject probably had great appeal to the reticent, slightly antisocial Hopper. Of additional interest is her delineation from an adjacent table, suggesting the presence of an unidentified viewer. The idea of a voyeur’s gaze on a lonely, dejected single woman was exhibited in Impressionistic masterpieces such as Г‰douard Manet’s The Plum (c. 1877) and Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe (1876). Hopper surpasses these images by elevating the significance of the setting to a level on par with that of the figure, emphasizing the automat’s function as a busy venue where, despite the autonomous act of retrieving food from a machine, crowds are the norm. Psychological nuance is added by focusing on a woman sunk in loneliness despite being in a place consistently flooded with people.
References:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hopper
http://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/48442/1/how-artist-edward-hopper-became-the-poster-boy-of-quarantine-culture
http://www.wikiart.org/en/edward-hopper
http://www.biography.com/artist/edward-hopper
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Hopper
http://m.theartstory.org/artist/hopper-edward/
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/paintings-analysis/nighthawks.htm