About Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper, the best-known American realist of the inter-war period, once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.' This offers a clue to interpreting the work of an artist who was not only intensely private, but who made solitude and introspection important themes in his painting.
He painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and also liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theatres, cinemas and offices. But even in these paintings he stressed the theme of loneliness - his theatres are often semideserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage. Hopper was a frequent movie-goer, and there is often a cinematic quality in his work. As the years went on, however, he found suitable subjects increasingly difficult to discover, and often felt blocked and unable to paint. His contemporary the painter Charles Burchfield wrote: 'With Hopper the whole fabric of his art seems to be interwoven with his personal character and manner of living.' When the link between the outer world he observed and the inner world of feeling and fantasy broke, Hopper found he was unable to create.
From the time of his marriage, Hopper's professional fortunes changed. His second solo show, at the Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924, was a sell-out. The following year, he painted what is now generally acknowledged to be his first fully mature picture, The House by the Railroad. With its deliberate, disciplined spareness, this is typical of what he was to create thereafter. His paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to paint, for instance, could not have been more out of fashion than it was in the mid-192OS, when he first began to look at it seriously. Though his compositions are supposedly realist they also make frequent use of covert symbolism. Hopper's paintings have, in this respect, been rather aptly compared to the realist plays of Ibsen, a writer whom he admired.
Paintings such as Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1942) convey a mood of loneliness and desolation by their emptiness or by the presence of anonymous, non-communicating figures. But of this picture Hopper said: `I didn't see it as particularly lonely... Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.' Deliberately so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings Hopper often exerts a powerful psychological impact -- distantly akin to that made by the Metaphysical painter de Chirico; but while de Chirico's effect was obtained by making the unreal seem real, Hopper's was rooted in the presentation of the familiar and concrete.
Hopper’s spatial constructions irritate the viewer and their natural understanding of space; they renounce Alberti’s famous view through a window through surreal light conditions and shadows, as well as unreal perspectives, and unfold a realism that is fragile and again and again reveals tendencies towards abstraction and a geometrization of the pictorial surface. Hopper’s psychologically charged interior and exterior spaces seem to merge, and we repeatedly come upon threshold motifs such as windows, balconies, and doors. Spatial boundaries blur and are accentuated at the same time. In their prototypical representation, Hopper’s figures make us think of the manichini of the Pittura metafisica, they have almost no individual features and strike us as isolated, cut off from others, melancholy, and introverted.
Edward Hopper once remarked, “To me, the important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re travelling.” Travelling provided Hopper with the subjects for his pictures, which were also a source of inspiration. Movement and standstill are two cornerstones of his art. He loved the cinema, and the cinema loved him. The filmic as such is crucial for his works because the static character of his paintings conveys itself as an indefinitely expanded instantaneous exposure that can only be explained through movement. The transformation of time into space is as key as the transformation of space into time. With this approach, Edward Hopper inspired not only a wide range of film makers like Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, and Wim Wenders, but also sculptors, photographers, video artists, and writers such as Peter Handke and Paul Auster.
Reference
"Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists", by Edward Lucie-Smith
From the time of his marriage, Hopper's professional fortunes changed. His second solo show, at the Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924, was a sell-out. The following year, he painted what is now generally acknowledged to be his first fully mature picture, The House by the Railroad. With its deliberate, disciplined spareness, this is typical of what he was to create thereafter. His paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to paint, for instance, could not have been more out of fashion than it was in the mid-192OS, when he first began to look at it seriously. Though his compositions are supposedly realist they also make frequent use of covert symbolism. Hopper's paintings have, in this respect, been rather aptly compared to the realist plays of Ibsen, a writer whom he admired.
Paintings such as Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1942) convey a mood of loneliness and desolation by their emptiness or by the presence of anonymous, non-communicating figures. But of this picture Hopper said: `I didn't see it as particularly lonely... Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.' Deliberately so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings Hopper often exerts a powerful psychological impact -- distantly akin to that made by the Metaphysical painter de Chirico; but while de Chirico's effect was obtained by making the unreal seem real, Hopper's was rooted in the presentation of the familiar and concrete.
Hopper’s spatial constructions irritate the viewer and their natural understanding of space; they renounce Alberti’s famous view through a window through surreal light conditions and shadows, as well as unreal perspectives, and unfold a realism that is fragile and again and again reveals tendencies towards abstraction and a geometrization of the pictorial surface. Hopper’s psychologically charged interior and exterior spaces seem to merge, and we repeatedly come upon threshold motifs such as windows, balconies, and doors. Spatial boundaries blur and are accentuated at the same time. In their prototypical representation, Hopper’s figures make us think of the manichini of the Pittura metafisica, they have almost no individual features and strike us as isolated, cut off from others, melancholy, and introverted.
Edward Hopper once remarked, “To me, the important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re travelling.” Travelling provided Hopper with the subjects for his pictures, which were also a source of inspiration. Movement and standstill are two cornerstones of his art. He loved the cinema, and the cinema loved him. The filmic as such is crucial for his works because the static character of his paintings conveys itself as an indefinitely expanded instantaneous exposure that can only be explained through movement. The transformation of time into space is as key as the transformation of space into time. With this approach, Edward Hopper inspired not only a wide range of film makers like Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, and Wim Wenders, but also sculptors, photographers, video artists, and writers such as Peter Handke and Paul Auster.
Reference
"Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists", by Edward Lucie-Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment