Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Nighthawks, 1942. Oil on canvas, 33 1/8 × 60 in. (84.1 × 152.4 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago; Friends of American Art Collection. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago
Both of these tributes to night and day are on display in the same room to great effect. Early Sunday Morning, a part of the Whitney’s permanent collection, is dramatically perched on an enormous easel that was crafted by the artist himself in 1924 (the very same easel upon which he painted Sunday Morning in his Village studio; it is on loan from New York University’s Silver School of Social Work). The two works play off one another — morning at one end of the gallery, night at the other — and reflect the passage of time. Nighthawks, in a first, is accompanied by all 19 prep drawings.
The photos on view in this gallery room anchor us and remind us of the changing face of New York. But they also point to how Hopper created his art. He worked from what he called “fact” — and you can see the facts, the visual evidence, in the photos — but also from imagination and from memory.
Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Soir Bleu, 1914. Oil on canvas, Overall: 36 × 72 in. (91.4 × 182.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest . Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper, licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art
He improvised, often approaching a subject long after he’s collected the visual evidence in his sketchpad. Case in point: the enigmatic dining scene Soir Bleu (1914), one of his largest works, painted in New York after his last trip to Paris. Saying “It took me ten years to get over Europe,” Hopper reaches back here to his sketchbook drawings of the city’s café and street characters but also to his watercolor caricatures of the French people.
He was fascinated by light, both artificial (Gas, 1940) and natural (Morning in a City, 1944; A Woman in the Sun, 1961). The last painting in the Whitney’s exhibit, Sun in an Empty Room (1963), is completely reductive: “What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house,” he said in 1946, and in this work he did just that — sunlight hits a wall in a seemingly vacant room. That’s it.
His trademark preoccupation with ordinary subjects — diners, bridges, roads, boarding houses, bedrooms and gas stations — and a fascination with solitary figures and their reveries, defined him. His figure paintings, many of women and many of his wife-turned-model Josephine, are infused with ambiguity, tension and poetic longing.
New York Movie (1939), a stand-alone in a large room filled with archival photos of Broadway movie palaces and 52 drawings, is a re-creation of the interior of the Palace Theatre in Times Square. The usherette, in a military-inspired uniform, is a younger blonde version of Josephine. She stands in a side aisle, apart from the audience, lost in thought. Her distance was required — the usherettes were not permitted to watch the movies while working.
But Hopper was a great fan of the movies, and when he needed to re-charge, he headed to the theaters. As he once said, “When I don’t feel in the mood for painting, I go on a regular movie binge!” He could spend an entire week in the dark indulging his passion. His vision and style (all those close-ups and artsy aerial shots, and that quiet, somber mood) were arguably both influenced by, and developed in tandem with, the cinema of his day, especially film noir.
Edward Hopper (1882–1967), New York Movie, 1939. Oil on canvas, 32 1/4 × 40 1/8 in. (81.9 × 101.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; given anonymously. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
The latter part of the exhibit pays homage to Hopper’s beloved Cape Cod, with scenes of Eastham (Route 6, Eastham, 1941) and Provincetown (Room for Tourists, 1945) and trees (Roads and Trees, 1962). He had the studio in Truro, but he used his car as a kind of floating studio, staking out his subjects and sketching them from the driver’s seat. The side-window was the lens through which he saw the Provincetown boarding house famously memorialized in Room for Tourists; it literally framed the scene.
Like the canvases themselves, which were typically spare and economical, Hopper was “a man of few words,” Curator of Drawings Carter E. Foster writes in the first chapter of the show’s hefty catalogue. But there’s a Goethe quote that he carried around in his wallet that sheds some light on his method, according to the curator:
“The beginning and end of all literary activity [ ‘For literary substitute artistic. It works for that too’] is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner.”
As Foster eloquently interprets, Hopper took the measure of his surroundings, but he also looked within himself. He gave “equal importance to the world and to the artist; their combination creates the art.”
©2013 Val Castronovo for SeniorWomen.com
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