The next section of Modern Life examines Hopper's relationship to artists who painted the excitement of urban life in the 'Roaring Twenties,' including Guy Pène du Bois and George Bellows who, like Hopper, were students of Robert Henri and represented a younger generation of the realist school initiated by the Ashcan group. These artists, together with sculptors such as Gaston Lachaise, departed from the loose brushwork of the Ashcan aesthetic, instead using smooth curves and monumental, tubular forms to depict their figures. Purged of anecdotal detail, their compositions are balanced between the idealized forms of abstraction and the particularities of realism. Though not as stylized as the work of these artists, Hopper's paintings and prints of the 1920s share a similar approach. Works like his iconic Early Sunday Morning are drawn from observed reality and yet are devoid of characteristic details that tie them to a specific place and time. Hopper was not interested in the lively social world depicted by many of his colleagues, but he shared their interest in capturing moments of solitude and in using bold, simplified forms to infuse his scenes with dramatic monumentality.
Also explored are the connections between Hopper's art and that of the Precisionists, who began to paint American factories, skyscrapers, and machine-made structures during the 1920s. Characterized by crisp lines, hard-edged geometric shapes, and flat planes of color, the Precisionist style embodied the sense of order, logic, and purity identified with science and the machine. For many of the Precisionists, including Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Ralston Crawford, this style also reflected a desire to create a distinctly American aesthetic rooted in shared national experience. Although Hopper did not share their optimistic embrace of industry and its hard-edged aesthetic, his work of the period shares certain affinities with theirs. For Hopper, as for the Precisionists, architecture offered a means of exploring formal geometries and light effects. In Hopper's paintings of urban scenes and industrial structures, as in those of the Precisionists, the interaction between diagonal planes and expanses of light is often as much a focal point as the subject itself. Both Hopper and the Precisionists depicted recognizable subjects, but their work conveys in equal measure the desire to reduce modern architectural forms to their abstract essence.
The next section of the exhibition examines Hopper's rural paintings of the 1930s in the context of other American artists who retreated to the countryside in search of a reprieve from the commotion of modern urban life. In 1930, Hopper and his wife Jo began spending summers in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he painted the coastal landscape and scenes inspired by the small town life he observed there. Together with Charles Burchfield, who painted in and around Buffalo, New York, Hopper came to represent the movement known as American Scene painting. Both artists elicited from the vernacular architecture and landscapes of small town America a mood of desolation and melancholy, in part for a way of life that was rapidly being abandoned as more people moved to urban centers. For many viewers, their art captured the sturdy individualism at the heart of the American ethos, particularly during the hardships of the Great Depression.
The exhibition's final room at the Whitney presents Hopper's urban paintings of the 1930s alongside those of the Social Realists, including Reginald Marsh, Paul Cadmus, and the Soyer brothers, Raphael and Isaac. Hopper was friendly with these artists — all were closely allied with the Whitney Studio Club and exhibited frequently at the Whitney Museum after its opening in 1931. At the time, Hopper's depictions of city life were often associated with those of the Social Realist circle, but his images differ from the work of his contemporaries, who gravitated to the chaos and vitality of urban life in the 1930s. Unlike his peers, Hopper uses the city as a springboard for exploring moments of solitude, transforming scenes of everyday life into meditations on the human condition.
Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time includes approximately eighty-five works in a range of media, primarily from the Whitney’s collection, which includes more than 2,500 works from Hopper's estate bequeathed to the Whitney in 1968, and combining well-known works with rarely exhibited early paintings and works on paper. Also featured are several loans of key Hopper paintings from other museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Neuberger Museum of Art. Nearly all the works by other artists in the show are from the Whitney’s collection, with the exception of a John Sloan painting, The Haymarket, Sixth Avenue (1907), originally owned by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, now in the collection of The Brooklyn Museum. In addition, the exhibition features a case of photographs of Hopper at work, with other artists, and at various stages of his life, drawn from the archives of the Whitney's Frances Mulhall Achilles Library.
Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time is accompanied by a 250-page illustrated catalogue with essays by American and German scholars, produced in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, which appeared at the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, and the Kunsthal Rotterdam in 2009-10.
1. Edward Hopper, New York Interior, ca 1921. Oil on canvas. Josephine Hopper bequest. Licensed by the Whitney Museum. Photo by Robert E. Mates.
2. Edward Hopper, Self-Portrait, 1925-1930. Oil on canvas. Josephine Hopper bequest. Licensed by the Whitney Museum. Photo by Robert E. Mates
3. Edward Hopper, South Carolina Morning, 1955. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum; Given in memory of Otto L. Spaeth by his Family.
4. Everett Shinn, Revue, 1908. Oil on canvas, Whitney Museum; Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Photo by Geoffrey Clements.
5. Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915. Platinum Palladium print. Whitney Museum; Gift of Michael E. Hoffman in honor of Sondra Gilman.
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