| Edward Hopper (1882-1967),
American painter, whose highly individualistic works are landmarks of American
realism. His paintings embody in art a particular American
20th-century sensibility that is characterized by isolation, melancholy, and
loneliness.
Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and
studied illustration in New York City at a commercial art school from 1899 to
1900. Around 1901 he switched to painting and studied at the New York School of
Art until 1906, largely under Robert Henri. He made three trips to
Europe between 1906 and 1910 but remained unaffected by current French and
Spanish experiments in cubism. He was influenced mainly by the
great European realists—Diego Velázquez, Francisco de
Goya, Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet—whose work
had first been introduced to him by his New York City teachers. His early
paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore (1909, Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York City), were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic
characteristics that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style
based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and the use of
architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals,
and diagonals.
Although one of Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the
famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited
little interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a commercial
illustrator for the next decade. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad
(Museum of Modern Art, New York City), a landmark in American art that marked
the advent of his mature style. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and the
stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier work, but the
mood—which was the real subject of the painting—was new: It conveyed an
atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost eerie solitude.
Hopper continued to work in this style for the rest of his
life, refining and purifying it but never abandoning its basic principles. Most
of his paintings portray scenes in New York or New England, both country and
city scenes, all with a spare, homely quality—deserted streets, half-empty
theaters, gas stations, railroad tracks, rooming houses. One of his best-known
works, Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago), shows an all-night
café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of
electric lights.
Although Hopper's work was outside the mainstream of
mid-20th-century abstraction, his simplified schematic style was one of the
influences on the later representational revival and on pop art. He
died May 15, 1967, in New York City. |
