hopper exhibition
TRANSCRIPT
HOPPER
Nyack, 22 July 1882
New York, 15 May 1967
A BIT OF HIS LIFE…
• Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was born in Nyack and lived all his life in New
York. Born into a modest, middle-class family, Hopper’s interest in painting
revealed itself at a very young age. He studied commercial illustration for a
year then enrolled in the painting classes at the New York School of Art.
There Hopper joined the studio of Robert Henri, a teacher who promoted
a realism that focused on the depiction of every day American life. Having
completed his studies Hopper went to Paris where he spent an academic
year, returning there for shorter periods in the future. After that date, he
only left the United States to make a couple of short trips to Mexico.
A bit of his life…
• Hopper worked formany years
as a commercial ilustrator but
from 1918 began to acquire a
reputation as a printmaker. His
Real change of fortunes, howe-
ver, came about in 1925 when
an exhibition of his watercolours at the Rehn Gallery
was completely sold out. This success
allowed him to dedicate himself entirely to painting.
Edward Hopper, Self-Portrait, 1906
HOW HE PAINTED
• Hopper began painting urban and architectural scenes in a dark
palette. Then he shifted to the lighter palette of the Impressionists
before returning to the darker palette with which he was
comfortable. Hopper later said, "I got over that and later things done
in Paris were more the kind of things I do now.”Hopper spent much of
his time drawing street and café scenes, and going to the theater and
opera. Unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated the abstract
cubists experiments, Hopper was attracted realist art.
HOW HE PAINTED
• Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes with
a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a chilling,
alienating, and often vacuous place. Everybody in a Hopper picture
appears terribly alone. Hopper soon gained a widespread
reputation as the artist who gave visual form to the loneliness and
boredom of life in the big city. This was something new in art,
perhaps an expression of the sense of human hopelessness that
characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Road In Maine (1914)
Queensborough Bridge (1913)
Notre Dame de Paris (1907)
Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928)
Corn Hill (1930)Sunday (1926)
Gas (1940)
• Chop Suey (1929)
Office in a Small City (1953)
• Four Lane Road (1956)
Morning in a City (1944)
Hotel Room
Automat
Morning Sun
(1927)
(1931)
(1952)
• Carolina Morning
New York Movie
(1955)
(1939)
Soir Bleu (1914)
Room in New York (1932)
CURIOSITIES
• Edward Hopper's artist wife, Jo, was his only model and was crucial to his success.
Josephine N. Hopper
Jo painting (1936)
CURIOSITIES
Intermission (1963)
Jo in Wyoming (1946)
CURIOSITIES
House by the Railroad (1925)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
A bit of his life
• Hopper died the 15th of May 1967 in his studio in NYC near Washington Square. His wife, who died 10 months later, bequeathed their joint collection of over three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is buried with his wife Jo in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack, the place where he was born.