15/02/2022
Edward Hopper painted America, not the American Dream. Beautiful pictures, vibrant with color, but filled with solitary individuals staring wistfully out a window or standing in a doorway, bathed in bright sunlight, alone and vulnerable in the man-made landscape; reverently rendered houses and buildings, isolated and ghost-like on their hilltops, with only the blue sky and sea as companions; sailboats small and fragile against a wind-swept sea that threatens to engulf them in its blueness; inspiring natural landscapes marred by the encroachments of civilization.
Hopper's is the art of distancing: he paints the familiar in order to de-familiarize it, to open up a space between the viewer and the everyday in order to make her see it with fresh eyes, to reveal, as one critic has put it, "the fractures beneath the painted skin of modern life." Hopper himself was ambivalent about whether or not he sought to portray the loneliness and alienation of modern life, but his American Landscapes have much the same visual power as Antonioni's Italian ones in evoking the paradox of modern industrial life, that the more power we have at our disposal the smaller and more vulnerable we often become, that the more we can communicate with each other the more isolated from our immediate environment and irrelevant we seem.
Hopper produced nearly 500 paintings, etchings and watercolors over his long career. This exhibit includes over half of them, arranged in chronological order. The viewer should come away with a good idea of the range of subject matter he attempted to portray -- from cityscapes to seascapes, from factories and offices to houses and barns, from the streets of New York to the shores of New England.
Many of the pictures are accompanied by comments on the work or the artist. They're worth checking out. For biographical information on Hopper, see the comments to the self-portraits.
For more 20th century American art, check out these other MWW exhibits:
* The Ashcan School: Urban Realism Comes to America (soon to be revised/expanded)
* American Moderns: I - Stuart Davis & the Steiglitz Gang of Four
* American Moderns II: Regionalists and Social Realists
* American Moderns III: Hymns to the Machine Age
* We the People - Lawrence, Shahn & Other Artists of the 30s
* American Moderns IV: Abstract Expressionists of the NY School
* Harlem Renaissance & Other Artists of the Jazz Age
* History Lessons: The Series Paintings of Jacob Lawrence
* American Moderns V: Pop Goes the Art World
* American Moderns VI: Art in the Age of Styrofoam
