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Work, Sport Star, Artist
of the Month.
September
2010 - June 2011 Artists of the Month
September
2011's Artist of the Month
November
2011's Artist of the Month
December
2011's Artist of the Month
February
2012's Artist of the Month
April 2012's
Artist of the Month is Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (July
22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter
and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings,
he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.
Both in his urban and rural scenes, his images reflected his personal
vision of modern American life.
Hopper was born in upper Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on
the Hudson River north of New York City. He was one of two children.
Hopper’s parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied
with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books. By his
teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil—drawing
from nature as well as making political cartoons.
In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky
Cove. It showed his early interest in nautical subjects.
In his early self-portraits, Hopper tended to represent himself as skinny,
ungraceful, and homely. Hopper began art studies with a correspondence
course in 1899.
One of his teachers, artist Robert Henri, taught life class. Henri encouraged
his students to use their art to "make a stir in the world".
He also advised his students, “It isn’t the subject that
counts but what you feel about it” and “Forget about art
and paint pictures of what interests you in life.”
He made three trips to Europe, each centered in Paris, ostensibly to
study the emerging art scene there. In fact, however, he studied alone
and seemed mostly unaffected by the new currents in art. Later he said
that he “didn’t remember having heard of Picasso at all.”
He was highly impressed by Rembrandt, particularly his Night Watch,
which he said was “the most wonderful thing of his I have seen;
it’s past belief in its reality.”
Years
of struggle
After returning from his last European trip, Hopper rented a studio
in New York City, where he struggled to define his own style. However
in 1913, at the famous Armory Show, Hopper sold his first painting,
Sailing (1911), which he painted over an earlier self-portrait.
Hopper was thirty-one, and though he hoped his first sale would lead
to others in short order, his career would not catch fire for many more
years to come. Shortly after his father’s death that same year,
Hopper moved to the Washington Square apartment in the Greenwich Village
section of New York City where he would live for the rest of his life.
The following year he received a commission to make some movie posters
and handle publicity for a movie company. Though he did not like the
illustration work, Hopper was a life-long devotee of the cinema and
the theatre, both of which became subjects for his paintings. Each form
influenced his compositional methods.
Breakthrough and
mature career
By 1923, Hopper’s slow climb finally produced a breakthrough.
He re-encountered his future wife Josephine Nivison, an artist and former
student of Robert Henri, during a summer painting trip in Gloucester,
Massachusetts. They were opposites: she was short, open, gregarious,
sociable, and liberal, while he was tall, secretive, shy, quiet, introspective,
and conservative. They married a year later. She remarked famously,
“Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a
well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.”
She subordinated her career to his and shared his reclusive life style.
The rest of their lives revolved around their spare walk-up apartment
in the city and their summers in South Truro on Cape Cod. She managed
his career and his interviews, was his primary model, and was his life
companion.
According to Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator Carol Troyen, "Hopper
really liked the way these houses, with their turrets and towers and
porches and mansard roofs and ornament cast wonderful shadows. He always
said that his favorite thing was painting sunlight on the side of a
house.
At forty-one, Hopper finally received the recognition he deserved. He
continued to harbor bitterness about his career, later turning down
appearances and awards. His financial stability now secured, Hopper
would live a simple, stable life and continue creating art in his distinctive
style for four more decades.
His Two on the Aisle (1927) sold for a personal record $1,500, enabling
Hopper to purchase an automobile, which he used to make field trips
to remote areas of New England. In 1929, he produced Chop Suey and Railroad
Sunset. The following year, art patron Stephen Clark donated House by
the Railroad (1925) to the
Museum of Modern Art, the first oil painting it acquired for its collection.
Hopper painted his last self-portrait in oil around 1930. Though she
posed for many of his paintings, Josephine modeled for only one oil
portrait, Jo Painting (1936).
Hopper fared better than many other artists during the Great Depression.
His stature took a sharp rise in 1931 when major museums, including
the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
paid thousands of dollars for his works. He sold 30 paintings that year,
including 13 watercolors. The following year he participated in the
first Whitney Annual, and he continued to exhibit in every annual at
the museum for the rest of his life.
In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first large-scale
retrospective. The Hoppers built their summer house in South Truro in
1934. Hopper was very productive through the 1930s and early 1940s,
producing among many important works New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show
(1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City
(1944). During the late 1940s, however, he suffered a period of relative
inactivity.
He admitted, “I wish I could paint more. I get sick of reading
and going to the movies.”
Death
Hopper died in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on
May 15, 1967. His wife, who died 10 months later, bequeathed their joint
collection of over three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American
Art.
Eary Sunday Morning
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Lighthouse
Summertime
Night Halks
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