I've just been recent introduced to Hopper's work. And the funny thing is that in the same week my English teacher introduced me his work, my husband came back from the MET very excited with a new artist for him that it was Edward Hopper. This article from the New Yorker is worth reading.
EDWARD HOPPER’S DETAILS
“Edward Hopper is called a realist,” said Carter Foster, the curator of drawing for the Whitney Museum, one recent morning in his office. “But his real process was about memory, the way it infuses subjectivity, and he focussed on the material memory of the city.” The desk, walls, and shelves of Foster’s office are currently crowded with clues to Hopper’s creative process, all gathered for the Whitney’s current show “Hopper Drawing.” Large foam-core boards stood pinned with reproduced photographs, sketches, maps, and other ephemera, looking like a scene from a detective movie: the evidence laid out for investigation. At first glance, the missing persons seemed to be the lost architectural structures of Greenwich Village on which Hopper’s most famous New York paintings were based.
If you are the nostalgic sort, you might long for Hopper’s paintings to represent reality, and for that reality to still exist on the streets of the city. You might want to find an actual diner, for example, where the faded imprints of the nighthawks’ elbows can still be observed in the Formica countertop, or at least know the hallowed ground on which the diner once stood, if only to have a place for pilgrimage, a place to point at and say, “There it was.” Foster doesn’t identify with this particular pang.
“I don’t know what people want,” he said of those who wish for Hopper’s paintings to be accurate copies of the real. “That’s not what Hopper is giving them. He’s giving so much more. Maybe people don’t want the art. They want the thing. But the painting is the thing. I don’t need to find a diner. What’s better is to understand how the artist’s mind worked.” Foster’s investigation has not been so much about locating the vanished architecture of Hopper’s city but, rather, about revealing the painter’s method.
“Hopper was a synthesizer,” he said definitively, pulling out a sketch of a fire hydrant, a study for “Early Sunday Morning.” He then pointed to a 1914 photograph of a fire hydrant planted on a stretch of Seventh Avenue near Fifteenth Street. Is it the same hydrant? The one in the painting is portlier than the one in the sketch, and may have been borrowed from another street. The scene’s barber pole materializes in archival sepia, in photo after photo, but Hopper enlarged it, aggrandized it, and cast an unreal light upon it. (As Foster wrote in the show’s catalog, “Hopper had no problem bending light to his own will.”) The building in the painting was real, but different, less moody—and you can’t make a pilgrimage to it. It was demolished in 1939, less than a decade after Hopper committed it to canvas.
On another of Foster’s evidence boards, the corpus of “New York Movie” comes together from multiple sources—a sketch of a balcony, a carpet’s floral whorls, a newspaper article showing the military-style uniforms of usherettes. “Hopper had to have real details,” Foster said, talking fast. “He had to go out and look for it in the world. He was walking the streets of New York constantly, absorbing the world and putting it into his paintings. So the real was very important. But to turn it into something poetic, he had to do something to it.” That something was the addition of a certain mood, one that many have called melancholy. Hopper didn’t like his work to be described this way. He once protested, “The loneliness thing is overdone.”
“If you interpret his paintings as lonely or melancholy,” Foster said, “that’s about you. The paintings are screens onto which the viewer can project their own feelings and ideas.”
“Nighthawks” might be the one painting that invites the most projection, and which has inspired the most longing for a real thing. It might also be the most synthesized of Hopper’s Greenwich Village paintings. Foster pointed out a 1908 photo showing the curvilinear glass prow of the Flatiron Building. He theorized that Hopper plucked that curved window from the Flatiron and married it to the wedge-shaped Crawford Luncheonette, which once stood behind the Loew’s Sheridan theatre on Greenwich Avenue. A close-up photo of the luncheonette’s interior reveals the silhouettes of men in dark fedoras and waiters in white shirtsleeves.
“Hopper probably looked through those same windows,” Foster said with excitement. He grabbed a 1937 Life magazine from his desk and flipped it over. On the back cover of that issue is an advertisement for Lucky Strike in which a woman bends her elbow to hold a cigarette aloft by her face. She resembles the woman seated at the diner counter in “Nighthawks,” as Foster demonstrated by holding the magazine next to Hopper’s sketch.
“Hopper read Life, and he smoked cigarettes, though I couldn’t find out what brand he smoked. This magazine might have been on his nightstand. The woman in the painting, what is she holding? A pack of Luckies? A wad of money? Hopper’s wife said it was just a sandwich.”
Whenever “Nighthawks” comes to New York, crowds swarm it the way they swarm the “Mona Lisa” at the Louvre. Foster isn’t sure why this painting has become so popular, but he suspects it has to do with storytelling and voyeurism. “You can imagine yourself as a pedestrian on that street. And the title—what does ‘Nighthawks’ mean? What are these people doing? Looking at it, people make up stories in their heads.”
But Foster doesn’t look at the characters and imagine their conflicts and trysts. “Hopper was painting a strata specific to the urban area,” Foster said, referring to windows at night, upper-story bedrooms glimpsed from the elevated train. “In New York, you can look into people’s lives. That’s the feeling I’m interested in. You don’t get that in Iowa.”
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