Art Exhibit: Golden Age Artist Edward Hopper

[imoldfashioned]

I went to see the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston this morning. The cost of the ticket ($23.00) made me hesitate but I would highly recommend anybody in the area to go before the show closes on the 19th; it was well worth the cost.

The show opened with a self portrait of Hopper and I couldn’t help but think he’d have been right at home here in the Lounge.

The exhibit included works in oil, watercolor, pen and ink and etching from over 60 years focusing on art produced during the 1920s and 1930s. The majority of the pieces were from different institutions affording a unique opportunity to see related works side by side that otherwise hang in museums across the country. It also provided a means to see Hopper’s style evolve from his Beaux Arts beginnings to near abstraction at the end of his life.

Seeing the actual paintings was a revelation; reproductions don’t capture the brilliant light and color that emanates from the originals. Most of the paintings were larger than I expected, giving them more of an impact on the viewer. Details were also more visible; Nighthawks has the most beautiful grey/green shadows on the street, the woman’s face in Chop Suey is boldly colored and focused and one of my favorite of Hopper’s paintings, New York Movie, is very muddy when you look at it in person, very different from reproductions I’ve seen.

My favorites were:

Captain Upton’s House 1927

Room in Brooklyn 1932 (the color in the original oil painting is breathtaking; this is a poor approximation)

Hotel Room 1931

Tables for Ladies 1930

Rooms for Tourists 1945

 

[Mr. Lucky]

Sounds spectacular! Almost worth the trip to Bean Town. Here's one of my favorites -

 

[imoldfashioned]

Yes, they had Automat there too--gorgeous colors.

 

[Harp]

Hopper

Love Nighthawks.

 

[J. M. Stovall]

Extremely jealous .

 

[Mr. 'H']

I viewed this gem in NYC last year. It was beautiful. it was smaller than I thought but intense colors - yes.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Edward Hopper is absolutely my favorite 20th century painter! Studying his work, and in particular his wonderful skill in showing how light falls, has greatly aided me in developing my "eye" for photography. (I also love Vermeer for the same reason.)

A couple of nice Hopper galleries are up at:

http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/hopper/index.html

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/

 

[carter]

There's a good article on Edward Hopper in the July 2007 issue of Smithsonian magazine as well.

It would be swell to see this exhibit. Do you know if it is travelling to other cities?

Thanks for sharing the great pictures.

Carter

 

[BeBopBaby]

Beautiful paintings... I always find it interesting how a lot of paintings seem to deal with the isolation of people in big groups - i.e., people being alone amoungst a sea of people in a big city.

 

[herringbonekid]

Hopper seems to pervade everything i like. whether it's films, photographs, comics or other paintings, he did it first. easily one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

 

[MAGNAVERDE]

To me, Hopper's real subject is not, despite the frequncy of solitary figures in his paintings and comments thereon, loneliness or alienation, but light and its effects: the brilliance of full sun; the hard yellow flare of a porch light on a humid summer night; the glowing, moody pools of light in a darkened movie theater; the interplay between the warm light from an incandescent ceiling fixture & the cold light of a mercury street lamp, the chilly fluourescent glare of a cheap diner. In Hopper's world, people are no more than anonymous extras, bit players in a story that doesn't involve them, but it doesn't matter, because the light itself has more than enough eloquence to tell the story.

Hopper only added figures to his paintings because somebody, somewhere along the line, must have suggested it, to "add interest", and the reason he used single figures so often is that he wasn't very good at people, he knew it, and he wanted to paint as few of them as possible. Just look at the love with which he depicted the rippling surface of a sun-struck awning or the turned-&-gouged silhouette of a wooden finial on an Italianate farmhouse and then look at the cold, dull eye he casts across the figures of his women, with their dark, heavy dresses, shapeless limbs & blurred, lumpy faces. Rubens turned full-figured women like this into godesses, but Hopper paints them like potato sacks & tree trunks. His men are even less attractive, all bald heads & scrawny necks. And whatever their gender, his people all have the stiff, unnatural look of articulated wooden figures, which is probably what he used to work out the poses. Painting those figures must have been torture for Hopper, especially knowing, as he must have known, that he didn't really need them. At any rate, he didn't waste much time on them.

In Hopper's best pictures--not necessarily his best-known pictures--there are no people at all, only the evanescent light. A sliver of sunlight in an empty barbershop, a raking wash of gold across a row of small-town businesses in early morning, the magic glow of colored liquids in a drug store window, these are the everyday sources of magic & romance--as long as you don't requre people.

Anyway, I agree about using Hopper--& Velasquez & Eakins & Sargent & Ingres & John Koch--as models for photography. Everything I've ever learned about photography, I learned from a painter. It's just too bad I can't get out to Boston.

Magnaverde.

 

[herringbonekid]

interesting viewpoint MAGNAVERDE, and eloquently put, but i disagree with your idea that people were torture for him to paint. if you look at paintings such as 'Night Windows' or 'Office at Night' the figures are central to the composition, the overall theme, and not just placed there as afterthoughts.

i agree that his figures are wooden and badly painted, but MOST of Hopper's paintings are badly painted, figures or not. seeing them in London a couple of years ago i was amazed at the obvious lack of interest he had in the surface of the painting and the texture of paint itself. they have a very amateurish 'just get it done' quality. i think Hopper should really have used colour photography or even moving film, as he was to me, clearly more interested in capturing the basic lighting and 'mise en scene' than he was in making a good painting. it's the images that are powerful (whether they include figures or not) despite, not because of, his painterly (or lack of) ability.

 

[Harp]

Hopper

An austere Realist, divorced from Impressionism; yet aware of its
light and colors, and his pursuit of the distaff side and its pervasive
melancholia, societal isolation--poetry-on-canvas.

 

[The Wolf]

All good points.
I love his paintings. I want to walk into them and experience that world.

Sincerely,
the Wolf