BIO
Edward
Hopper was an American painter whose highly individualistic works
are landmarks of American realism. His paintings embody in art a
particular American 20th-century sensibility that is characterized
by isolation, melancholy, and loneliness. Hopper was born on July
22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and studied illustration in New York
City at a commercial art school from 1899 to 1900. Around 1901 he
switched to painting and studied at the New York School of Art until
1906, largely under Robert Henri. He made three trips to Europe
between 1906 and 1910 but remained unaffected by current French
and Spanish experiments in cubism. He was influenced mainly by the
great European realists‹Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore
Daumier, Edouard Manet‹whose work had first been introduced to him
by his New York City teachers. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon
de flore (1909, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City),
were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics
that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style
based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and
the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong
verticals, horizontals, and diagonals. Although one of Hopper's
paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New
York City, his work excited little interest, and he was obliged
to work principally as a commercial illustrator for the next decade.
In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad (Museum of Modern Art,
New York City), a landmark in American art that marked the advent
of his mature style. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and
the stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier
work, but the mood‹which was the real subject of the painting‹was
new: It conveyed an atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost
eerie solitude. Hopper continued to work in this style for the rest
of his life, refining and purifying it but never abandoning its
basic principles. Most of his paintings portray scenes in New York
or New England, both country and city scenes, all with a spare,
homely quality‹deserted streets, half-empty theaters, gas stations,
railroad tracks, rooming houses. One of his best-known works, Nighthawks
(1942, Art Institute of Chicago), shows an all-night café, its few
uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric
lights. Although Hopper's work was outside the mainstream of mid-20th-century
abstraction, his simplified schematic style was one of the influences
on the later representational revival and on pop art. He died May
15, 1967, in New York City.
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