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edward hopper
(Jul. 22, 1882 Nyack, NY - May 15, 1967 NY) American Realist Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Edward Hopper was an American painter whose highly individualistic works are landmarks of American realism. Edward Hopper started studying illustration but switched to oil painting and studied at the New York School of Art until 1906, under Robert Henri and between 1906 and 1910 made three trips to Europe, though these had little influence on his style. He was influenced mainly by the great European realists, Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier and Edouard Manet, whose work had first been introduced to him by his teachers.
Hopper exhibited at the Armory show in 1913, but his work excited little interest, so until 1923 he abandoned painting, earning his living as a commercial artist. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad (Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.), 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 are in keeping with his earlier works, 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. Thereafter, he gained widespread recognition as a central exponent of American scene painting, 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 and rooming houses.
Paintings such as Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago) convey a mood of loneliness and desolation by their emptiness or by the presence of anonymous, non-communicating figures. Hopper said: "I didn't see it as particularly lonely... Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."
Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a chilling, alienating and often empty place. Everybody in a Hopper oil painting appears terribly alone. Hopper soon gained a widespread reputation as the artist who gave visual form to the loneliness and boredom of life in the big city. This was something new in art, an expression of the sense of human hopelessness that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Edward Hopper had something of the lonely personality peculiar to Thomas Eakins, a courageous fidelity to life as he feels it to be. He also shares Winslow Homer's power to recall the feel of things. Cape Cod Evening (1939) should be idyllic, and in a way it is. The couple enjoy the evening sunshine outside their home, yet they are a couple only technically and the enjoyment is wholly passive as both are isolated and introspective in their reveries. Their house is closed to intimacy, the door firmly shut and the windows covered. The dog is the only alert creature, but even it turns away from the house.
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.
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Early Sunday Morning
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Nighthawks
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Gas
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