The Essential Edward Hopper

The Essential

by Justin Spring

"Eerie silence, desolate houses, and blank-eyed individuals with frozen faces, stunned and fixed in time. Cold sunlight from some mysterious, otherworldly source. Unmoving bodies drained of passion and lonely people staring nowhere," writes author Justin Spring on the first page of this pocket-sized guide to one of America's favorite realist painters. "Welcome to Hopper's world."

Hopper's landscapes and interiors have affected everyone from noir film directors to the abstract expressionists. His paintings conveying the loneliness of contemporary life were painfully apt in the 1930s during the Great Depression--and they are still meaningful today. This book, one of the Essentials series of art books that offer the reader a quick and easy grounding in the work of a single artist, is also a surprisingly deep work thanks to the author. Spring can take a marriage like Edward and Jo Hopper's, which other writers have viewed as monumentally dysfunctional, and find what was good and enduring in it. He has a perfect grasp of Hopper's beauty as well as his strangeness, his voyeurism and his insistence on privacy, his asceticism, his love of culture, and his wanderlust. Spring also gives readers telling glimpses of scores of famous paintings, such as Nighthawks and A Woman in the Sun. Quoting Jo's note about the latter: "Cigarette and sad face of woman unlit." This is an excellent introduction to the art and the artist. --Peggy Moorman

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

112 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 1998

About the author

Justin Spring is a New York based writer specializing in twentieth-century American art and culture. He is the author of many monographs, catalogs, museum publications, and books, including the biography Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art (Yale University Press, 2000) and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude (Universe, 2002). He has been the recipient of a number of grants, fellowships, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the International Association of Art Critics Best Show Award. He has held research fellowships from Yale University, Brown University, Radcliffe College and Amherst College. His monograph on Paul Cadmus was a finalist for the Lamda Literary Award in Art History.

Reviews

[Yoana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely accessible introduction to Hopper, suitable for complete beginners in the sphere of fine art. It held my attention and its rich illustrative material was a delight. However, I was extremely vexed by the blatantly sexist and far-fetched interpretations of the author - to him, if there is a whiff of a woman in a painting, it's an erotic painting, and the woman is most likely a prostitute. A woman naked in the privacy of her room - prostitute. A woman dressed in a hotel room - prostitute. A woman fully dressed drinking coffee by herself - likely a prostitute. Two women dining together in a restaurant - probably prostitutes. He calls "subtly erotic" a painting with a fully clothed female figure at one side – a theatre usherette just looking bored at her job. He straight up declares that the women in Hopper's paintings (not accounting for context, style or anything else besides the presence of a female figure) create a sexually charged atmosphere. For this guy, a female figure, no matter what it looks like or how it's painted, can only ever be a sexual symbol. It's like he's never entertained the thought that women are also people and could be painted merely as human beings, embodying the same universal ideas as male figures in painting - isolation, alienation, feeling of hopelessness in the modern age. Found it really grating.

[Gerald Thomson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A high overview of Hopper’s life and work. The illustrations are abundant and the insights are very revealing. Spring knows his subject and obviously has a fondness for Hopper. A great place to start if you are looking to find out more about this amazing, American artist.

[Julie Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series is great for getting an overview and beginner's insight into artists and their best known works. This one about Edward Hopper was quite good and I really enjoyed seeing so many of his paintings as I read about his life.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must have for any Hopper fan!