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Edward Hopper(Hardback) - 2007 Edition
Pub 2007. 264 in Thames & Hudson Limited Spanning the entirety of the Hoppers withcareer but with particular emphasis on his heyday in the 1930s and 40s. this book highlights the artists greatest achievements the while discussing such topics as his absorption of European influences. critical reactions to his work. the relation of realism to modernism. his fascination with architecture. his depiction of women. and the struggle in his last years to produce original works. Illustrated with over 150 oils. watercolours and prints. and including essays by several noted scholars in the field. this is the most comprehensive volume on Hopper to be published in many years.
Hardcover
First published May 21, 2007
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December 11, 2018
To me Edward Hopper is a truly American realist master, up there in the same realm as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Andrew Wyeth. At the same time, his special interest in the forms of light and shadow and rendering of rhythms and progressions in shapes brings a personalized and distorted perception of outward reality, consistent with his overall view of himself at core as being an Impressionist. On top of that, I get such an emotional impact out of the pervasive sense of loneliness from his settings, which are mostly devoid of people or contain only one or two figures who are up to some mysterious purpose or unknown, possible desperate, drama. You know, like in his most famous work, “The Night Hawks,” where the vision of customers through the big window of an all-night café makes you feel an alienation like living in a noir mystery. Somehow there is always a source of light somewhere or some homey human touch to feel redeemed from the threat of despair.
This is a coffee-table book suitable for random viewings of its excellent color reproductions. By accident of poking into the chapters on his paintings in Massachusetts and Maine (my residences since 1980), I discovered it has an engaging and elucidating narrative content in the form of nine thematic essays by various art critics and scholars. I was rewarded earlier in the year a book on art theory by one artist, Ben Shahn, and more recently a well-edited set of interviews of a sculptor, Louise Nevelson, who was eloquent on her creative process and personal evolution. Here the artist’s aesthetic framework and conception of his own work are elusive. Still, I got a lot of satisfaction witnessing his development and his inspiration from the various places he sought out for subjects of his work.
Raised the son of a dry-goods merchant at an old industrial town on the Hudson River, Hopper took an early liking of drawing and illustration and garnered family support of attending art school at the precursor to the Pratt Institute in New York City. There he trained under artists who practiced realistic renderings of everyday objects, termed the Ashcan School. After graduating he made income from commercial illustration work while growing a big ambition. In the first few years of the 20th century he made three trips to Paris to soak up as much as possible of avant garde trends, especially favoring the Impressionism styles of Manet and Degas. When his efforts to emulate their kind of work failed to sell, he turned toward etching, which he applied to domestic interior scenes, architectural subjects, and cityscapes like street corners. Here is a spooky one I really like, which like much of his later work begs the reader to imagine a story to go with the setting. Though Hopper read Freud and Jung, he never validated any symbolic representation of unconscious anxieties or desires in his work. The dreamlike mystery of this one reminded one critic of certain works by Surrealist painters:
"Night Shadows". Etching, 1921
Though in his long life, Hopper lived in the Washington Square section of Greenwich Village, he took up summering in various seaside villages, first Gloucester, Massachusetts, then Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and then many years in Truro on Cape Cod. Thus, his work divides between that of cityscapes and urban interiors and that of houses, lighthouses, and landscapes of the New England coast. Coming from wide-open Oklahoma, I personally feel happy with the wide-open spaces and resilient solitude to be found in most of the works from the latter category. Far from boring us with some kind of bland postcard rendering of his subjects, there is always something disturbing in the framing, the perspective, or the limited human incursions on his scenes. For example here is one of his lighthouse pictures from Portland:
”Lighthouse Hill". Oil on canvas, 1927
Unlike a tourist snapshot, there is no water. We are on the back side in the shadow. The house makes no welcome in its gloomy side facing us. The photographic detail of the house and light cross the visual chasm from on high to the viewer facing the sketchy barriers of shadowed ridges. The human structures feel unreachable to me, but so solidly out there on the edge, resolutely facing the sea and elements. I felt a bit of emotional threat, but there was an escape to relief.
A lot of people wonder over Hopper’s affinity for painting old Victorian style houses both in the city and in coastal villages, with all their garish frippery and gingerbread woodwork. Their Gothic atmospherics, according Wiki, inspired Hitchcock to model the Bate’s house in “Psycho” on one of them. When pressed on it, Hopper would deny any social statement behind his subject choices and only speak of the interesting shapes and patterns in their parts. As for me, I like the simpler forms and patterns in many of his houses that are more typical of the Maine coast, such as this Federalist-style lighthouse keeper’s home in Portland:
"Captain Upton’s House". Oil on canvas, 1927
Hopper was so retiring and conservative, he avoided much social life, especially the bohemian lifestyle of trendy artists. He actively avoided being affiliated with any particular school or style of painting and never joined a collective or a summer artist colony. He met his wife Josephine Nivison in Gloucester, who was more practical and social and who gladly subjugated her own career to manage his life and business. She served as a model for most of his female figures and applied names to a lot of his paintings. Among his urban interiors with mysterious figures, I like best the restaurant scene “Chop Suey”, which is used for this book’s cover, and the following one of a single well-dressed, middle-class woman having tea in a modern, self-serve café, her revery seeming to be highlighted by columns of light reflections beaming into the obscure night beyond the window:
"Automat", 1927
Despite his productivity and their effective teamwork, his work didn’t begin to be seriously recognized until he was in his early 40s. The three paintings I just shared all came from his 45th year. With works like these, he was a favorite of the Whitney Museum, which gave him shows and made a lot of purchases of his work, progressing from acquisitions for a couple of hundred dollars to a few thousand. Though his work slowed, he kept producing great work for nearly four more decades. He had enough income to acquire a car and take road trips around the United States, including a trip to visit Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico. I absolutely love this homage to automobile travel in America done at age 75. The woman achieves a bit of glamor as she smugly sits on arrival or approaching departure from an anonymously sleek motel room facing a vista of smooth generic hills and the echoing curves of some modern car:
Western Motel, 1957
I am grateful to find such vibrancy to Hopper’s kind of realism. My eye delights in his scenes and the hidden life of emotions brimming within them even in his works devoid of people. One of the only clues we have about what he thought about the respective power of representational vs. abstract approaches to art comes from a brief piece he submitted to the journal “Reality” in 1953:
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.
…The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.
This is a coffee-table book suitable for random viewings of its excellent color reproductions. By accident of poking into the chapters on his paintings in Massachusetts and Maine (my residences since 1980), I discovered it has an engaging and elucidating narrative content in the form of nine thematic essays by various art critics and scholars. I was rewarded earlier in the year a book on art theory by one artist, Ben Shahn, and more recently a well-edited set of interviews of a sculptor, Louise Nevelson, who was eloquent on her creative process and personal evolution. Here the artist’s aesthetic framework and conception of his own work are elusive. Still, I got a lot of satisfaction witnessing his development and his inspiration from the various places he sought out for subjects of his work.
Raised the son of a dry-goods merchant at an old industrial town on the Hudson River, Hopper took an early liking of drawing and illustration and garnered family support of attending art school at the precursor to the Pratt Institute in New York City. There he trained under artists who practiced realistic renderings of everyday objects, termed the Ashcan School. After graduating he made income from commercial illustration work while growing a big ambition. In the first few years of the 20th century he made three trips to Paris to soak up as much as possible of avant garde trends, especially favoring the Impressionism styles of Manet and Degas. When his efforts to emulate their kind of work failed to sell, he turned toward etching, which he applied to domestic interior scenes, architectural subjects, and cityscapes like street corners. Here is a spooky one I really like, which like much of his later work begs the reader to imagine a story to go with the setting. Though Hopper read Freud and Jung, he never validated any symbolic representation of unconscious anxieties or desires in his work. The dreamlike mystery of this one reminded one critic of certain works by Surrealist painters:
"Night Shadows". Etching, 1921
Though in his long life, Hopper lived in the Washington Square section of Greenwich Village, he took up summering in various seaside villages, first Gloucester, Massachusetts, then Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and then many years in Truro on Cape Cod. Thus, his work divides between that of cityscapes and urban interiors and that of houses, lighthouses, and landscapes of the New England coast. Coming from wide-open Oklahoma, I personally feel happy with the wide-open spaces and resilient solitude to be found in most of the works from the latter category. Far from boring us with some kind of bland postcard rendering of his subjects, there is always something disturbing in the framing, the perspective, or the limited human incursions on his scenes. For example here is one of his lighthouse pictures from Portland:
”Lighthouse Hill". Oil on canvas, 1927
Unlike a tourist snapshot, there is no water. We are on the back side in the shadow. The house makes no welcome in its gloomy side facing us. The photographic detail of the house and light cross the visual chasm from on high to the viewer facing the sketchy barriers of shadowed ridges. The human structures feel unreachable to me, but so solidly out there on the edge, resolutely facing the sea and elements. I felt a bit of emotional threat, but there was an escape to relief.
A lot of people wonder over Hopper’s affinity for painting old Victorian style houses both in the city and in coastal villages, with all their garish frippery and gingerbread woodwork. Their Gothic atmospherics, according Wiki, inspired Hitchcock to model the Bate’s house in “Psycho” on one of them. When pressed on it, Hopper would deny any social statement behind his subject choices and only speak of the interesting shapes and patterns in their parts. As for me, I like the simpler forms and patterns in many of his houses that are more typical of the Maine coast, such as this Federalist-style lighthouse keeper’s home in Portland:
"Captain Upton’s House". Oil on canvas, 1927
Hopper was so retiring and conservative, he avoided much social life, especially the bohemian lifestyle of trendy artists. He actively avoided being affiliated with any particular school or style of painting and never joined a collective or a summer artist colony. He met his wife Josephine Nivison in Gloucester, who was more practical and social and who gladly subjugated her own career to manage his life and business. She served as a model for most of his female figures and applied names to a lot of his paintings. Among his urban interiors with mysterious figures, I like best the restaurant scene “Chop Suey”, which is used for this book’s cover, and the following one of a single well-dressed, middle-class woman having tea in a modern, self-serve café, her revery seeming to be highlighted by columns of light reflections beaming into the obscure night beyond the window:
"Automat", 1927
Despite his productivity and their effective teamwork, his work didn’t begin to be seriously recognized until he was in his early 40s. The three paintings I just shared all came from his 45th year. With works like these, he was a favorite of the Whitney Museum, which gave him shows and made a lot of purchases of his work, progressing from acquisitions for a couple of hundred dollars to a few thousand. Though his work slowed, he kept producing great work for nearly four more decades. He had enough income to acquire a car and take road trips around the United States, including a trip to visit Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico. I absolutely love this homage to automobile travel in America done at age 75. The woman achieves a bit of glamor as she smugly sits on arrival or approaching departure from an anonymously sleek motel room facing a vista of smooth generic hills and the echoing curves of some modern car:
Western Motel, 1957
I am grateful to find such vibrancy to Hopper’s kind of realism. My eye delights in his scenes and the hidden life of emotions brimming within them even in his works devoid of people. One of the only clues we have about what he thought about the respective power of representational vs. abstract approaches to art comes from a brief piece he submitted to the journal “Reality” in 1953:
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.
…The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.
January 11, 2013
I just loved this book. I vanished off the face of the earth for five whole days reading this from cover to cover. In the two hundred and fifty pages there are nine essays from five experts that cover the six decades of Edward Hopper's work. The eleven by eleven inch format allow many full page displays of watercolour and oil paintings, as well as photographs, etchings and prints. Yet, this is not just a picture book. Very detailed and insightful essays escort the reader through the sixty year long journey of this iconic artist.
Four of the essays are written by Carol Troyen, two by Judith A. Barter and one each from Elliot Bostwick Davis, Janet L. Comey and Ellen E. Roberts, who all provide a chronological survey of Hopper's output that makes a very interesting study for the art expert as well as the casually interested reader.
Hopper took inspiration from French avant-garde and impressionist works of Degas, Manet, Pissaro, Renoir and Sisley, but developed qualities of Postimpressionism and Surrealism into his own blend of American Realism which spanned the twentieth century all the way to the pop art of the Warhol sixties.
Even though this artist was in his forties before critical acclaim greeted his work, he went on to produce images that have become the embodiment of American painting in the last hundred years.
His watercolours and oils from Gloucester, Massachusetts and from the coast of Maine are high points. Later work, of film noir like scenes from New York's Washington Square/Greenwich Village/Times Square area of the 1930's and 1940's produced pictures of Chandleresque characters, without any central motifs, fixed in view with the expert handling of light and shade.
If all that isn't enough, this book finds space to display art from past and contemporary painters to compare their work with that of this master, from Rembrandt, Degas and right through to George Segal and Richard Diebenkorn. Along with Notes, a Chronology of work, a Checklist of Illustrations, Bibliography and Index, this 2007 publication can't be anything else but five star.
Four of the essays are written by Carol Troyen, two by Judith A. Barter and one each from Elliot Bostwick Davis, Janet L. Comey and Ellen E. Roberts, who all provide a chronological survey of Hopper's output that makes a very interesting study for the art expert as well as the casually interested reader.
Hopper took inspiration from French avant-garde and impressionist works of Degas, Manet, Pissaro, Renoir and Sisley, but developed qualities of Postimpressionism and Surrealism into his own blend of American Realism which spanned the twentieth century all the way to the pop art of the Warhol sixties.
Even though this artist was in his forties before critical acclaim greeted his work, he went on to produce images that have become the embodiment of American painting in the last hundred years.
His watercolours and oils from Gloucester, Massachusetts and from the coast of Maine are high points. Later work, of film noir like scenes from New York's Washington Square/Greenwich Village/Times Square area of the 1930's and 1940's produced pictures of Chandleresque characters, without any central motifs, fixed in view with the expert handling of light and shade.
If all that isn't enough, this book finds space to display art from past and contemporary painters to compare their work with that of this master, from Rembrandt, Degas and right through to George Segal and Richard Diebenkorn. Along with Notes, a Chronology of work, a Checklist of Illustrations, Bibliography and Index, this 2007 publication can't be anything else but five star.
January 7, 2019
Terrific selection of Hopper's best paintings and the accompanying essays are great.
January 4, 2023
I love how the book I thought would make me delve into the world of Edward Hopper would actually make me realize how much I have romanticized his few paintings in an unhealthy way. I really had to dive deeper into his other works to get a grasp of his creation. And it was a success; I like how there are quotations and interviews from Edward Hopper himself—that really added to how the overall book and collection of art is seen by the reader.
February 10, 2014
This is a beautiful and hard as a brick book on the great American painter Edward Hopper. High quality paper for the excellent illustrations of all his best paintings and a lot more. The text matches the quality of the reproductions, flows along with the life of the author and his artistic progression. The author never bores; she obviously comments on the artistic quality and style of the painter, but never getting entangled or too academic. If not a biography, which definitely is not, it is a good introduction and appetizer for other books on the Hooper.
The illustrations are sometimes full-sized, others half-page... never too small. Just the one book on Hopper if one is to choose just one. I spent a whole lot of time just contemplating the front cover. This is one of those books that really is worth all the bucks you have to pay for it. A lovely book!
The illustrations are sometimes full-sized, others half-page... never too small. Just the one book on Hopper if one is to choose just one. I spent a whole lot of time just contemplating the front cover. This is one of those books that really is worth all the bucks you have to pay for it. A lovely book!
Want to read
November 16, 2008i bought this in boston at the museum of fine arts at the hopper exhibit. the hopper exhibit literally brought tears to my eyes...i have read bits and pieces of the book put hope to explore it further.
January 24, 2008
I purchased this as my souvenir after seeing this show in Boston in the summer of 2007. I have not yet read this cover to cover yet, but only flipped through the book several times drooling over the paintings. Having worked at the Whitney, I grew to love Hopper and his representations of New York city--the images became very personal to me, a most fitting reflection of my own experiences in the city.
December 28, 2007
A terrific look at Hopper's career with fresh insight. Good pacing and context throughout. Very well done.
My only regret is buying it at the National Gallery of Art in a fit of excitement for the full $65. It's available on Amazon for $40.95. Nonetheless, it's worth every penny.
My only regret is buying it at the National Gallery of Art in a fit of excitement for the full $65. It's available on Amazon for $40.95. Nonetheless, it's worth every penny.
October 14, 2010
Excellent book on Hopper and his career
September 13, 2012
Excellent book which some might slight as intended for a coffee table only. Cannot be read in one sitting. As one contributor said Hopper caught the unique isolation of every day American life.
November 24, 2012
Read half of it and looked very hard at the other half. Hopper's work speaks for itself.
September 6, 2014
Have a small exhibition of Hopper & his contemporaries @ local museum. Enjoyed reading about this artist,a fave of mine.
October 9, 2014
Excellent book and show at the MFA.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews