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Nighthawks - Edward Hopper biography.
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Edward
Hopper Biography
Hopper, Edward (1882-1967).
American painter, active mainly in New York. He trained under Robert
Henri, 1900-06, and between 1906 and 1910 made three trips to Europe,
though these had little influence on his style. Hopper exhibited at
the Armoury Show in 1913, but from then until 1923 he abandoned painting,
earning his living by commercial illustration. Thereafter, however,
he gained widespread recognition as a central exponent of American
Scene painting, expressing the loneliness, vacuity, and stagnation
of town life. Yet Hopper remained always an individualist: `I don't
think I ever tried to paint the American scene; I'm trying to paint
myself. Paintings such as Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1942)
convey a mood of loneliness and desolation by their emptiness or by
the presence of anonymous, non-communicating figures. But of this
picture Hopper said: `I didn't see it as particularly lonely... Unconsciously,
probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.' Deliberately
so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings Hopper
often exerts a powerful psychological impact -- distantly akin to
that made by the Metaphysical painter de Chirico; but while de Chirico's
effect was obtained by making the unreal seem real, Hopper's was rooted
in the presentation of the familiar and concrete. Edward Hopper painted
American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing
the world around him as a chilling, alienating, and often vacuous
place. Everybody in a Hopper picture 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, perhaps an expression of the sense of human
hopelessness that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Edward Hopper has something of the lonely gravity 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. For Hopper,
this feel is insistently low-key and ruminative. He shows the modern
world unflinchingly; even its gaieties are gently mournful, echoing
the disillusionment that swept across the country after the start
of the Great Depression in 1929.
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