It is the birthday of the wondrous Edward Hopper, the visual poet of loneliness and isolation: With its deliberate, disciplined spareness, this is typical of what he was to create thereafter. His paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to paint, for instance, could not have been more out of fashion than it was in the mid-192OS, when he first began to look at it seriously. Though his compositions are supposedly realist they also make frequent use of covert symbolism. Hoppers paintings have, in this respect, been rather aptly compared to the realist plays of Ibsen, a writer whom he admired....Hopper became a pictorial poet who recorded the starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for example, in his pictures of lighthouses and harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing deserted streets at night. Some paintings, such as his celebrated image of a gas-station, Gas (1940), even have elements which anticipate Pop Art. Hopper once said: To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when youre travelling.He painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and also liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theatres, cinemas and offices. But even in these paintings he stressed the theme of loneliness - his theatres are often semi-deserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage. Hopper was a frequent movie-goer, and there is often a cinematic quality in his work....He died in 1967, isolated if not forgotten, and Jo Hopper died ten months later. His true importance has only been fully realized in the years since his death.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 08:30:02 +0000
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