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Biography of Edward
Hopper
Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, N.Y., in 1882. He studied at the New York School of Art and
later moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1913, a neighborhood that would serve as his studio and home for the rest of his life. He started as a printmaker, where his early themes
He switched to oil and watercolor painting in 1923, the same year he spent the summer in Gloucester, Mass. Gloucester was an artist colony, and that’s where he met artist Josephine Nivision. The two married in 1924. Nivision encouraged him to submit his watercolors to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, which would eventually accept six and purchase one – The Mansard Roof. It was the first painting he sold; he was 41 years old.
The marriage between Nivison and Hopper was difficult at times. Nivison was the main female model for his paintings because she did not want anyone else to pose for him, according to Helen Langa, associate professor of art history at American University. Nivision also resented that she put her own artistic career on hold for her husband’s.
“They fought constantly, it was an extremely abusive relationship,” Langa said. “She kept his notebooks and records, and he was not very complimentary of her work.”
The couple bought a house in Truro, Mass., in 1930 with money Nivison inherited. Hopper painted into old age, working between New York and Truro.
Though not shown in the National Gallery exhibition, the last work Hopper painted was his 1966 Two Comedians. It shows two costumed actors — one male, another female — taking a final bow on stage.
He died in 1967 in his studio. Nivison died 10 months later.

The Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery of Art surveys some of Hopper’s greatest masterpieces and marks the first time in more than 25 years that a comprehensive exhibition of his work has been seen in an American museum. The show features 48 oil paintings, 34 watercolors and 12 prints, as well as two ledger books and a short film about his life. The exhibit is organized by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. It runs until Jan. 21, 2008. Visit the Hopper exhibit online for more information.

by LISA CHIU

Edward Hopper’s work has inspired filmmakers, students and the public since it was first noticed in the late 1920s. His paintings are now as much a part of modern American culture as the isolation he captures.

No one seems more adept at illustrating the notion that a person can be surrounded by people in a busy metropolis, or a bustling resort town, and still feel completely alone.
It’s not necessarily a sad loneliness. It is a reflective one.

In Early Sunday Morning, a lone street is captured in front of a deep red, two-story building. The rising sun is just beginning to illuminate the building and street, and though no human being is depicted, there is a feeling of quiet morning solitude emanating from the windows.

“It seems pretty boring when you first look at it. The flat line of the curb, the awnings and the roof are repetitive,” said Helen Langa, associate professor of art history at American University. “But when you really start to look, you notice that all the window shades are at different levels. You get a syncopated rhythematic pattern that comes across.”

The visual stimulation points throughout the painting lend themselves to a narrative – one that differs for each person who views it.

“This is a very poignant quiet early morning scene, you begin to imagine what people are doing behind the windows,” Langa said. “Something is going to happen that hasn’t quite happened yet. It is visually very, very interesting.”

A story-like quality appears in almost all Hopper’s work – whether it is in his fascination with architecture, both modern and Victorian, or his capturing of people in the midst of the most mundane tasks.

In Two on an Aisle, a couple is sitting just before a performance in an empty theater. In New York Movie, a young usher leans against a wall as moviegoers watch the silver screen. In “Room in New York,” a man reads a newspaper while a woman idly plays at a piano in a small, almost suffocating room, neither one talking to the other.

“We don’t really see what’s happening. It’s part of a transitory moment, like film stills in a movie,” Langa said. “You click on one scene and you know that it’s part of a trajectory of action. He also loved going to the movies.”

While Hopper painted in a realist style, many aspects of his work reflect modernism, Langa said. In Eleven A.M. for instance, a lone nude woman sits in a blue stuffed chair and looks out a window into an obscure urban courtyard surrounded by high rises. It’s not clear who she is, or why she’s there.

“He sort of blocks her in this painting,” Langa said. “He protects her with the chair. There are strong repeated verticals. He understood geometric modernism and though he was committed to realistic works, he used modernist ideas in his paintings but covered it up by using architecture.”

A lone figure in a room is a common theme of Hopper’s. Often his figures are depicted lost in thought, or with a blank or hardened expression, the exhibit notes. Some have even called Hopper’s figures clumsy.

The exhibit notes the words of art critic Clement Greenberg: “A special category of art should be devised for this kind of thing Hopper does; his means are secondhand, shabby, and impersonal. But his rudimentary sense of composition is sufficient for a message that conveys an insight in the present nature of American life for which there is no parallel in our literature. If he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”

The exhibit at the National Gallery also marks the first time Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks is displayed in the district. It’s a painting nearly everyone will recognize. Seen through the window of a diner, three people sit late at night. A waiter attends to his customers. The storefronts outside are empty, and some have speculated that it’s a result of the Great Depression, though it’s not clear. There is a greenish cast to the painting, notes Langa, showing the color given off by the early fluorescent lights of the 1940s.

People of that time would recognize that,” Langa said. “Hopper was very in tune to the modern colors of his environment.”

The figures in Nighthawks don’t seem to be talking to each other, yet another example of the isolation Hopper depicts. While he noted that the focus of alienation in his paintings was overblown, it’s hard to avoid that overriding theme in all his works.

“He didn’t intend to paint alienation but he certainly painted an ineluctable loneliness of the human condition,” Langa said. “He was very clearly someone that was deeply attracted to a certain kind of quietude and he seeks that out in his work.”

One of the last paintings of his life was Sun in an Empty Room, painted in 1963, which shows sun shining through a window into a pale yellow room. The architectural angles of the room cause the sun to cast shadows, filling the space with dark and light. It’s a perfect culmination of his lifelong focus on architecture and sublime loneliness.

Helen Langa discusses Edward Hopper.