July Birthday Artist Edward Hopper

Posted by Meg Nola Jul 12, 2008

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 - 1967) was a man of few words, as reflected in his smoothly finished, precise paintings that never take anything to excess. He showed us simple houses and gas stations, diners and movie theaters with a new and unusual significance, but he preferred to leave the context within those paintings open to interpretation.

Rizzoli Books used to publish short yet oversized volumes with large prints of an artist’s paintings and a biographical foreword. Karal Ann Marling’s essay on Hopper from the Rizzoli art series is excellent, and if you can find a copy on Amazon or through other used on-line booksellers, it’s well worth reading. (And if you can deal with the sacrilege of cutting up An Art Book, you could definitely frame some of those big prints and even create something like a Hopper Room in your home.) Here are a few interesting snippets from the Marling intro:

One of Hopper’s favorite artists was French Impressionist Edouard Manet;

Hopper’s 1940 Office at Night painting was called “Confidentially Yours, Room 2005” in his early notes, with the woman featured being nicknamed “Shirley” and a specific intent to make sure she had “black hair and plenty of lipstick” and wore black, high-heeled shoes;

Not surprisingly, Hopper liked the stripped-down writing of Ernest Hemingway, and praised Hemingway’s stories for not being the usual “vast sea of sugar-coated mush that makes up most of our fiction.”

And finally, Hopper once deflected a critic trying to break through to his inner psyche by saying that he that he really had no reason to verbally explain things, and that “[t]he whole answer is there on the canvas….”