This is the question I pondered at this huge retrospective of
his work in the heart of Paris. There seems to be a Hopper retrospective ever
few years or so in the United States. His images have become so familiar, so
iconic in their simple compositions and their isolated characters sitting
silently in public and private spaces. His most famous painting, “Nighthawks”
(1942), has been reproduced and caricatured so often you are surprised when you
actually stand in front of it, the dramatic contrasting light between the
diner’s inner, yellow hues and the shadowy street never match a reproduction.
The painting practically glows from the interior outward, the light indistinct
in source. It seems as if the whole canvas must be illuminated from behind.
“Nighthawks,” like many of his works of the era, have become iconic of the
mid-century era, their compositions inspiring artists and directors in the
decades since. Hopper himself has from his earliest shows in the 1930s been
called a definitively American painter, a painter who somehow captures the
American scene.
Take the review of Hopper’s first major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 in the New York Times, which noted with near glee, “on the ground floor are the water-colors — all of them save an amusing little set of Parisian ‘types,’ which has a wall to itself elsewhere in the building.” The “amusing little types” that captured scenes of Paris were by choice set off on their own, displaced as a kind of exotic moment amidst a landscape that was firmly American. In the substantial catalog to that show, MoMa director Alfred Barr argued that like any great artist of any era, Hopper traveled to the art capital of his day: Paris. But, Barr reassured, “he returned to his native country and showed in his mature work almost no vestige of his studies abroad.” In this way, critics often placed Hooper alongside the regionalist painters of the era such as Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton. These latter, mid-Western artists affected a persona of rural idealism in their persona and canvases.
Over two decades later, Time magazine, which featured Hopper on its cover, used the artist’s work and life as a crucial example of the kind of art that was uniquely American. In a tone that reflected those hyper-nationalistic 1950s, the profile celebrated Hopper’s own kind of realism and presented the artists work as important to the heritage of American art as distinct from European aesthetics. Over the decades, American art, the magazine informs us,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. “has reflected not European painting but American life — rough and smooth, tumultuous and diverse.” With respect to Hopper himself, the article quotes realist painter Jack Levine who noted “no dreams of the old masters set him off his course . . . Hopper looks inland. He’s an American painter all the way.”
Hopper’s Americaness has so often been his story, despite the fact that he himself was quite dubious of such a label. “The French painters didn’t talk about the ‘French Scene,’ or the English painters the ‘English Scene,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag.’” was Hopper’s usual response to claims of his art’s geographical specificities. His rightful resistance to the claims about his art was an effort to recover his paintings as something more personal than national, more individual than social. “What lives in a painting is the personality of the painter,” he once said. And in this sense seeing Hopper as a kind of quintessential American painter distracts us from seeing Hopper the painter.High quality stone mosaic tiles.
Despite the many times I’ve encounter his paintings,The oreck XL professional air purifier, I’ve never had the experience of looking at Hopper in Europe. I hadn’t imagined that it would be much different than looking at Hopper in New York or Los Angeles. Unlike my earlier encounters with Hopper exhibitions, this one was not born in the United States nor was it set to tour there. Curated by Didier Ottinger, Chief Curator for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, “Hopper” at the Grand Palais offers a different story of artist’s development that has little to do with the American scene, and much more with the complex history that the artist’s work was caught in, between New York and Paris, between 19th century realism and 20th century modernity.
We can easily forget that much of what we admire about Hopper’s work today was done later in his life. The MoMa show in 1933 was mounted just before the artist’s 50th birthday. Between his art school education at the turn of the century, to the early 1930s, Hopper had worked as a magazine illustrator (the covers are projected in large colorful slides in one gallery), he experimented with etching (many are on display here), and worked for a time with watercolors. A small collection of these watercolors are presented here illuminating his delicate skill with the medium, crafting scenes as stark and quiet as his later works, each absent of people with hints of voyeurism. He exhibited and sold a painting in the famous Armory Show in the spring of 1913 in New York that brought European modernist works to New York — most famously symbolized in Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912).Whether you are installing a floor tiles or a shower wall, Such a diversity of experiences makes it difficult to know where to start the story of Hopper, and where to located the origins of his aesthetics.
Perhaps we can start at the New York School of Art where Hopper studied between 1900 and 1906. There he was influenced by his teachers William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, who advocated a social realism that merged the values of late 19th century French painting with the particular subject matter of an increasingly urban America. It is Henri’s paintings that we first encounter in this show, his darkly framed image of an art student and one deeply intimate portrait of Thomas Eakins, whom he much admired. This first gallery situated Hopper among his contemporaries such as George Bellows, Whistler, and John Sloane. Henri’s focused drew on European post-Impressionism but capturing scenes of urban street life. For this group of artists, like their French contemporaries, the subject of painting rested on the new realities of social life, of working-class salons, of construction sites, train stations, and boxing matches.
But before you get to these painters, this show opens with the black and white film “Manhatta” (1921), a collaboration between painter Charles Scheeler and photographer Paul Strand. The non-narrative film captures a sequence of Manhattan moments, from ferry crossings to the top of the newly built “skyscrapers,” the camera angled on elevated train platforms and window ledges all presenting the wonderment with the city’s growing monumentality. These images are interspersed with lines from Walt Whitman poems, modernism’s linearity meshing with 19th century romanticism. But such a vision of the city stands in strong contrast to the realists that Hopper studied with, whose vision of urban life is much more intimate, eschewing the skyscrapers of modernity for the street life in the shadows. Hopper himself never painted a skyscraper, though he lived much of his life in Greenwich Village, underscoring the personal and psychological themes of his paintings against the modernism grandeur. His canvases are firmly rooted in an intimacy of small moments, a theater of empty spaces and silent encounters, of country lanes and lighthouses, that almost push out the voices and clatter of the city’s upward thrust.
Take the review of Hopper’s first major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 in the New York Times, which noted with near glee, “on the ground floor are the water-colors — all of them save an amusing little set of Parisian ‘types,’ which has a wall to itself elsewhere in the building.” The “amusing little types” that captured scenes of Paris were by choice set off on their own, displaced as a kind of exotic moment amidst a landscape that was firmly American. In the substantial catalog to that show, MoMa director Alfred Barr argued that like any great artist of any era, Hopper traveled to the art capital of his day: Paris. But, Barr reassured, “he returned to his native country and showed in his mature work almost no vestige of his studies abroad.” In this way, critics often placed Hooper alongside the regionalist painters of the era such as Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton. These latter, mid-Western artists affected a persona of rural idealism in their persona and canvases.
Over two decades later, Time magazine, which featured Hopper on its cover, used the artist’s work and life as a crucial example of the kind of art that was uniquely American. In a tone that reflected those hyper-nationalistic 1950s, the profile celebrated Hopper’s own kind of realism and presented the artists work as important to the heritage of American art as distinct from European aesthetics. Over the decades, American art, the magazine informs us,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. “has reflected not European painting but American life — rough and smooth, tumultuous and diverse.” With respect to Hopper himself, the article quotes realist painter Jack Levine who noted “no dreams of the old masters set him off his course . . . Hopper looks inland. He’s an American painter all the way.”
Hopper’s Americaness has so often been his story, despite the fact that he himself was quite dubious of such a label. “The French painters didn’t talk about the ‘French Scene,’ or the English painters the ‘English Scene,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag.’” was Hopper’s usual response to claims of his art’s geographical specificities. His rightful resistance to the claims about his art was an effort to recover his paintings as something more personal than national, more individual than social. “What lives in a painting is the personality of the painter,” he once said. And in this sense seeing Hopper as a kind of quintessential American painter distracts us from seeing Hopper the painter.High quality stone mosaic tiles.
Despite the many times I’ve encounter his paintings,The oreck XL professional air purifier, I’ve never had the experience of looking at Hopper in Europe. I hadn’t imagined that it would be much different than looking at Hopper in New York or Los Angeles. Unlike my earlier encounters with Hopper exhibitions, this one was not born in the United States nor was it set to tour there. Curated by Didier Ottinger, Chief Curator for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, “Hopper” at the Grand Palais offers a different story of artist’s development that has little to do with the American scene, and much more with the complex history that the artist’s work was caught in, between New York and Paris, between 19th century realism and 20th century modernity.
We can easily forget that much of what we admire about Hopper’s work today was done later in his life. The MoMa show in 1933 was mounted just before the artist’s 50th birthday. Between his art school education at the turn of the century, to the early 1930s, Hopper had worked as a magazine illustrator (the covers are projected in large colorful slides in one gallery), he experimented with etching (many are on display here), and worked for a time with watercolors. A small collection of these watercolors are presented here illuminating his delicate skill with the medium, crafting scenes as stark and quiet as his later works, each absent of people with hints of voyeurism. He exhibited and sold a painting in the famous Armory Show in the spring of 1913 in New York that brought European modernist works to New York — most famously symbolized in Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912).Whether you are installing a floor tiles or a shower wall, Such a diversity of experiences makes it difficult to know where to start the story of Hopper, and where to located the origins of his aesthetics.
Perhaps we can start at the New York School of Art where Hopper studied between 1900 and 1906. There he was influenced by his teachers William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, who advocated a social realism that merged the values of late 19th century French painting with the particular subject matter of an increasingly urban America. It is Henri’s paintings that we first encounter in this show, his darkly framed image of an art student and one deeply intimate portrait of Thomas Eakins, whom he much admired. This first gallery situated Hopper among his contemporaries such as George Bellows, Whistler, and John Sloane. Henri’s focused drew on European post-Impressionism but capturing scenes of urban street life. For this group of artists, like their French contemporaries, the subject of painting rested on the new realities of social life, of working-class salons, of construction sites, train stations, and boxing matches.
But before you get to these painters, this show opens with the black and white film “Manhatta” (1921), a collaboration between painter Charles Scheeler and photographer Paul Strand. The non-narrative film captures a sequence of Manhattan moments, from ferry crossings to the top of the newly built “skyscrapers,” the camera angled on elevated train platforms and window ledges all presenting the wonderment with the city’s growing monumentality. These images are interspersed with lines from Walt Whitman poems, modernism’s linearity meshing with 19th century romanticism. But such a vision of the city stands in strong contrast to the realists that Hopper studied with, whose vision of urban life is much more intimate, eschewing the skyscrapers of modernity for the street life in the shadows. Hopper himself never painted a skyscraper, though he lived much of his life in Greenwich Village, underscoring the personal and psychological themes of his paintings against the modernism grandeur. His canvases are firmly rooted in an intimacy of small moments, a theater of empty spaces and silent encounters, of country lanes and lighthouses, that almost push out the voices and clatter of the city’s upward thrust.
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