Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, and studied painting in New York City with Robert Henri. His wife, Jo Nivison, whom he married in 1924, was a fellow student. Beginning in 1906 Hopper worked as a commercial illustrator; that summer he also went to Paris. He visited Paris repeatedly during the next four years and at the outset of his career identified himself very strongly with French art, though never with the avant-garde. He first exhibited in 1920 in New York with the Whitney Studio Club, and for the rest of his life he remained closely identified with the club as it evolved into a museum.

Success as a painter came slowly to Hopper. He early on won a reputation for his commercial work and prints, but it was not until 1923, when he exhibited watercolors at the Brooklyn Museum, that the qualities that made him famous as a painter were noticed by the critics: the solid, seemingly unemotional renderings of an American landscape that seems slightly out-of-sync with the modern world. In this first exhibition his subjects included studies of architecture, both urban and rural, and the New England landscape. In 1932 he visited Cape Cod, where he built a studio in 1934. He summered at the Cape nearly every year thereafter. With few exceptions, his subjects were those found near his studios in Manhattan and Cape Cod. After the early 1920s, his style and his subjects varied little, and his career was a steady stream of awards and commercial and critical recognition. His work has become, if possible, more popular since his death and has been appropriated by filmmakers, set designers, and poets, as well as other painters.

“Blackhead, Monhegan,” 1916-19

Oil on panel, 11 1/2 x 16 in. (29.2 x 40.6 cm)

Signed (lower right): E. HOPPER./ inscribed (verso): To Beatrice Acken from Edward Hopper / Oil on wood panel / signed in lower right corner

Gift of Olga H. Knoepke (1992.22)

“Blackhead, Monhegan” represents a cliff on the east side of Monhegan, a small island about ten miles off the coast of Maine that is famous for its rugged headlands facing the Atlantic Ocean. Because of its undeveloped beauty, the place was, and is, a favorite of artists.

Robert Henri, Hopper's teacher, visited Monhegan in 1903 and convinced many of his pupils, including Rockwell Kent and George Bellows, to follow him there over the years. Henri's immediate response was ecstatic: "Great rocks-can't describe it. . . . This is the real thing . . . and from the great cliffs you look down on a mighty surf battering away at the rocks . . . . They are wild . . . a little harbor shielded by a small island-simply a huge mass of rock. It is a wonderful place to paint-so much in so small a place one can hardly believe it." (1) Hopper visited Monhegan in the summers of 1916 to 1919, the last in the company of Henri, and the New Britain sketch was painted during one of those visits. Unlike most of his classmates, however, Hopper did not turn any of his sketches into finished paintings. They were exhibited once, in 1920, and remained largely unknown until his widow bequeathed them to the Whitney Museum in 1967, after the artist's death. This example, which Hopper gave to his friend Beatrice Acken, is one of the few Monhegan sketches not in the collection of the Whitney.

Henri popularized a very direct, vigorous handling of the brush, a painting style that especially suited the wild Monhegan landscape. Most of his students' sketches of the island follow in his footsteps, and in this respect Hopper's oil is no exception. In the years following the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced avant-garde European art to the American public, Henri and many others modified their palettes, making them much more vivid and dissonant. Hopper, however, appears to have been indifferent to such innovations. In contrast to those artists, Hopper used a relatively muted palette in “Blackhead, Monhegan”, the same one he had been using since his years in Paris: Hopper's allegiance to French Impressionism and the study of light (as opposed to color) was constant and unaffected by any recent experience of Van Gogh and Matisse. (2)

During the years that Hopper visited Monhegan, he seems to have completed no oil paintings. Instead, the paintings he made on Monhegan represent an escape from his usual commercial work.

Beautiful in their own right, the Monhegan sketches represent an experiment, a recasting of French light onto rough uncultivated American scenery: they are the necessary prelude to his enormous popularity and critical success in the 1920s, when he became identified as the exemplary American painter.

BR

Bibliography:

Lloyd Goodrich, “Edward Hopper” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971); Gail Levin, “Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist,” exhib. cat. (New York: W. W. Norton and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980); Gail Levin, “Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné,” 4 vols. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995); Gail Levin, “Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography” (New York: Knopf, 1995); Deborah Lyons, “Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work” (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997).