Hopper, Edward

Hopper, Edward (1882–1967). American painter and etcher. He was born in Nyack in New York State and spent almost all his career in New York City, but he travelled extensively in the USA, making long journeys by car. After a year at a commercial art school he studied from 1900 to 1906 at the New York School of Art; his teachers included Chase and Henri and his fellow students included George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. Between 1906 and 1910 he made three trips to Europe (mainly Paris), but these had little influence on his style (he admired the Impressionists but took no interest in avant-garde art). In 1913 he exhibited (and sold) a picture at the Armory Show, but from then until 1923 he earned his living entirely by commercial illustration. Following a successful one-man show in 1924, however, he enjoyed a fairly rapid rise to recognition as the outstanding exponent of American Scene Painting (he was given a retrospective exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 and this set the seal on his reputation).

Hopper's distinctive style was formed by the mid-1920s and thereafter changed little. The central theme of his work is the loneliness of city life, generally expressed through one or two figures in a spare setting—his best-known work, Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1942), showing an all-night diner, has an unusually large ‘cast’ with four. Typical settings are motel rooms, filling stations, cafeterias, and almost deserted offices at night. He was the first artist to seize on this specifically American visual world and make it definitively his own. However, although his work is rooted in a particular period and place, it also has a peculiarly timeless feel and deals in unchanging realities about the human condition. He never makes feelings explicit or tries to tell a story; rather he suggests weariness, frustration, and troubled isolation with a poignancy that rises above the specific. Hopper himself enjoyed solitude (although he was happily married to another ex-student of Henri's) and he disliked talking about his work. When he did, he discussed it mainly in terms of technical problems; one of his best-known pronouncements is that he wanted only to ‘paint sunlight on the side of a house'. Of Nighthawks he said: ‘I didn't see it as particularly lonely … Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a big city.’ Deliberately so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings he exerts a powerful psychological impact that makes him one of the great painters of modern life.

Hopper worked in watercolour as well as oil and also made etchings, beginning in 1915. In fact his individual vision emerged in printmaking before it did in painting—he later commented that ‘After I took up etching, my painting seemed to crystalise'. His best-known print is Evening Wind (1921), establishing a theme that would later often recur in his paintings—the female nude in a city interior. He virtually abandoned printmaking in 1923, but in spite of his short career in the medium he has been described as ‘undoubtedly the greatest American etcher of this century’ ( Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, American Prints 1879–1979, 1980).

Hopper was dismayed by the rise of Abstract Expressionism and in 1953 was one of a group of representational painters who launched the journal Reality as a mouthpiece for their views; in 1963 they protested to the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art about the ‘gobbledegook influences’ of abstract art in their collections. Nevertheless, Hopper's widow, who survived him by only a year, left his entire artistic estate—over 2,000 works—to the Whitney.