Edward Hopper

THE PHYSICAL FACE of America, seen with complete candor, is the material of Edward Hopper's art. But with all his objectivity he is essentially a poet-one who finds his poetry less often in nature than in man's creations, in the structures and cities man has built and among which his life is spent. Hopper's work is an intense expression of that poetry of places which has been a theme of artists through the centuries, from Guardi to Meryon.

Born in 1882 at Nyack, N.Y., studying art in New York, Hopper made three trips to Europe before 1910 which had little effect on his art. As early as 1908 he began painting the American scene, but it was not until the 1920's that he achieved recognition.

Hopper has discovered for art those man-made features which we now see as most characteristic of the American landscape, but which had been shunned by his more tender-minded predecessors. He likes American architecture in its most frankly native phases, especially the bare white wooden houses and churches of New England. He likes stark, structural things: factories, bridges, the simple immaculate forms of lighthouses. He likes railroads, highways, gasoline stations.

Although human beings appear in his paintings, the whole scene is what interests Hopper. In his city pictures, it is not the hurrying crowds, the traffic and movement, but the city itself--its streets, buildings, its great masses of stone and steel, its varying architecture, its myriad forms. The few human figures are parts of the scene rather than leading actors; often they seem isolated and solitary.

By contrast with impressionism, Hopper's art is built on form. Everything is solidly constructed; the forms are massive and severely simplified; only essentials are given. His paintings are very thoughtfully designed: straight lines are stressed, and strong contrasts of verticals and horizontals create pictorial drama. A frequent device is a straight foreground line, such as a road or railroad tracks, forming a base for the whole. His compositions are monumental rather than dynamic. Always they possess order, balance, and a total harmony.

Unlike the immaculates, an important element in his work is the mood of the scene: the exact time and weather and light, and the emotions which these evoke. Light plays a leading part in his pictures. The American impressionists had imported the soft air and light of France; but Hopper loves the strong sunlight, clear air and high cold skies of the northern United States. He likes the play of sunlight and shadow on white-painted houses; the precise effect of the baking noonday sun on wood, stone, brick; the low light of clear afternoons, modelling the forms of earth and houses. Often his pictures have a crystalline clarity, and give a sense of stillness and waiting, and of loneliness, penetrating and yet serene.

Hopper: Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception.

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