MILAN – It has been said of him that he knew how to ‘paint silence’ or that he was the forerunner of Pop Art. Andre Breton, in his exile in New York, compared him to Giorgio De Chirico in an interview published in View in 1941. Edward Hopperhe was an artist who cannot be inscribed in artistic currents, his style was very personal; he uses compositions and photographic cuts similar to those of the Impressionists that he had seen from life in Paris, but in fact I elaborate a painting that is out of the ordinary. The composition of the paintings, sometimes geometrizing, is lost in a sophisticated game of cold, sharp and deliberately ‘artificial’ lights. In his paintings a dramatic estrangement and lack of communication between the subjects seems to emerge. The direction of their gazes or their attitudes often ‘go beyond the boundary of the picture’, in the sense that they turn to something that the viewer does not see. DISCOVER THE SHOPPER AND THE CATALOG DEDICATED TO EDWARD HOPPER ON LIBRERIAMO STORE THE FIRST YEARS
At 18 I began to attend the New York School of Art, directed by William Merritt Chase, a follower of European impressionism, coming into contact with the future American art scene of the early fifties. He soon moved to Paris, taking up accommodation near the Louvre; here he let himself be fascinated by impressionist painting and symbolist poets before returning to his homeland to work as an advertising illustrator. In reality he never stopped traveling, especially in Europe, London, Berlin, Brussels and then again Paris, where he painted a lot, in the wake of masters such as Manet, Monet, Courbet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Goya. Back in New York, he abandoned painting for a few years to devote himself to the technique of engraving (drypoint and etchings), thanks to which he obtained numerous prizes and awards, also from the prestigious National Academy of Design. In 1918 he was one of the first members of the Whitney Studio Club, the most vital center for American independent artists of the time; it was here, two years later, that he held his first solo show, where Soir bleu was exhibited among other works. The title of the painting is inspired by the first verse of Sensation, a poem by Arthur Rimbaud about the pleasures of wandering. Hopper stages a group of heterogeneous characters on the terrace of a Parisian cafe: on the right a middle-class couple, on the left a protector. In the center, an officer from behind, in profile a bearded character, probably an artist, in front of a pierrot and a prostitute in the background.THE SUCCESS
In 1924 some of his watercolors were exhibited in Gloucester in Frank Rehn’s gallery, which made a significant change in the career of Hopper, who had so far earned his living as a magazine illustrator. That same year Hopper married Josephine Verstille Nivison, the only model for all female characters that he would paint from then on. The success achieved with the exhibition at the Rehn Gallery helped make Hopper the leader of the realists who painted the ‘American scene’. In 1925 his canvas titled Apartment Houses was bought by the Pennsylvania Academy: this was his first oil work to enter a public collection. In 1930 the famous House by the Railroad, which would serve Alfred Hitchcock as a model for the Psyco house, was donated by collector Stephen C. Clark toMoMA in New York, becoming part of the permanent collection of the museum. After three years, the same MoMA dedicates the first retrospective to him. The Whitney Museum of American Art dedicated the second retrospective to him in 1950 and, in 1956, TIME magazine paid tribute to him with a cover. Hopper died at the age of 85 on May 15, 1967 in his studio in downtown New York. THE STYLE
Strongly influenced by French Impressionism, Hopper managed to develop a very personal style, taken up in later times by filmmakers and photographers. Recently, photographer Richard Tuschmanhas created a project that is inspired by the artist’s works, entitled ‘Hopper Meditations’. Hopper’s painting favors landscape architecture, city streets, interiors of houses, offices, theaters and clubs. The images have bright colors but do not convey liveliness, the spaces are real but in them there is something metaphysical a la Giorgio De Chirico that communicates to the viewer a strong sense of disquiet. The scene is often deserted, immersed in silence; there is rarely more than one human figure, and when there is more than one, a dramatic strangeness and incommunicability between the subjects seems to emerge. READ ALSO: Because Edward Hopper’s paintings make us feel less alone
