Edward Hopper's New York

Edward Hopper resided in the Washington Square area of New York City from 1905 until his death in 1967, pursuing the visual essence of Gotham in various media and taking the measure of ordinary city dwellers. He embraced the architecture of the great city, revealing its solidity and bulk in "convincing three dimensional pictorial space." Today his most evocative canvases resonate with a contemporary power. Whether in oils and watercolors such as "Automat," "Nighthawks," or "New York Pavements" or in etchings like "The El Station" and "Night Shadows," Hopper gave us stark yet intimate interpretation of urban existence that are touchstones of American art.

Avis Berman's essay explores how Hopper and his work illuminate each other by analyzing what his New York is -- and is not. The artist preferred nondescript vernacular buildings, eschewing the new, the gigantic, the technologically exciting. He truly made emptiness full, silence articulate, plainness mysterious, and tawdriness noble.

Reviews

Download as a PDF

ARTNews:

Surprisingly, this slim volume is the first devoted exclusively to Hopper's depictions of New York City. Combining more than 50 paintings, watercolors, and etchings with an elegant essay by historian and critic Avis Berman, it sums up both the life of the man and the uniqueness of his work.

One of the mysteries of Hopper's paintings is why they still seem so contemporary seven decades after he created them. Berman distills the vast number of writings on the artist and clarifies the hallmarks of his vision.

Hopper ignored the city's soaring skyscrapers, bustling crowds, and architectural icons (he never painted the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State, Chrysler, or Flatiron buildings). Instead, his signature New York images, such as "Early Sunday Morning" (1930) and "Nighthawks" (1942), are unrelentingly horizontal, intimate, and anonymous. His images deal in spatial and psychological ambiguities — windows that both separate and unite, intrusive angles, unexpected vantage points, glaring sunlight and deep shadow. Hopper, Berman comments, "portrays architectural exteriors and human interiors at the same time."

Carefully chosen quotes from the artist and earlier writers add to our appreciation of the images. Like her subject, Berman extracts with deceptive simplicity the essence of Hopper's progression from his early days in Paris to his stark masterpieces of the 1930s and 1940s.

Reference and Research Book News:

An attractive and accessible book, this volume presents the paintings, prints and drawings Hopper made of New York City, many in full-page color plates of good quality. Berman writes on Hopper's life and his work in New York, drawing extensively on his writings and interviews.

The Midwest Book Review:

Edward Hopper is one of the country's best known painters: he based himself in New York City and depicted the city through the first half of the 20th century. While most of these potraits have appeared in more general Hopper art books, it's refreshing to see in print the first book devoted entirely to his New York paintings alone. Reproductions drawn from galleries around the country includes both color and black and white prints created before he was fully recognized as an artist: with each picture enhanced by artistic insights on the opposite page, any Hopper collections won't be complete without adding Edward Hopper's New York.