"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with the second of three 12-piece Exhibitions of works by Edward Hopper (1882–1967), a master of a genre known unofficially as “New Realism,” a social form of painting with an eye on contemporary urban life.

 

Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, to a middle-class family who encouraged him to develop his artistic gifts. After studying for a year at the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City, he enrolled in classes at the New York School of Art in 1900. In the following six years, he would study with the prominent artists William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, both advocates for the new realism in painting. Among his classmates were several other well-known artists, including George Bellows, Guy Pène du Bois, and Rockwell Kent.
 

From 1906 to 1910, Hopper would visit Europe on three different occasions, where he would absorb the Parisian Impressionistic influences of painters Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet. After 1910, Hopper moved to Greenwich Village, where he would establish and maintain a studio. He began to exhibit his own works in and around New York, including the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910) and the famous Armory Show of 1913. Hopper had his first solo exhibition in 1920, at age 37, at the famous Whitney Studio Club, founded by the heiress and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. While he sold no paintings, word of his work spread, and his second solo exhibition, at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York, was a huge success. After every painting in the exhibition sold, the Rehn Gallery would represent him for the rest of his career. 

 

Edward married Josephine (“Jo”) Verstille Nivison in 1923, who became not only his wife, but the favorite model for the female figures in his art. She also was an able business woman who helped Edward by keeping meticulous records of his works, exhibitions and sales. The Hoppers would spend nearly every summer from 1930 through the 1950s in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where they built their own house in Truro.

 

After a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Hopper became nationally famous as a stylist. His painting subjects were divided equally between architectural urban scenes and New England landscapes, both of which revealed a distinctive style of antiseptic distance and exacting realism. The underlying theme of his work--the modern isolation and alienation of the individual—spawned extensive social analysis and discussions of art’s role in modern life. As Abstract Expressionism rose in popularity, Hopper’s style fell out of favor with critics for a time in the 1940s and 50s. Today, however, his works enjoy more popularity than ever, influencing several generations of American realist painters and cementing his place in art history.