Edward Hopper Book

One of the most enduringly popular painters of the twentieth century, Edward Hopper produced many works now considered icons of Modern art. Canvases such as Drugstore, New York Movie, and the universally recognized (and often parodied) Nighthawks not only reshaped what painting looked like in America, but created a visual a language for middle-class life and its discontents. This extensive new assessment of Hopper, which accompanies a major traveling exhibition, examines the dynamics of the artist's creative process and discusses his work within the cultural currents of his day--examining the influence not only of other painters, but also of such media as literature and film. And while most studies have tended to see Hopper as the great painter of alienation, this one takes a much broader, more nuanced, and ultimately more representative view. Spanning the entirety of Hopper's career, but with particular emphasis on his heyday in the 30s and 40s, Edward Hopper highlights the artist's greatest achievements while discussing such topics as his absorption of European influences, critical reactions to his work, the relation of Realism to Modernism, the artist's fascination with architecture, his depiction of women and the struggle in his last years to produce original works. Illustrated with over 150 oils, watercolors and prints, and including essays by several noted scholars in the field and an extensive chronology and bibliography, this is the most comprehensive volume on Hopper produced in the last decade, published to accompany the major traveling exhibition.

Publishers Weekly

``For all his realism, Hopper was essentially a poet,'' writes Goodrich, and this sumptuous album, a reissue of an out-of-print 1970 monograph, is an incomparable guide to understanding that poetry. Hopper (1882-1967) gravitated to painting lunch counters, nudes in hotel rooms, lighthouses, gas stations, rooftops--underappreciated, nakedly honest figurations of America's heartland. A prophet of loneliness, this laconic individualist captured the anarchy of American cities, the quiet melancholy of small towns and suburbs. Paradoxically, his pictures have a restorative, bracing effect--perhaps, as is suggested here, because of Hopper's emotional attachment to his native environment. The late Goodrich was director of the Whitney Museum in New York and a friend of the artist, whose own comments are interspersed with a refreshingly readable text and more than 200 full-page plates. (Nov.)