Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings. From 1900 to 1906 he studied at the NY School of Art, and while in school, shifted from illustration to works of fine art. Hopper was stoic and fatalistic—a quiet introverted man with a gentle sense of humor and a frank manner. Conservative in politics and social matters, he accepted things as they were and displayed a lack of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was well-read, and many of his paintings show figures reading. He often made preparatory sketches to work out his carefully calculated compositions.
For New York Movie (1939), Hopper demonstrates his thorough preparation with more than 53 sketches of the theater interior and the figure of the pensive usherette.
His primary emotional themes are solitude, loneliness, regret, boredom, and resignation. He expresses the emotions in various environments, including the office, in public places, in apartments, on the road, or on vacation. Hopper died in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on May 15, 1967
Further reading on Edward Hopper:
Edward Hopper's Solitary Figure in a Theater, painted somewhere around 1903, when he was barely in his twenties, and now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Before he took mutiple trips to Paris for his inspiration, he captured some avant-garde style that is impressive for such a novice.
The spectator is sitting alone, in a seeminly empty theater, while presumably reading the playbill for the act that has not yet started. This depiction is distinct because of its depiction of solitude in a public place where one attends for entertainment, usually with their friends or family. Hopper is known for his depictions of lonliness and even boredom, but why might he have used the theater specifically to imply such futility in theatergoing? It may be his sense of the theater experience as introspective, a venue where one gains the most in solitude without distraction, or to expose reality just before the embracement of illusion and escapism offered by a performance.
Much later in Hopper's career, his evolved style is evident in this piece, New York Movie, painted in 1939. What we can tell at its surface is that there is a female usher, seemingly bored while leaning against a wall, out of sight of the movie, which is playing for a visible audience.
This was chosen as a piece in the exhibit, even though it isn't a depiction of stage theater, because it expresses something universal in entertainment. It shows a clear separation of spectators being entertained, while the subject of the painting solemnly waits alone at a distance, which is telling of her lack of enthusiasm for the movie, probably because she has seen and heard it so many times that the ability for her to escape into it is hopeless. The revealing of that separation creates a sharp line between reality and illusion. This sharp line reminds one of the falsity of entertainment, instead of thinning the line between spectacle and spectator in order to show the transferrence of emotion from actor to audience
At the Theater, painted by Hopper between 1916 and 1922, is a much different style of his other two works shown. It has cleaner lines, sketched and he perhaps used watercolors instead of oil.
What really makes this standout in his collection of work is that the audience members are completely the center of this piece, and are looking off in a distance thatthe viewer is unable to see. We can assume they are watching some kind of performance, yet how do we interpret the spectators if we are unable to see the object that they are viewing? Hopper instead of creating a division between two points in New York Movie he creates a boundary which keeps the second object from effecting ones interpretation of the other. However, if this group of subjects are watching a play or movie, it doesn't seem to be captivating them, but they are staring at the performance none-the-less. It seems like an attempt to express boredom, or the reliance of entertainment for escape and the disappointment of it not being satisfactory, but still being worth the hope.