Word: hopper
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...poetic consistency of Hopper's vision now seems far more interesting than the unadventurous vanguardism of most "advanced" American painting in the '20s and '30s, that is partly because it was grounded in 19th century France: especially in Manet, whose work Hopper studied and copied. The sober painterliness of Hopper's style, its reliance on the single brush mark to enunciate form, came ultimately from Manet; so did his passion for meticulous truth of tone; and so, especially, did the "emptiness" of his compositions, with their emphatic blocks of shadow, their wide, flat planes of wall...
There were other influences too: Daumier for the dense, impacted drawing, a touch of caricaturists like Théophile Steinlen for the faces, and symbolist poetry for the emblematic moodiness of some of the scenes. Some of the most powerful aspects of Hopper's work came from outside the history of painting itself: from theater, whose devices of staging and lighting Hopper constantly invoked. Hopper's rooms and landscapes have a constant air of expectancy. When empty, they seem to have been just vacated by actors; when they are peopled, the figures are posed and lit as though...
...make an inventory of Hopper's sources does not explain either the quality of his paintings or their grip on the viewer. In part, these come from his sense of place and his unsparing, discreet eye for the truth of a scene. Anyone who has spent time on the sea knows that nothing, in terms of observation, is missing from his images of Truro on Cape Cod, like The Martha McKean of Wellfleet, 1944. From the humping blue of the water to the mild sun on the belly of the gaff-rigged sail, it is all there, immemorial...
...same reasons, his great city paintings like Nighthawks, 1942, are by now as solid a fixture of the American imagination as the novels of Raymond Chandler. Hopper's European contemporaries, especially in Weimar, Germany, had also dealt with this theme: the city as condenser of loneliness. But none of them did it with the same etiquette of feeling. Hopper had no expressionist instincts at all. He sensed, but did not agonize over, a profound solitude, a leaning toward Thanatos that lay at the core of American optimism. Although he was the first painter to deal with...
Time and again, Hopper's work insists in its characteristically modest way that these green fields have gone, or, at least, are going; that having run out of external frontiers, Americans were faced by an impassable frontier within the self, so that the man of action had been replaced by the watcher, or voyeur, whose act of watching included the creative functions or "eye" of the artist. One is company, two is a crowd: such is the implied mot to. This, perhaps, is why one senses so in tense a bond between Hopper and his apparently aloof, disconnected human...