Word: hopperful
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...good students of art were expected to, Hopper went to Paris in 1906 for a year of study. But he bore little resemblance to the popular notion of an American art student in France. He kept to himself, sketching and painting along the Seine and in the parks. "I had heard of and knew about Gertrude Stein," he recalls, "but I wasn't important enough for her to know me. About the only important person I knew was Jo Davidson, and he was willing to look at me only because I knew the girl he was going to marry...
Paris that interested Student Hopper. "The light was different from anything I had known," he says. "The shadows were luminous-more reflected light. Even under the bridges there was a certain luminosity. Maybe it's because the clouds are lower, just over the housetops. I've always been interested in light-more than most contemporary painters, and certainly more than the abstractionists...
Withdrawal & Return. History is full of men who withdrew to the desert to learn their true mission. Hopper did the same thing unconsciously and by necessity: he took up commercial art. The advertising and publishing houses that bought his drawings of storybook characters "posturing and grimacing" were desert sands to him: ''Sometimes I'd walk around the block a couple of times before I'd go in, wanting the job for money and at the same time hoping to hell I wouldn't get the lousy thing...
...Hopper yearned simply to "paint sunlight on the side of a house." But his oils lacked the gusto then in fashion. They showed an almost obsessive fear of the flourish. Xo one wanted them. For a whole decade he practically ceased 'painting them. His empty easel was wasteland, and within himself lay wilderness. His friends heard nothing from him; apparently he had gone under...
...very fact of being so cut off from his mission, Edward Hopper was able to bring it into being. Protected from the slow ravages of compromise-either with public taste or with his own immaturity-he developed his style invisibly along with his character. At last he produced some etchings that had a wholly new quality, the quality of himself. There followed a hesitant shower of equally exciting watercolors. and finally more oils. In 1924 he had his first one-man show of new work, which sold out. He married a painter named Josephine Nivison (who had also studied with...