For most Europeans, Edward Hopper's art confirms a preconceived image of America… Hopper's American qualities are in the scenes he chose to paint.
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Rolf Günter RennerEdward Hopper
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I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to brand performance. … Something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting that the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.
Alain de Botton
Hopper is simply a bad painter, but if he were a better one, he would probably not be such a great artist.
Edward Hopper
[After describing a hopper for feeding winter game:] If you think you're too old to enjoy building such contraptions — that only Boy Scouts get a kick out of such nonsense — just try it. You may end up by building several.
Aldo Leopold
Hopper's best pictures are representational only in that simplified, stripped-down, visually dissonant manner that suggests some distant memory, or a dream.... They are simple, yet mysterious; blunt, yet poetic; familiar, yet at the same time inscrutable.
Edward Hopper
Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.
Michael Moore
Hopper, Edward
Hopper, Grace
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