In the summer of 2013 I had the opportunity to see a large exhibition of the drawings of the American artist, Edward Hopper (1881-1967) at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.
As a young artist, Hopper made his living as a commercial illustrator for magazines, drawing hundreds of illustrations for business magazines and posters. While he disliked working for others, he had been inspired by his great teacher, Robert Henri, to draw from the real world, which for Hopper was to reveal the existential loneliness of the new industrial cities, an insight that eventually was the foundation for his painting career.
The charcoal drawing for the painting Nighthawk was one of dozens of charcoal sketches he made to explore the subject, as he looked for the abstract core ‘idea’, as light, shape, value. Such drawings were also his way of exploring the emotional elements of his subject, like Rembrandt, whom he studied carefully, and like Rembrandt, Hopper was also a master printmaker in black and white.
Painting is of course a much slower and more subtle process of many steps. By the time he began painting Nighthawk, also shown here, he had settled upon a later version from the drawing shown. However, the abstract structure earned through his many charcoal studies, as well as the expressive experience in his bones that drawing provides, provided him the map that kept him from getting lost in the details of painting in color.
What I learned seeing this great Hopper retrospective was first, how much preliminary work went into each of his major paintings. And secondly, that Hopper’s charcoal drawings were as powerful and direct in their own right as his painting was, to the point of his being acknowledged as an early modern inspiration to the later work of the Abstract Expressionist movement in America.
In future blogs I look forward to revisiting the many facets of Hopper’s work that are so relevant to our own time. Meanwhile, there is a splendid catalogue of the 2013 exhibition available through the Whitney Museum of Art, for those interested in seeing and learning more about Edward Hopper.
