9780375709715: Hopper
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375709711 ISBN 13: 9780375709715
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Now in rich color, thirty of American painter Edward Hopper’s masterpieces with critiques from acclaimed poet Mark Strand. Strand deftly illuminates the work of the frequently misunderstood American painter, whose enigmatic paintings—of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias, and hotel rooms—number among the most powerful of our time.

In brief but wonderfully compelling comments accompanying each painting, the elegant expressiveness of Strand’s language is put to the service of Hopper’s visual world. The result is a singularly illuminating presentation of the work of one of America’s best-known artists. Strand shows us how the formal elements of the paintings—geometrical shapes pointing beyond the canvas, light from unseen sources—locate the viewer, as he says, “in a virtual space where the influence and availability of feeling predominate.”

An unforgettable combination of prose and painting in their highest forms, this book is a must for poetry and art lovers alike.


From the Hardcover edition.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was raised and educated in the United States. He has written nine books of poems, which have brought him many honors and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship and, forBlizzard of One, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. he was chosen as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990. He is the author of a book of stories,Mr. and Mrs. Baby, several volumes of translations (including works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), the editor of a number of anthologies, and the author of two monographs on contempory artists. He teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I

I often feel that the scenes in Edward Hopper paintings are scenes from my own past. It may be because I was a child in the 1940s and the world I saw was pretty much the one I see when I look at Hoppers today. It may be because the adult world that surrounded me seemed as remote as the one that flourishes in his work. But whatever the reasons, the fact remains that looking at Hopper is inextricably bound with what I saw in those days. The clothes, the houses, the streets and storefronts are the same. When I was a child what I saw of the world beyond my immediate neighborhood I saw from the backseat of my parents' car. It was a world glimpsed in passing. It was still. It had its own life and did not know or care that I happened by at a particular time. Like the world of Hopper's paintings, it did not return my gaze.

The observations that follow are not a nostalgic look at Hopper's work. They do, however, recognize the importance for him of roads and tracks, of passageways and temporary stopping places, or to put it generally, of travel. They recognize as well the repeated use of certain geometrical figures that bear directly on what the viewer's response is likely to be. And they recognize that the invitation to construct a narrative for each painting is also part of the experience of looking at Hopper. And this, inasmuch as it demands an involvement in particular paintings, indicates a resistance to having the viewer move on. These two imperatives-the one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us to stay-create a tension that is constant in Hopper's work.

II

In Nighthawks, three people are sitting in what must be an all-night diner. The diner is situated on a corner and is harshly lit. Though engaged in a task, an employee, dressed in white, looks up toward one of the customers. The customer, who is sitting next to a distracted woman, looks at the employee. Another customer, whose back is to us, looks in the general direction of the man and the woman. It is a scene one might have encountered forty or fifty years ago, walking late at night through New York City's Greenwich Village or, perhaps, through the heart of any city in the northeastern United States. There is nothing menacing about it, nothing that suggests danger is waiting around the corner. The diner's coolly lit interior sheds overlapping densities of light on the adjacent sidewalk, giving it an aesthetic character. It is as if the light were a cleansing agent, for nowhere are there signs of urban filth. The city, as in most Hoppers, asserts itself formally rather than realistically. The dominant feature of the scene is the long window through which we see the diner. It covers two-thirds of the canvas, forming the geometrical shape of an isosceles trapezoid, which establishes the directional pull of the painting, toward a vanishing point that cannot be witnessed, but must be imagined. Our eye travels along the face of the glass, moving from right to left, urged on by the converging sides of the trapezoid, the green tile, the counter, the row of round stools that mimic our footsteps, and the yellow-white neon glare along the top. We are not drawn into the diner but are led alongside it. Like so many scenes we register in passing, its sudden, immediate clarity absorbs us, momentarily isolating us from everything else, and then releases us to continue on our way.

In Nighthawks, however, we are not easily released. The long sides of the trapezoid slant toward each other but never join, leaving the viewer midway in their trajectory. The vanishing point, like the end of the viewer's journey or walk, is in an unreal and unrealizable place, somewhere off the canvas, out of the picture. The diner is an island of light distracting whoever might be walking by-in this case, ourselves-from journey's end. This distraction might be construed as salvation. For a vanishing point is not just where converging lines meet, it is also where we cease to be, the end of each of our individual journeys. Looking at Nighthawks, we are suspended between contradictory imperatives-one, governed by the trapezoid, that urges us forward, and the other, governed by the image of a light place in a dark city, that urges us to stay.

Here, as in other Hopper paintings where streets and roads play an important part, no cars are shown. No one is there to share what we see, and no one has come before us. What we experience will be entirely ours. The exclusions of travel, along with our own sense of loss and our passing absence, will flourish.

III

Painted the same year as Nighthawks, Dawn in Pennsylvania is also dominated by an isosceles trapezoid, one that, in this case, extends nearly across the full horizontal plane of the canvas. And the periodic posting of verticals that frame and give momentary respite in both paintings from the strong horizontal movement of the trapezoid are in almost identical positions and of the same size. But instead of looking into a diner, we look out toward a couple of industrial buildings from a covered station platform. And instead of walking somewhere, we are waiting to go somewhere. The feeling is that we will be waiting a long time. The large, squarish, off-white pillar breaks the forward thrust of the trapezoid, and the rear of a parked railcar powerfully suggests that nothing in this station is moving. Unlike the complex Nighthawks, this painting turns on a simple paradox, which is that we feel trapped in a place whose purpose has to do with travel. The trapezoid-with some assistance from the tracks and the parked train-may suggest motion, but it is overwhelmed by the depth it encloses. That is, we look much further into Dawn in Pennsylvania than we do into Nighthawks and find ourselves looking through the trapezoid instead of being led by it. What we encounter is the cold and feeble light of a new day.

IV

The storefront in Seven a.m. seems cheerful in its ordinary whiteness, its lack of clutter, its geometric certainty. And the trapezoid it forms is nowhere near as acute or extended, nor as troubling, as those that appear in Dawn in Pennsylvania and Nighthawks. Even though we are prevented from witnessing its resolution, we do not feel left behind or left out. For one thing, we seem to be in front of the store because we choose to be. There is no sense-as there is in Nighthawks-that we have just happened by. Nor is there a feeling of being imprisoned as there is in Dawn in Pennsylvania. We may have approached for any number of reasons. Or no reason. It does not much matter. There is no urgency; there is only a geometric calm. And something else, something that the primness and tidiness of the storefront almost seems an attempt to hide-the massed trees, which form the dark, tangled, impenetrable presence of nature. They exist in the painting as a frightening alternative to the store, which manifests a set of orders, the most obvious of which is the temporal one symbolized by the centrally located clock, while the most civilized is the historical one represented by the engaged columns that flank the plate glass windows. Our position relative to the storefront is pretty much what it is in Nighthawks relative to the diner, but since the store is closed we are less drawn to what is inside, and we are more doubtful about the woods than we are about the city streets.

V

In Second Story Sunlight two identical white gables, each with two windows on the second floor and one on the third, face the sun. Their roofs are a dark blue-gray and their shadow sides are a violet blue. On the porch in front of the gable closest to the viewer an old woman in a navy dress sits reading, and a young woman in shorts and halter sits sideways on the porch railing. Behind the twin gables is a group of trees that seems, because of its upward slant, to be growing on a hillside. Dark and forbidding, it appears,...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375709711
ISBN 13 
9780375709715
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
69
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar