Curatorial Essay 

The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) presents Edward Hopper: From City to Coast as part of its “Masterpieces from Overseas Collections” series, which introduces renowned masterpieces in cooperation with leading overseas art institutions. Jointly curated by SeMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this is the first solo exhibition on Edward Hopper (1882-1967) in Korea. A leading figure in modern art, Hopper captured on canvas the daily lives and sentiments of early 20th-century Americans from a unique perspective. With an artistry transcending time and space, his work has not only greatly influenced fine arts, but culture as a whole, and continues to enjoy worldwide popularity. 

In 2020, The Guardian, a British daily, published an article titled “‘We are all Edward Hopper paintings now:’ is he the artist of the coronavirus age?” Why is Hopper, an American artist from the early 1900s, being reexamined today, at a time when feelings of isolation, disconnection, and alienation are prevalent? As Hopper put it, “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist.”[1] For him, who was of a taciturn nature, painting was a unique way of expressing his feelings towards the world. The gaze stays on those ordinary things “that others flee from or pass with indifference,”[2] captured through Hopper’s meticulous observation and his unique use of light and shadow, bold composition, and reconstruction of time and space. In this sense, his paintings go beyond the landscape to become an introspective self-portrait and, be it someone’s silhouette across a window, the roof of a low building in contrast with a skyscraper, or a sunset on the railroad, they all resemble us.

Edward Hopper: From City to Coast looks back on the artist’s 65-year painting career, focusing on those places in Paris, New York, northern New England, and Cape Cod whose traces were captured in his works. As he regularly traveled between his longtime home in New York City and various rural and coastal retreats, these places played an integral part in expanding Hopper’s artistic horizons. The exhibition title, which means “On the way” in Korean, is meant to evoke Hopper’s journeys, along which he developed his personal style―each road connecting and becoming a unique trace of his own―and the moments in which we encounter Hopper. 

This exhibition presents 270 pieces spanning Hopper’s entire life, including drawings, prints, oil paintings, watercolors, and materials from the Sanborn Hopper Archive divided into eight sections to provide a faithful overview of the artist’s life and artistic universe. Though Hopper’s work is most often thought of as depicting the solitude of modern people, the paths he walked were diverse and profound. “To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re traveling.”[3] As his words suggest, Hopper felt a unique sensitivity to place throughout his life, grounded in his keen observational skills and made meaningful through the synthesis of memories and imagination. It is our hope that this exhibition broadens our understanding of Edward Hopper and that, to those of us in many ways fatigued, his works may offer sympathy and solace. 

[1] Selected pages from Reality: A Journal of Artists' Opinions, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1953), The Sanborn Hopper Archive at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, New York; gift of the Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust EJHA. 3271.

[2] Brian O'Doherty, American Masters (New York: E.P. Dutton. 1982), 20. 

[3] William C. Seitz, Edward Hopper in SaoPaulo 9(Washington D.C: Smithsonian Press, 1969), 22.

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York. His appreciation of art and literature began at an early age. In 1899, he attended the New York School of Illustrating in New York City to study commercial illustration. Then, the following year he enrolled in classes at the New York School of Art, where he pursued his artistic ambitions under the tutelage of some of the forerunners of American realism, including Robert Henri.

Divided into three periods, this exhibition introduces a selection of works by Hopper including his self-portraits, which were made at different points in his lifetime. The works created during his student days in the early 1900s show his face and upper body. In particular, the numerous drawings of the artist’s hands point to Hopper’s relentless efforts to hone his artistic expression and technical skills through training exercises. The self-portraits highlight his journey of self-reflection as an artist. In one of Hopper’s charcoal drawings from the mid-1920s, two emblematic items appear―his hat and the etching press that he acquired in 1916―revealing both his personal and professional means of self-representation. During the 1940s, when his artistic competence and reputation soared, he continued to produce self-portraits, which is no doubt a mark of his constant endeavors in evaluating himself and his growth as an artist. 

Hopper’s childhood home in Nyack on the Hudson River played a key role in nurturing his artistic pursuit and thematic interest in the contrast between nature and the built environment. Artist’s Bedroom, Nyack (c. 1905–1906) set in Hopper’s bedroom shows a self-portrait, sketches, books, and notes. The composition of Hopper’s later work Stairway (1949), in which the artist revisits his childhood home in Nyack, turns the viewer’s gaze from the house as a symbol of civilization to the mysterious landscape of lush foliage outside. The shadowy forest, which often appears as an antipode of civilization in Hopper’s works, both invites and obstructs the viewer, thereby emphasizing boundaries. In addition, such interior motifs as stairs, windows, and front doors set a boundary between inside and outside, direct the eye to move between different worlds, and serve as visual devices that evoke imagination.

Paris

In 1906, Edward Hopper headed to Paris, funded by his assignments as an illustrator, to pursue his artistic vision. Widely considered the capital of art at the time, Paris with its graceful features and orderly streets made a sharp contrast with New York, a city subjected to constant development. Hopper visited Paris three times between 1906 and 1910. He spent his time exploring the city’s streets and its suburbs and closely observing nature, architecture, and people. In addition, he traveled to other European cities to see the works of master painters. 

Through this journey of finding new subject matter and inspiration in new environments, Hopper gradually transformed his art with each visit. When he first arrived in Paris in the fall of 1906, he was still under the influence of his teacher Robert Henri. The dark color palette he used to express the interior of the Baptist church near his lodging as well as the surrounding cityscape, which included maroons and dark greys, likely developed from the teachings of Henri. However, Hopper quickly became inspired by Impressionism emphasizing the effects of light rather than avant-garde Fauvism and Cubism, and he began painting more actively outdoors by 1907. His works featuring the Seine River, nearby architecture, and sky show bright tones, quick brushstrokes, and soft light. Hopper paid attention to the contrast between light and shadow as well as architectural elements such as the river banks of the Seine, the Louvre Museum, and the bridges. The emergence of a composition resembling a photographic frame indicated the start of Hopper’s own painting style. 

Once he became accustomed to painting outdoors, Hopper began to observe the daily life of Parisians. The lively city offered fascinating subject matter from dawn till dusk for Hopper, who went on to create thirty-three watercolors caricaturing laborers, prostitutes, janitors, cafe-goers, and people dressed in fashionable clothes. Later, his observations and depictions of everyday life and people were reimagined in Le Bistro or The Wine Shop (1909) and Soir Bleu (1914). Completed in New York, these two paintings are important early examples of Hopper’s realism, which started from a composition based on actual observations but came to fruition in combination with memory and imagination.

Soir Bleu shows an assortment of people in a Parisian cafe: on the far left, a working-class man; in the center, a prostitute, a clown, an artist smoking a cigarette, and on the far right, a bourgeois couple. It is worth noting that Soir Bleu, which was painted in New York four years after Hopper’s final trip to Paris, hints at his mature style characterized by human disconnection and the depiction of the psychological landscape. However, when it was exhibited at the MacDowell Club of New York City in 1915, Hopper received harsh criticism because the movement to develop independent art in the United States called for scenes from New York, not Paris. Having made New York his permanent home after his third visit to Europe, Hopper was consequently prompted to capture the American landscape.

New York

After I took up etching my painting seemed to crystallize. [4]

In 1915, Edward Hopper, who had not given up his dream of becoming an artist even amidst the tedious reality of working as an illustrator for a living, turned to etching―a printmaking technique in which lines are emphasized. Following his purchase of an etching press in 1916, Hopper produced dozens of prints, many of which show scenes of New York. His early etchings use vivid yet rough lines to depict New York’s residential districts, high-rise buildings, and bustling streets, thereby reflecting the explosive population growth and urban development at the time. Moreover, they provide insight into the development of transportation systems such as the elevated trains and railroads. Hopper was often drawn to the lights illuminating the city at night, and empty, dark street corners. As a result, etching served as an important medium for Hopper to study the effects of light and shadow, and paved the way for the subject matter, composition, and expression found in his later paintings. Hopper’s etchings were favorably received, allowing him to gain recognition as an artist.

Edward Hopper moved to New York City in 1908, and spent the rest of his life there until his death in 1967. New York was the American city that Hopper knew best and liked most. For Hopper, the urban landscape of New York and the daily lives of New Yorkers were objects of observation and became the subject matter of much of his art. From 1899 to 1908, he commuted to New York City by train and ferry from Nyack. His experience of traveling from the quiet suburb to the city and witnessing the changing landscape further deepened his lifelong interest in travel and modes of transportation, which can be seen in Ferry Slip (c. 1904-1906) and Tugboat with Black Smokestack (1908).

The scenery of parks located among New York’s skyscrapers was one of Hopper’s favorite materials. He moved to 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village in 1913, and lived there for the rest of his life. He was interested in Washington Square Park, which was visible from his window, and Central Park in the heart of the city. In particular, Hopper left numerous studies of the statue of Shakespeare in Central Park at dusk. He seemed to have projected literary inspiration drawn from the light and shadow cast by the evening sun, and the mysterious ambience created by the darkness.

In the early 20th century, New York was transforming into a metropolis (today’s Greater New York). The formation of skyscrapers, subways and railroads was followed by the widespread distribution of automobiles, and the construction of bridges and highways. However, Hopper was interested in capturing the city’s old, crumbling 19th-century architecture rather than the spectacle of the bustling cityscape. He set himself apart from other painters of his time by depicting Blackwell’s Island in the East River, riverfront apartments, and the expansiveness of long bridges―instead of the vertical skylines of skyscrapers. His unique perspective was likely shaped by his travels between New York and New England, where he witnessed buildings of various styles and eras in the countryside, as well as the railroads that crossed different neighborhoods. Furthermore, the top-down perspective is reminiscent of Hopper’s gaze from the elevated train (also known as ‘El’). 

Hopper focused on observing and depicting the inner psychological landscape of metropolitan life unfolding in social spaces and private spaces. His observational gaze into the interior from the outside captured individuals’ daily lives through the window, a motif Hopper often used to connect inside and outside. Jo Hopper’s note on Study for Nighthawks (1941 or 1942) reads “bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street at the edge of stretch of top of the window.” The illuminated interior space contrasts with the darkness outside the window, thereby creating a sense of disconnection as if time has stopped.

During the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, Americans became enthusiastic about theaters, restaurants, and sporting events. Hopper and Josephine’s shared love for theater meant they frequented Broadway and other venues. He depicts the backs of figures seated facing the stage, or forlorn figures before, during, or after performances.

The unique characteristics of Hopper's realism are evident in his painting and studies set in theaters. In numerous sketches, he studied elements of the city’s theaters, later combining various aspects of each in his paintings. He often portrayed such ornate architectural details as the proscenium arches and orchestra pits of theaters like the Palace and the Sheridan, bringing them together in compositions built from observation and imagination. 

[4] Hopper, as quoted in Suzanne Burrey, “Edward Hopper: The Emptying Spaces,” Arts Digest, April 1, 1955, 10. Kim Conaty, Edward Hopper’s New York, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2022), 19.

From City to Coast

Edward Hopper’s American landscape paintings are not realistic representations of the landscape as it is. Rather, Hopper reimagined the American landscape in his work. In his painting Railroad Sunset (1929), a signal tower stands starkly against green hills and a spectacular sunset next to a railroad track. Hopper added imaginary details to what appears to be a scene glimpsed from a train window. In 1929, the year that he completed this painting, Hopper and his wife traveled from New York to Charleston, South Carolina, as well as to Massachusetts and Maine.[5] The images that he encountered on the road left a lasting impression, and continued to inspire the artist for years to come.

[5] “Edward Hopper, Railroad Sunset, 1929,” Whitney Museum of American Art. https://whitney.org/collection/works/5874, [accessed in October, 2022]. 

New England

Hopper spent several summers in Maine, one of six states in the Northeastern United States that together comprise the region of New England, which was home to the Puritans’ first settlement in America. The artist first explored the New England coastline in 1912, when he traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, and began painting outdoors; afterwards, he returned to other coastal sites in Massachusetts and Maine, as well as the mountains and farms of Vermont and New Hampshire.

In 1914 and 1915, Hopper spent time in Ogunquit[6], Maine, a small fishing village surrounded by three miles of sandy shoreline. Between 1916 and 1919, he made four trips to Monhegan Island[7], Maine, which is surrounded by some of the highest ocean cliffs on the Maine coastline. Carrying oil paints and small panel supports, he walked along the rocky shore and created sketches and improvisational works.[8] Hopper’s works from this period are characterized by particularly dynamic and expressive features such as the stark color contrast between reflected light and shadows, the masses of rocks emphasized through impasto, and the bold compositions created by steep coastal cliffs and the surrounding crashing waves.[9] 

Hopper’s time in New England greatly impacted his personal life. In the summer of 1923 in Gloucester, Maine, he began courting Josephine Verstille Nivison, a former classmate and artist, whom he married in 1924. Under Josephine's influence, Hopper started painting watercolors outdoors, and soon after, she helped him display these works at the Brooklyn Museum. Hopper’s watercolors produced during this period were well-received in the art world, and led to sales, thereby opening up opportunities for him to become a full-time painter. For Hopper, his travels around New England offered him a chance to gain inspiration and try new things through encounters with new environments away from the city.

[6] Repeated visits by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), a celebrated traditional American landscape painter turned Ogunquit into a hub for artists.

[7] Monhegan Island was a favorite destination among many of Hopper’s contemporaries, including Robert Henry, Rockwell Kent, and George Bellows. Hopper said, “Maine is so beautiful and the weather is so fine in the summer - that's why I come here to rest and to paint a little too.” Carol Troyen, Edward Hopper’s Maine (Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art Brunswick, 2011), 17.

[8] Carol Troyen, Edward Hopper’s Maine, 18.

[9] Lenora Mamunes, Edward Hopper Encyclopedia (North Carolina: McFarland & Co, Inc., 2011), 82. 

Cape Cod

In 1925, Edward Hopper and his wife traveled across the United States by train. Two years later, in 1927, they purchased a secondhand car, and then enjoyed traveling to places like the American West and Mexico throughout the rest of their lives. As Lloyd Goodrich, a longtime acquaintance of Hopper and former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York reflected, “this preoccupation with the concept of travel is quite conscious; he has said that his themes often come to him when driving.”[10] The widespread use of automobiles and the expansion of roads at the time facilitated the Hoppers’ travels, which can be seen as a temporary escape from socioeconomic problems such as urbanization and the Great Depression.

Captivated by the charms of New England, Hopper and his wife arrived in Truro on southern Cape Cod in June 1930, and rented a small cottage from A.B. Burleigh Cobb, the village postmaster for the summer. With its long stretches of coastline, fine sand dunes, homes scattered among low hills, rustic farmhouse barns, and wide green nature basking in warm sunlight, the small village of about 500 people was a perfectly serene place for Hopper to get away from the hustle and bustle of New York and focus on his work.[11] After Josephine came into an inheritance, and the couple set up their own home in Truro in 1934, the couple would summer on Cape Cod and return to New York City in early autumn for the rest of their lives.

From the late 1930s, Hopper began infusing his paintings with images from his memory and imagination. His artistic voice continued to mature as he sought subjects that captured the contrast between reality and fantasy, nature and artifice, which could relate to his own experience of traveling between the city and the countryside. 

Hopper’s impressions of the forests near Truro and the houses and beach cottages that dot the landscape gave rise to the paintings Cape Cod Sunset (1934), and Second Story Sunlight (1960). Both works capture the atmospheric conditions of summer days along the coast but focus attention on the dramatic potential of light and the ways that architecture and the environment intersect. 

According to Josephine Hopper, Seven A.M. (1948) depicts a “blind pig,” or illegal drinking establishment located in Nyack. Completed in Cape Cod in 1948, fifteen years after the repeal of Prohibition, Seven A.M. shows the artist’s distinctive realist characteristics created by moving back and forth in time and space. The title itself is worth noting. With a specified time and place, it implies that Hopper paid attention to the movement of the sun and varying degrees of brightness in the space he explored.

[10] Lenora Mamunes, Edward Hopper Encyclopedia (North Carolina: McFarland & Co, Inc., 2011), 31.

[11] Lenora Mamunes, 11-12. 

Josephine Hopper

Josephine Nivison Hopper (1883-1968) enrolled at the New York School of Art in 1905, and studied under Robert Henri. By 1914, she was a promising young artist, presenting her work in group exhibitions with modernist artists such as Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, and Charles Burchfield. Under her influence, Edward Hopper began painting watercolors in 1923, as the two painted outdoors together in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She arranged for Hopper’s watercolors to be included in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. One of his watercolors was selected to be included in the museum’s collection, and received wide critical acclaim.

The couple married in 1924, but often clashed due to differences in personality. Nevertheless, the couple shared passion for literature, cinema, theater, and France, exchanged artistic inspiration, and traveled around the United States, Canada, and Mexico, where they enjoyed painting outdoors together. 

Above all, Josephine was Hopper’s greatest supporter. Unlike her reticent husband, she had an outgoing personality, and thus acted as his publicist promoting his work and interacting with the dealers, collectors, curators, and journalists. She was also Hopper’s long standing muse. Based on her experience of being on the stage with the Washington Square Players in 1910s, she frequently posed for her husband’s paintings, and studies of her posing can be found in many of Hopper’s drawings.

Josephine served as Hopper’s manager, keeping ledger books that documented his works, exhibitions and sales for more than thirty years. After her husband’s death, she donated some 2,500 pieces of Hopper’s artworks and materials to Whitney Museum of American Art. Josephine’s thorough and meticulous records of the details of Hopper’s work, which the taciturn artist often failed to mention, are major historical sources of his life and work.

Hopper’s Life and Career

Drawing from the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Sanborn Hopper Archive, Hopper’s Life and Career details the artist’s life and art. It is largely divided into ‘Journey’, ‘Illustration’, ‘The Hoppers’, ‘Hopper’s View’ and ‘Documentary’.

‘Journey’ focuses on Hopper’s time in Paris. While he later traveled throughout the United States and Mexico, he spent his early years visiting Paris. He made three extended visits between 1906 and 1910 and during his trips abroad, he also visited Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Madrid. This section features photographs from Paris, his annotated map of Europe, as well as letters and a postcard to his mother. His travels allowed him to awaken his gaze, and develop a distinctive style of depicting nature, cities, and everyday scenes with his own unique perspective and composition.

‘Illustration’ presents a selection of Hopper’s advertising illustrations, magazine covers, and magazine illustrations from the two decades (1906-1925) before he achieved success as a painter. As an illustrator, he keenly observed the cityscape of New York and the daily lives of New Yorkers, which then prompted him to capture the present state of America.

‘The Hoppers’ features photographs of the couple, the theater tickets they collected, and four ledger books. The ledgers are the most important records of Hopper’s career. The Hoppers made copious notes and sketches of his ideas. From the time he sold his first work in 1913, Hopper and his wife Jo kept detailed records of sales, loans, and exhibitions of his works. After Hopper completed a work, he would make a small sketch of it in the ledger, and Jo then added lively descriptions of the work, often imagining anecdotal details that Hopper―a man of few words―never discussed himself. Their life and artistic endeavors are chronicled in the documentaries Visual Art in America (1965), produced in their later years, and Hopper: An American Love Story (2022).

Finally, ‘Hopper’s View’ presents the brochure for Early Paintings (1941), an exhibition of Hopper’s Parisian-themed paintings from the early 1900s; a statement that he submitted with other artists to Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions (1953) as a form of resistance to the trend in American art toward abstraction and his interview with John D. Morse conducted in 1959 for the Archives of American Art. In particular, in the interview with John Morse, Hopper read from his best-known writing, Notes on Painting (1933), and his statement published in Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions, both of which can be heard in the Crystal Gallery on the third floor.