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Edward Hopper lived and worked in New York City from 1913 till his death in 1967. Many of his paintings depict the city, but also more generally an essence of American life. Hopper's vision of that life was of isolation and solitude. He loved films, too, and his paintings often have a cinematic quality: like a still image from a film, the viewer knows there is more to the story, before and after this one image.

Many of Hopper's images are familiar. They portray the essence of what we recognise as early twentieth-century America: empty sidewalks; brownstone buildings baking in the summer heat; lonely people in roadside cafes. Many of his paintings are of New York but one that was already old-fashioned when he painted them. There are no skyscrapers. Hopper's characters may be alienated but it's not by the city. It remains human-sized and could just as easily be any American town, not the enormous metropolis of New York.

Through the Window
Hopper often used windows in his paintings. Isolated by the glass, we can view his subjects like characters on a stage. It is difficult to distinguish private space and public space.

In Edward Hopper's best-known work, Nighthawks, painted in 1942, two men and a woman sit at the counter of a brightly lit diner. It is late at night and we wonder why they are there. We are observing them through the large window of the diner, where they are like actors under the spotlights on stage.

In Automat (1927), a woman sits in a café at night staring into a coffee cup. There is an empty chair. Was someone sitting in it? Is she waiting for someone? The title tells us the setting is an "automat": a new type of café in New York where customers effectively bought their food and drinks from a vending machine, with no interaction with a member of staff.

In Sunlight on Brownstones, a couple stands on the front steps of a brownstone building, staring at a park. What is going on between them? They are both looking the same way, has something drawn their attention? Morning Sun (1952) reveals a woman sitting on a bed staring out of a window. She cannot see us. We don't know why she is there or what she is looking at.

The paintings invite us to make up our own story. We can walk those city streets or look in through those windows and set our imagination free.

Edward Hopper's New York
Whitney Museum, New York
Till 5 March 2023

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> Biobox: Edward Hopper

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Edward Hopper lived and worked in New York City from 1913 till his death in 1967. Many of his paintings depict the city, but also more generally an essence of American life. Hopper's vision of that life was of isolation and solitude.

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EO - EE : describing a visual "café days"

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EO - EE : describing a visual "café days"

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En bref

Alors que les avant-gardes puis l'abstraction impriment leur marque sur l'Amérique, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) cultive un réalisme à contre-courant. À partir des années 1930, ce peintre s'est rendu célèbre en exposant des toiles mélancoliques, inspirées par l' American way of life dont il livre une vision désabusée. Son œuvre contient une profondeur symbolique derrière les apparences de la banalité. Artiste prolifique, tant dans le domaine de la peinture que des œuvres graphiques, Hopper a donné vie à un réalisme métaphysique silencieux, à la perfection sourde et instable, à l'image d'un drame hitchcockien.

Il a dit

" Si vous pouviez le dire avec des mots, il n'y aurait aucune raison de le peindre. "

Sa vie

Né en 1882 dans l'État de New York, Hopper grandit dans une famille de commerçants modestes. Rien ne le prédestine à devenir peintre. C'est par le biais de ses études - il envisage une carrière comme illustrateur publicitaire - que la passion le gagne. À la New York School of Art, l'artiste américain développe une esthétique figurative, intimiste, au réalisme presque photographique.

Si Hopper a passé l'essentiel de sa vie à New York, il a cependant quitté cette ville entre 1906 et 1910 pour gagner l'Europe. À Paris, qu'il visite à trois reprises, il découvre la culture française - dont il demeure passionné au point d'en apprendre la langue - et étudie les grands maîtres du réalisme européen, de Rembrandt à Édouard Manet. Pour autant, Hopper ne se considère pas comme un continuateur des courants européens et souhaite au contraire doter l'Amérique d'un art figuratif indépendant, reflétant les caractères propres à cette nation.

Pour vivre, Hopper travaille, comme prévu, dans le domaine publicitaire. Sa vocation d'artiste se précise vers 1913, lorsqu'il loue un atelier dans le quartier de Greenwich Village. Mais l'artiste se fait surtout connaître durant les années 1920, époque à laquelle il se marie. Le couple s'installe à Cap Cod dans les années 1930.

En apparence, l'artiste s'intéresse à des objets mineurs, à des personnages anodins, mais il les dote de sentiments profonds et ambivalents. Ce ne sont pas des Américains triomphants, légers ou insouciants, des architectures modernes et imposantes. Hopper ne peint pas les gratte-ciels de New York, ni l'Ouest sauvage. Il captive ces " riens ", moments de vide et de silence mais lourds d'anxiété, d'attentes ou de désirs.

Le succès vient à Hopper de son vivant. Dès 1933, le Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) lui consacre une rétrospective. Le peintre est invité à représenter son pays lors de la Biennale de Venise en 1952. Couronné d'éloges, il s'éteint en 1967.

Le réalisme figuratif d'Edward Hopper ne s'appuie pas seulement sur l'observation du monde réel. S'y mêle une bonne dose de fiction, à l'image d'un noir polar. Le peintre, en mettant en scène des personnages isolés, des lieux confinés ou abandonnés, exprime ses angoisses intérieures et les incertitudes humaines. En ce sens, tout en représentant les mœurs de la société, il livre aussi un portrait inquiétant d'une Amérique en perdition.

Ses œuvres clés

Nul train ne passe devant cette maison qui semble abandonnée ou endormie, à l'écart de la vie moderne. Pourtant, nous avons le sentiment de contempler un personnage doté d'une âme. Cette impression est renforcée par le jeu des ombres sur l'architecture, qui lui donne un caractère inquiétant et changeant. Cette maison victorienne, démodée pour l'époque, serait tout droit sortie de l'imaginaire d'Hopper et aurait inspiré le cinéaste Alfred Hitchcock pour le film Psychose (1960).

Une femme seule, assise au bord d'un lit dans une chambre d'hôtel impersonnelle, lit les horaires de train. Figure de passage, pourtant immobile, elle est concentrée au point de ne pas se douter de la présence du spectateur. Hopper a cultivé dans son œuvre une observation voyeuriste des personnages. La composition est proche de la photographie. Comme à son habitude, le peintre met en contraste les couleurs chaudes de sa palette avec les sentiments dégagés par ses protagonistes : froids, imperméables, distants.

Toile célèbre - peut-être la plus connue de l'art américain -, cette scène raconte moins une histoire qu'un moment, saisi sur le vif et comme figé dans le temps. Quatre personnages occupent l'espace de ce diner, à la fois clos et ouvert sur la ville, en plein cœur de la nuit. S'ils se touchent ou échangent des regards, ils renvoient pourtant à un sentiment de profonde solitude et lassitude. Autour d'eux, tout est vide. Le peintre observe la scène depuis l'extérieur du restaurant, en retrait. Peinte en grand angle, cette œuvre fait autant penser à la photographie qu'au cinéma.

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Alors que les avant-gardes puis l'abstraction impriment leur marque sur l'Amérique, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) cultive un réalisme à contre-courant. À partir des années 1930, ce peintre s'est rendu célèbre en exposant des toiles mélancoliques, inspirées par l'American way of life dont il livre une vision désabusée.

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Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is Hopper's most famous work and is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art. Within months of its completion, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000, and has remained there ever since.

Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine (Jo), kept a journal in which he would, using a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a precise description of certain technical details. Jo Hopper would then add additional information in which the themes of the painting are, to some degree, illuminated.

A review of the page on which "Nighthawks" is entered shows (in Edward Hopper's handwriting) that the intended name of the work was actually "Night Hawks", and that the painting was completed on January 21, 1942.

Jo's handwritten notes about the painting give considerably more detail, including the interesting possibility that the painting's evocative title may have had its origins as a reference to the beak-shaped nose of the man at the bar:

Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3/4 cross canvas at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right. Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark Phillies 5c cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street at edge of stretch of top of window.

The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist's wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."

Nighthawks was probably Hopper's most ambitious essay in capturing the night-time effects of manmade light. For one thing, the diner's plate-glass windows cause far more light to spill out onto the sidewalk and the brownstones on the far side of the street than is true in any of his other paintings. As well, this interior light comes from more than a single lightbulb, with the result that multiple shadows are cast, and some spots are brighter than others as a consequence of being lit from more than one angle. Across the street, the line of shadow caused by the upper edge of the diner window is clearly visible towards the top of the painting. These windows, and the ones below them as well, are partly lit by an unseen streetlight, which projects its own mix of light and shadow. As a final note, the bright interior light causes some of the surfaces within the diner to be reflective. This is clearest in the case of the right-hand edge of the rear window, which reflects a vertical yellow band of interior wall, but fainter reflections can also be made out, in the counter-top, of three of the diner's occupants. None of these reflections would be visible in daylight.

Hopper's biographer, Gail Levin, speculates that Hopper may have been inspired by Café Terrace at Night by Vincent van Gogh, which was showing at a gallery in New York in January 1942. The similarity in lighting and themes makes this possible; it is certainly very unlikely that Hopper would have failed to see the exhibition, and as Levin notes, the painting had twice been exhibited in the company of Hopper's own works. Beyond this, there is no evidence that Café Terrace at Night exercised an influence on Nighthawks. Although there is no evidence at all (other than the fact that Hopper admired the story), Levin also suggests that he may have been inspired by Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story, The Killers.

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Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is Hopper's most famous work and is one of the most recognizable paintings in American art. Within months of its completion, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3,000, and has remained there ever since.

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10 Classic Norman Rockwell Paintings That Will Remind You Of Simpler Times

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You may not recognize his name, but you’ve probably seen lots of Norman Rockwell’s famous paintings before.Most famous for his magazine covers, including more than 300 beautiful, hand-painted covers for the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell was well-known for his realistic but warmhearted paintings...

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"The problem we all live with" - Rockwell

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"The problem we all live with" - Rockwell

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Here are our top tips for describing a photo or a picture in an exam.

Do:

Look at your picture carefully and take a few moments to think before you start talking.

Talk for all the time you are given. If you have one minute to do the task, use every second.

Practise the useful language below so you can explain which part of the picture you are talking about.

Don't:

Panic if you don't know the words for all the things in the picture. You don't need to know all the words for everything in the picture if you know what to say when you don't know an exact word.

Get distracted and start talking about something else. Focus on the photo or picture.

Panic if your mind goes blank. Take a deep breath, look at the picture and start again.

If you are asked to describe a photo or a picture in the exam, here is some language you can use:

What is in the picture?
In the picture I can see ...
There'The man is ...ing
The people are ...ing
It's raining. s / There are ...
There isn't a ... / There aren't any ... At the top/bottom of the picture ...
In the middle of the picture ...
On the left/right of the picture ...
next to
in front of
behind
near
on top of
under
Say what is happening with the present continuous
It looks like a ...
It might be a ...
He could be ...ing
Maybe it's a ...
Where in the picture?

If something isn't clear

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In some speaking exams you have to talk about photos or pictures. The video and tips below will help you to do really well in this type of speaking exam.

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Who is Andy Warhol - Vidéo - Francetv Éducation