Investor's Business Daily, April 20th, 2007
It was the moment of which every artist dreams: his first solo show.
Edward Hopper was ready.
He'd sold his first painting, "Sailing," at the International Exhibition of Modern Art seven years earlier. He'd often exhibited in group shows and was considered an emerging American realist.
But when the 1920 Whitney Studio Club exhibition of 16 of his works ended, Hopper (1882-1967) hadn't sold a single painting.
"He was already 37 and beginning to doubt if he would achieve any success as an artist," wrote Edward Lucie-Smith in "Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists."
While he struggled with the doubt, Hopper had to support himself. He worked as a commercial artist, a job he disliked. He made posters, ads and illustrations for magazines.
But he hadn't given up his dream of painting. He set aside several days a week, as well as summers, to pursue his true passion. That focus would help him win recognition as one of the foremost painters of the 20th century.
He reviewed his work and tried to figure out what he was doing wrong. The unsuccessful Whitney show had comprised mostly oil paintings of Paris from Hopper's earlier trips to Europe.
What really captured his imagination was the America he lived in. It was, he decided, time to turn his attention to it.
The New York City resident again began painting the world around him: the street corners and cramped interiors of urban life.
He was also drawn to American landscapes. During a summer trip to Gloucester, Mass., Hopper painted watercolors of frame houses and fishing boats. Six of the pieces were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1923, earning rave reviews and comparisons to master painter Winslow Homer.
"What vitality and force and directness!" a newspaper critic wrote. "Observe what can be done with the homeliest subject if only one possesses the seeing eye."
The Brooklyn Museum bought "Mansard Roof," a study of an old sea captain's house, for $100. It was Hopper's first sale of a painting in 10 years and his first piece to be purchased by a museum.
Hopper kept focusing on what he did best. His next one-man show came at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery the following year. Unlike the Whitney show, all 11 of his watercolors sold, as well as five undisplayed pieces. Hopper was a sensation.
Free to paint full time, Hopper began stretching his skills and working more in oils. In 1925 he painted "House by Railroad," his first mature piece. In it, a Victorian house stands alone by a railroad track, a comment on the changes technology was forcing in the American landscape. It became part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection in 1930.
"His paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities," Lucie-Smith wrote. "Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past."
The same year of the Rehn Gallery show, Hopper married Josephine Nivison, an old art school friend who'd exhibited with Hopper in the past. Jo came to serve as his promoter, manager and model. "In Jo, he found a soul mate, and for the next 43 years the Hoppers were inseparable," wrote Ita Berkow in "Edward Hopper: A Modern Master."
Edward and Jo lived in New York's Washington Square neighborhood most of their adult lives. For inspiration, Hopper would walk around Greenwich Village at night, looking at lighted interiors. Some of what he saw appeared in paintings such as "Night Windows" and "Room in New York." A moviegoer, he also drew inspiration from the moody film noir movement.
Hopper was born the son of a dry-goods shop owner in the Hudson River town of Nyack, N.Y. He started drawing sketches and self-portraits as a child. He decided he'd pursue art as a career at a young age.
After graduating from high school in 1899, Hopper looked for more training. He enrolled at the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York, traveling by train from Nyack to take classes.
Looking for new challenges, Hopper transferred the next year to the New York School of Art, where he studied under Robert Henri, one of the fathers of American realism. Henri was a proponent of the Ashcan School, a movement featuring painters who rejected the niceties of 19th century art to portray the gritty side of urban life.
To show viewers the changes in the country as Americans moved from rural origins to city life, Hopper often depicted figures in his paintings as aloof and alone. "Chop Suey" depicts glum diners at a Chinese restaurant. His signature painting, "Nighthawks," shows forlorn customers and a counterman at a Greenwich Village diner.
In 1933 his work appeared in the Museum of Modern Art. He was by then considered a top realist. His paintings hung at the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
"No artist has painted a more revealing portrait of 20th century America," wrote biographer Lloyd Goodrich. "But (Hopper) was not merely an objective realist. His art was charged with strong personal emotion, with a deep attachment to our familiar everyday world, in all its ugliness, banality and beauty."
This story originally ran Jan. 15, 2003, on Leaders & Success.
