Edward Hopper, the most remarkable and individual painter in USA, enjoys great fames in American history. Although having undergone many turning points in his long-term painting career, he has still adhered to realism as the method to depict lives.
Hopper once points out, “I always paint for the very purpose of reflecting the most vivid impression in the real world by using the precise method”.
He goes on, “Normally, if one nation’s art can best reflect its people’s qualties, it has reached its most perfect level. ”
Out of respect and intersts to the masses’ privacy, Hopper depicts such subjects as the ordinary citizens sitting in an all-night-open restaurant and leasurely having their meals, self-satisfied tenants reading newspapers in a barely furnishhed apartment, naked beauty gracefully dressed up in the morning, and the tired and bored usherette in the small gaudify cinema.
Only a few paintings are drawn by Hopper each year. Usually, the painting subjects will take him several months to think carefully with new ideas. Afterwards, he starts to draw the painting at a heat.
He leads a simple life in his apartment in the Washington Square, New York with only two painting rooms, one bedroom and one kitchen. He usually immerses himself in his own work-drawing paintings in a hovel with solid white walls. Combating extravagance and pageantry, he wears only tweeds and has light meals, either having meals with his wife in the restaurant near his apartment for a shift or eating some canned food at home. This artist enjoys driving and has driven across the USA from the east to the west for many times.
At the turn of the new century when the American art has freed itself from conservatism and many modern artists such as Rockwell Kent and George Bellows has shot to fame, Hooper refuses to go with the stream and still keeps his painstaking artistic creation with his identity totally hidden. Not until at the age of 43 has he gained a widespread reputation.
Detached from mainstream art of that time, a kind of lonely passion has been immersed into all his works and become his unique style. Detailed and refined depiction in his paintings, such as the Victorian architecture, streets, roadside restaurants, shows in the cinema, and farmhouses in New England, are typical representations of American landscape. All his works are not filled with the hustle and bustle of city life, but oppositely with a sort of silence before the coming of storms, or after great disasters, or watching passerbys behind windows.
In essence, his inspiring unique artistic style belongs to modernism, but not any modern school. At the beginning, he addicts, himself neither to tradition, nor to innovation, but keep insight and adhere at his own artistic direction. At the retrospective show of Hopper’s paintings at Whitney Museum of Art in 1964, Times artistic reviewer John Canard writes an article to speak highly of such a great artist. He says that Hopper is a big man with a similar figure as a university rower at the beginning of this century and rather a distance runner with the skinny but solid muscles on the artistic arena. His pace, sure-footed as a goat, has not slowed down with the march of time. Today, he has already held a safe lead on the artistic course and no one in America can merely Match with him, lagging far behind him, The only one can competes with him is Pablo Picasso in Europe.
