[SEM2] Site Week 4 02/08/2022

“The beginning and the end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, moulded and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner.” – Johann von Goethe

Edward Hopper throws light into their interiors with a penetrating beam as unwavering as moonlight or sunlight, high-keyed and relentless, to reveal people isolated in stark rooms, portraits of aloneness, absorbed in themselves, detached from their world. “To believe your own thoughts, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.” Hopper believes that artist’s goal should be to reveal the truth of everyday and the interior life of ordinary people – and that the artist’s challenge lay in his inherent ability to convey that authenticity of vision. Most oof Hopper’s characters are so immersed in thought that they seem completely unaware of their surroundings. They are posed in dramatic scenes of distraction, absorbed in private thought and sober musing, where Hopper’s graphic drama creates a thrall of spectatorship that makes potent the compelling mystery of their mental state. Hopper’s work shows the art of conveying a profound internalization, dramatized by radical lighting effects and deep shadows. Hopper’s major paintings do not refer to specific places, but are “types” of places – the projections of his imagination, his “interior vision.” He was committed to finding a way to picture modern life that could best express the contemporary issues in which he was interested. He was intent on achieving his ambition to reproduce the “the world that surrounds me by means of the world that’s in me.”

The influence of French artists on Hopper’s work is particularly clear. His use of dramatic cropping, emphatic diagonals and unusual perspective brings to mind the work oof Degas, whose prioritization of the framing of the subject in relationship to its composition was of considerable importance for Hopper. “One reproduces only that which is necessary.” Hopper’s late works gradually empty out oof interior spaces and the elimination of objects and other details that might play a counter role of the main “narrative” of his paintings. Window and mirrors are well-known formal device, like an eye or a lens, used by artists as diverse as Manet and Magritte as a common denominator to denote a threshold, a transition place between two contrasting or opposite states, inside and outside, object and subject, a signifier of consciousness offering either a literal reflection or metaphorical self-portrait. Hopper’s paintings do not report an actual event in the world but rather stage a re-imagined event in narrative pictorial terms. We are face to face with a painting that is presenting a staged drama, pulsating with emotional energy held in check – at the same time as intensified – by the physical composition. A painting by Hopper presents a world over which over which the artist has almost total control, preconceived and ordered to create the illusion of reality. Hopper’s desire was to each a kind of plausibility, offering the minimum amount of information necessary to suggest to us that the scene in front of us is the kind of thing that could actually happen.