Edward Hopper   
Edward Hopper's paintings invite us to look into houses, automats, theaters, and restaurants, where solitary figures often dwell, unaware of our presence.

Hello, I'm Daphne Maxwell Reid, and you're listening to Art on the Air.

American artist Edward Hopper studied with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art in the early 1900s. Though Hopper was trained as a commercial illustrator, he started painting full-time at the age of 41. For fifty years, he worked largely from his New York City studio, though he spent his summers on Cape Cod.

Hopper is known for his Realist urban scenes--an apartment house at dusk, a diner in the wee hours of the morning. But he also painted scenes of lonely ocean cottages. We sometimes spot a single figure inside, or maybe two, silhouetted against the light.

Often constructed like stage sets, his paintings have a mystery about them-dark, slightly oblique views; light that illuminates windows, countertops, or characters, revealing them but telling little.

His paintings sometimes pose dilemmas for me, between looking and intruding, glancing and staring. Some people find his works sad, other see them as incredibly detached.

Hopper refrained from offering interpretations: " the most important element in a picture cannot be explained, " he once said. He was evidently a man of profound silences, like his haunted pictures, and he proclaimed "if you could say it in words, there'd be no reason to paint." 


(c) Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2006