Unfortunately, because of the infamous Covid-19 epidemic, Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, near Basel (Switzerland) is closed until further notice. Otherwise, until May 17, 2020 you would have been able to visit the great Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape exhibition. You can still purchase the catalogue and read my book review (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de).
The Fondation Beyeler exhibition has been organized in cooperation with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the major repository of Edward Hopper’s work; the Whitney has lended 41 works to this show! At Fondation Beyeler you can always admire Edward Hopper’s Cape Ann Granite from 1928, formerly in the prestigious collection of David Rockefeller, because it is on permanent loan to the Swiss museum. This magnificent landscape painting provided the initial impetus for the current exhibition, the first dedicated to Edward Hopper’s extraordinary treatment of landscape, bringing together 37 (often iconic) oil paintings as well as a 16 watercolors, 13 drawings and 1 etching on this theme. The works come mostly from museums and private collections in the United States and Spain.
The front cover of the catalogue shows Edward Hopper’s work Gas from 1940 (cat. p. 91). The famous oil painting on canvas, 66.7 x 102.2 cm, is normally exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1943; in other words, shortly after its creation, this great work of art found its way into one of the world’s great museums).
The earliest of the typical Hopper “images” were painted in the early 1920s, when the artist was already around forty years old. For many years, until around 1925, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) had worked as a commercial illustrator.
In the catalogue forword, Sam Keller and Ulf Küster underline that Edward Hopper is one of the great known unknowns of modern art. Several of his works have attained astonishing popularity and belong to the cultural memory of the twentieth century. Yet, there are facets of his art that are only familiar to a small number of specialists.
According to Keller and Küster, Edward Hopper created a manifestly modern approach to one of art history’s established genres. In contrast to the academic tradition, his landscapes appear limitless; they are—theoretically—infinite and seemingly always show only a small part of an enormous whole. His American landscapes are geometrically clear-cut compositions. Their main components are houses, symbolizing human settlement. Railroads structure the pictures horizontally and stand for the human capacity to traverse the vastness of space. He offers enormous skies and particular lighting moods.
Keller and Küster write that Edward Hopper’s landscape paintings create the impression that they deal with something that cannot be seen, something that takes place outside the picture. His visible landscapes are forever confronted by invisible subjective landscapes that emerge within the viewer. They are marked by melancholy and loneliness. Edward Hopper contributed significantly to establishing the idea of a melancholic America, shaped also by the dark side of progress, as an immense, boundless space—a notion that would become popular particularly through its development in movies ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) to Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990).
For the exhibition Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape, Wim Wenders has realized his own personal homage to Hopper, the 3D short film Two or Three Things I Know about Edward Hopper. The film premiered at the Fondation Beyeler exhibition opening. According to Keller and Küster, it poetically and touchingly demonstrates not only how much cinema owes to Hopper but also how much Hopper himself was influenced in turn by cinema. Unfortunately, the museum is closed and, so far, I haven’t had the chance to see it yet.
In the catalogue, David M. Lubin explores the relation between Hopper and Hitchcock. Other contributions deal with Edward Hopper’s fresh look at landscape, Hopper’s themes, his biography and more. Of course, all exhibited works are depicted in the catalogue.
Throughout his life, Edward Hopper, who took German in school, carried around a piece of paper with a quotation from a August 21, 1774 letter by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the philosopher, economic reformer, merchant and writer Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi:
“See, dear friend, what is the beginning and end of all writing, the reproduction of the world around me, through the inner world in which everything is held, bound up, remade, kneaded, and in peculiar form and manner again set forth; which remains eternally secret, God be thanked, and neither will I reveal it to gapers and chatterers.”
The catalogue contains extracts of Edward Hopper’s October 19, 1939 letter to Charles H. Sawyer, the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, in Andover, Massachusetts. According to Ulf Küster’s catalogue essay, it is probably the most important of all of Edward Hopper’s personal testimonials. To begin, he positions his art between a narrative, “anecdotal” figuration and abstraction as such:
“To me, form, color and design are merely a means to an end, the tools I work with, and they do not interest me greatly for their own sake. I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation. . . . One must say guardedly, human experience, for fear of having it confounded with superficial anecdote. I am always repelled by painting that deals narrowly with harmonies or dissonances of color and design. My aim in painting is always, using nature as the medium, to try to project upon canvas my most intimate reaction to the subject as it appears when I like it most; when the facts are given unity by my interest and prejudices.”
This and much more you can find in the Fondation Beyeler exhibition catalogue.
Edited by Ulf Küster, with contributions by Erika Doss, David M. Lubin, Ulf Küster, Katharina Rüppell: Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape. Hardcover, Fondation Beyeler, Hatje Cantz, 2020, 148 pages and 110 illustrations. Order the book / exhibition catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
This review is based on the exhibition catalogue. For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this review are not put between quotation marks.
Book review added on March 26, 2020 at 14:30 Swiss time.
