National Museum of American Art
Washington, D.C.
202-633-8998
Edward Hopper: The Watercolors
October 22, 1999January 3, 2000
The first major exhibition in forty years of the watercolors of
Edward Hopper (18821967) will premiere at the Smithsonian's American
Art Museum on October 22, 1999. The exhibition, co-organized with the Montgomery
Museum of Fine Arts, features fifty-six watercolors made between 1923 and
the mid-1940s, ranging from early scenes of Gloucester and Cape Cod to works
painted on trips to Mexico and Charleston. The watercolors are the body
of work that brought Hopper, then in his forties, his first critical and
financial success. (left: Edward Hopper in Truro, Mass., 1934,
Photograph: Dr. Davenport WEst, Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh)
The product of several years' research by Virginia M. Mecklenburg
(senior curator at the Museum of 
American Art) and Margaret Lynne Ausfeld (curator
at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts), Edward Hopper: The Watercolors
brings together rarely seen masterworks from fifteen private lenders and
eighteen museums. Senators Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah),
both longtime arts advocates, are honorary patrons for the exhibition.
The watercolors present an approach very different from
that of Hopper's oils and their carefully composed urban scenes heavy with
alienation and rigid geometry.
"We are delighted to present these wonderful watercolors
by one of America's most revered artists," said Elizabeth Broun, director
of the Museum of American Art. "These paintings reveal a more spontaneous
Hopper
who was moved by the thematic possibilities of simple houses and expansive
skies."
Born in 1882 in Nyack, N.Y., Hopper first became known
for his etchings. He had painted since his student days at the Chase School,
where he was a classmate of George Bellows, Guy Penn du Bois, and Rockwell
Kent, but his artwork brought him little attention and for a number of years
he made his living as an illustrator, a career he found unsatisfying and
frustrating.
While vacationing in Gloucester, Mass., during the summer
of 1923 he began working in watercolors at 
the suggestion of Jo Nivison, an artist who became
his wife the following year. Away 
from New York and working outdoors in a medium that
demanded quick choices, Hopper was at his freest. He drew from visually
complicated subjects -- lighthouses along the shore, gabled and dormered
Victorian houses -- to create images specific to real locations, a direct
contrast to the invented settings of the etchings and paintings of his urban
artworks.
The
watercolors, composed only by Hopper's choice of vantage point, capture
subtle 
and
ephemeral shifts in the light and air of a particular moment and place.
In them he examines crisp New England landscapes, the dramatic perspectives
and intense sunlight of Mexico, and haunting vestiges of the Civil War in
Charleston. Hopper repeatedly turned to lighthouses and Victorian architecture
as symbols of the past. By setting these subjects adjacent to utility poles,
railroad tracks, or other references to progress, he elicited a dialogue
between past and present and alluded to change as a fundamental characteristic
of American life.
The
watercolors from the summers of 1923 and 1924 catapulted Hopper to fame.
The Brooklyn Museum purchased The Mansard Roof after including it
in their 1923 watercolor show, and all sixteen paintings in a 1924 exhibition
at Frank K. M. Rehn's 
New
York gallery sold. In The Mansard Roof (1923), a sun-washed pile
of a house, fluid forms of foliage and shadows dance to the same breeze
that billows the yellow awnings. "He captured the temperature of the
air, a breath of wind, the rustling of dry grasses-an aura of timelessness
very different from the psychic urgency so often found in his urban scenes,"
said curator Mecklenburg. In Funnel of Trawler (1924) the interplay
of light and shadow combines with unusual cropping to create a sense of
immediacy.
Hopper
visited Cape Cod for the first time in 1930 and he and Jo returned each
summer to paint, building a modest house there in 1934. While the watercolors
produced during the 1930s are less spontaneous, they exhibit a greater sense
of compositional finesse and take on a more modernist edge. Roofs of
the Cobb Barn (1931) emphasizes the clean geometric forms and
white planes of the barn roof.
In his later watercolors Hopper engaged the textured surface
of the paper through drybrushing and relied less on washes. Cottages
at North Truro (1938) illustrates this "toothier" approach.
It also unites two important Hopper themes, vernacular architecture and
railroad references, in a complex and dramatic landscape.
By the
late 1930s his work was becoming more restrained in both style and method.
Hopper had exhausted the Cape Cod area for imagery, and he and Jo began
traveling elsewhere for subject matter. Several of the late watercolors
were painted in Mexico; Monterrey and the Spanish colonial town of Saltillo
provided inspiration for Monterrey Cathedral, Saltillo Mansion, and
Saltillo Rooftops, works from the summer of 1943. 
Edward Hopper's regular forays in watercolor ended with
a trip West and into Mexico in 1946. Asked in 1960 if he gave up watercolor
out of a preference for working slowly, he replied, "I don't think
that's the reason I do fewer watercolors. I think it's because the watercolors
are done from nature and I don't work from nature anymore."
Edward
Hopper: The Watercolors is the final exhibition
before the museum begins an extensive renovation of its historic home, the
Old Patent Office Building. During this three-year renovation, eight major
traveling exhibitions featuring 500 treasures from the permanent collection
(see "Treasures to Go")
will make stops in 70 museums throughout the country. NMAA's
presence in Washington, D.C., will be maintained at its Renwick Gallery,
located on Pennsylvania Ave. across from the White House.
Following its Washington debut, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors
will be shown January 30 through March 26, 2000, at the Montgomery Museum
of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Ala., the final venue for the exhibition.
Edward Hopper paintings from top to bottom: Coast Guard Station,
1927, watercolor, gouache and charcoal, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection, Bequest of Emma A.
Sheafer, 1973; Saltillo Mansion, 1943, watercolor, 21 1/4 x 27 1/8
inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Geaorge A. Hearn Fund, 1945; Folly
Beach, 1929, watercolor, gouache and charcoal, 13 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lesley and Emma Sheafer Collection,
Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, 1973; Portland Head Light, 1927, watercolor
over charcoal, 13.5 x 19.5 inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest
of John T. Spaulding, 1948; Light at Two Lights, 1927, watercolor,
14 x 20 inches, The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama,
The Blount Collection; Roofs at Washington Square, 1926, watercolor
over charcoal, 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh,
Bequest of Mr. and Mrs. James H. Beal, 1993; House with Big Pine,
1935, watercolor, 20.5 x 25.25 inches, New England Collector; Eastern
Point Light, 1923, watercolor, 14 x 20 inches, Private Collection; House
by the Sea, 1923 or 1924, watercolor and graphite, 13 15/16 x 20 inches,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest; Funnel
of Trawler, 1924, watercolor, 13 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches, Kathy and Bruce
Hornsby; The Mansard Roof, 1923, watercolor over pencil, 14 x 20
inches, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum Collection Fund; House on Pamet
River, 1934, watercolor, 21 13/16 x 26 13/16 inches, Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, Purchase.
Web-Site Feature
An Edward Hopper Scrapbook of artwork and archival
ephemera from throughout Hopper's career will be on view starting September
7 at http://www.nmaa.si.edu/hopper.
This electronic scrapbook presents a broad but intimate view of Hopper's
life and work including views of over 50 paintings. Web site visitors will
have the opportunity to browse through letters written by Hopper, his friends,
and his wife, Jo; read original clippings related to his many artistic achievements;
view photographs of Hopper and reproductions of his artwork; and hear audio
clips of him discussing his paintings.
Publications
A fully illustrated book by curators Virginia Mecklenburg
and Margaret Lynne Ausfeld will be published by W.W. Norton, on the occasion
of the exhibition. The 192-page book will be available for purchase in the
museum shop. An Edward Hopper: The Watercolors 2000 wall calendar,
published by Rizzoli, will be available also.
The exhibition is made possible through the generous support
of the Sara Roby Foundation, Thelma and Melvin Lenkin,
Paula and Peter Lunder, Marie and Hugh Halff, Forbes Magazine, and the Smithsonian's
Special Exhibition Program. Partial support for the exhibition catalogue
was provided by Furthermore, the publication program of The J. M. Kaplan
Fund.
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cited in this article please see America's
Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.
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The first major exhibition in forty years of the watercolors of
Edward Hopper (18821967) will premiere at the Smithsonian's American
Art Museum on October 22, 1999. The exhibition, co-organized with the Montgomery
Museum of Fine Arts, features fifty-six watercolors made between 1923 and
the mid-1940s, ranging from early scenes of Gloucester and Cape Cod to works
painted on trips to Mexico and Charleston. The watercolors are the body
of work that brought Hopper, then in his forties, his first critical and
financial success. (left: Edward Hopper in Truro, Mass., 1934,
Photograph: Dr. Davenport WEst, Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh)
