Hollow City: Edward Hopper’s portraits of urban alienation
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
On one hand, his paint handling is terrible. He spreads paint on the canvas like icing sugar on a cake. All the nuance of application I teach he happily ignores… no scumbling, glazing, tonking etc. The way he paints figures is also terrible. They look stiff and unnatural, like they have been stuffed.
On the other hand, he is a genuine poet. But His visual poetry owes nothing to European traditions. It comes from the cinema and from photography, a true American creation. A classic.
The outcome is an artist who is easy to like but hard to learn from. He succeeds on his own unique terms and by a narrow margin. I sigh when one of my students discovers him. I have to find a way to say that hopper could pull it off, but almost certainly you can’t.
Not scumbling or tonking, though.
> hopper could pull it off, but almost certainly you can’t.
I reminds me of what my piano teacher said when I pointed out to her the extremely eccentric postures that some great pianists had, or have.
Google arts and culture images give some idea as to the differences I am talking about. Below are two links, one to a Rubens painting one to Hoppers. Use the zoom function to show their incredible detail. A godsend for teaching.
Rubens was perhaps the most skilled painter to have ever lived, but has frequently been critiqued for his lack of content.
Hopper treated colors ‘locally’. This means that a red thing would be painted with red paint, and a blue thing with blue paint. Like a child with a coloring book. I show students how to moderate hue, saturation, lightness amusing a range of pigments.
If you have time, check out the difference between the two.
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-wrath-of-achille...
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/nighthawks-edward-ho...
I see what you are saying about the merit of distillation. However, Of Rubens, I would say that he has an increadable economy to his brushwork. He suggests with a few marks, what other painters would painfully describe in longhand.
where I actually went (I think this is it). It's small enough to see in a couple of hours.
There are artists who don't even know what's good technique or what's bad; they just create. I'm not saying this is better or worse, but it's always interesting.
Picasso’s other strength was his refusal to be absorbed by the ever present academy/salon. They acted as a club, keeping a tight hold on what was and was not considered proper. Picasso could have easily become a part of this, but had the balls to walk away when he was (I think) no more than 16. He went his own way, jointing a studio in Barcelona.
Adding to this was that by the time he was in his early 20s, he had nearly died from illness, and lost a close freind to suicide. This gave his work an emotional back bone it had lacked before. In a sense, it made him.
His most creative move was to take an interest in African masks. Reconciling African sculpture with European painting was impossible. But as every tome on creativity will tell you, new things come from cross breeding old things, all the better if they can’t be interbred.
But whatever Picasso did, he never stopped being a classicist, which is what he had learned when he was a child.
Twombly… I like but with reservation. He died only recently, and has therefore only recently become ‘art history’. He had his thing, and many people liked his thing and would pay good money for it. However, he had none of the scope of some of his peers (eg jasper johns). Certainly, he is far more difficult to use in a classroom unless you are talking about his work. In other words, he is the perfect example of himself (if that makes sence).
>never stopped being a classicist
I'm totally lost on this bit, please elaborate
I like painting. I didn't know what scumbling or tonking were, I just read about them. But I do those things anyway as it turns out, and I'm just an amateur messing about so they can't be that hard to discover. For all I know, Hopper knew those techniques and chose not to use them to achieve the artist style he wants to convey.
https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/painting-ap...
Novice students don’t understand how subtle paint application can be. For them, it is a binary: on the canvas or not on the canvas. In reality, it can take a multitude of forms. It is this that can give a painting depth and impact. Most importantly, it works against the inherent flatness of the canvas surface, giving us something that can be looked into as well as looked at.
Username greatly appreciated.
Cohen can't sing worth a damn, and the melodies are tonally simplistic, bordering on trivial and repetitive. But that doesn't matter because they're merely scaffolding for the real gold: the words. Plus his gravelly voice has a haunting aspect that he uses to great effect.
To this day one of my favorite songs ever is "Waiting for the Miracle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXvG0SMP7tw
I've enjoyed some of your other comments on art. Are there any books that you would recommend to someone who enjoys art but knows little about art history (or art in general)?
Frankly... sorting the wheat from the cruft is a major task as there has been so much written on the subject. I would recommend that art be separately considered with respect to it's history (time/place), aesthetics (it's formal parameters) and process (how it was made).
On the subject of art history, I would recommend any art history book that places art in standard sequential order (i.e. 'canon'). Even a child's primer on the subject would be sufficient. A lot can be learned about art by simply placing it in sequential order. Only then can you see that art grew in response to the time/place of its manufacture. If you need a recommendation, then you could do no worse than 'The Art Book' (Phaidon).
More specifically, art produced pre- and post- 1900 needs different treatment as they are different things.
- For art produced pre 1900, the classic tome is 'The Story of Art' by Ernst Gombrich. He may be a bit sneered at nowadays, but he knew his stuff.
- For art produced post 1900 'The Shock of the New' by Robert Hughes is a great primer. Also 'Ways of Seeing' by John Berger is aimed at students and presents high-brow ideas in a very digestible manner.
On the subject of aesthetics, I would recommend 'Toward a Psychology of Art' by Rudolph Arnheim. He may now be considered rather old fashioned but he is one of the few thinkers on art who effectively addressed its formal attributes. He also drew, which is a plus. In the same vein there is Ruskin (Modern Painters) who really understood how an artist thinks, and was no slouch as an artist (draftsman) himself.
On color in art I would recommend Bruse MacEvoy's Handprint website. On the topic of color, he has forgotten more than most people would ever know. In my opinion, he is superior to Goethe and Johannes Itten (both art school favorites but both highly questionable). He does not always organize his thinking as well as might be hoped, but that is the nature of color: pan-dimensional and perverse. Also 'Color space and its divisions' Kuehni, R. G. (2001).
The making of art is a process, yet we only see the finished thing. This is our loss as there is much to be learned by studying this process. On the creative process much has been much written, some of it very high-brow. However, the book I would most highly recommend is rather coffee table: 'Daily Rituals: How Artists Work' by Currey, M. (2013). Nothing gives deeper insight into the mind of a creator than how they timetable their productive life.
Finally, I would recommend that art be experienced 'in situ', in front of the actual artwork. I was speaking to a student a few days ago who claimed to have seen the work of Rothko. Of course they had not, they had only seen photos of it. Nuf said.
Hopper's figures are surrounded by space, like mis-sized players in an oversized 3D game map. And they stare away into the distance. Lowry depicts what some would call "urban alienation" - grim northern factories - but they're packed together, with intimacy, proximity and movement.