Window into artist’s method

Known for depictions of solitary figures in urban landscapes with sometimes-melancholy overtones, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) serves as a marvelous example of the heights once to be scaled within American representational and realist art. Those possibilities changed after the Armory Show of 1913, when the European vision took hold in popular culture.

The realist tradition traces back throughout American history and Hopper can be seen as the direct inheritor of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), possibly the greatest American artist in the genre. Hopper was trained under another realist master, Robert Henri, whose early days were in the Philadelphia art scene with Eakins. The glamour of the urban grit and the stern realism demanded by the Eakins passion for verisimilitude combine easily into Hopper’s oil masterpieces, such as Night Hawks.

Now, another Hopper genre has been pulled from the wonderfully rich attic of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

From about 1915 to 1925, Hopper worked at the art of etching and devoted himself to exploring its possibilities. It was as a printmaker that Hopper first achieved artistic success, and the core of that work is 26 published pieces – all owned by the museum – many of them in a number of "states" or versions tried out by the artist.

"At the Window: Etchings by Edward Hopper" looks at this output from the standpoint of one of his recurring images: a solitary figure at a window. The show in the Stieglitz Gallery runs through July 31.

Many of the etchings are presented in several versions, as Hopper worked and manipulated until he got just the right effect. One etching is shown in eight different states, while several others are in the first state. The subject matter is typical of Hopper and includes locomotives, catboats (he built and sailed these on the Hudson River), houses and the Maine coastline. In several, he enriched the tones and lines of the etchings with black crayon and white chalk. He even used the white from the paper itself to provide contrast. The Night Wind, an image of a nude woman on hands and knees on a bed beside an open window, illustrates his power. One can literally feel the breeze on skin and can immediately sense a universal emotional response. In great art, it has been called "a tactile quality."

Hopper, from Nyack, N.Y., entered the world of commercial illustration in the city while studying at the New York School of Art with Henri, William Chase Merritt and Kenneth Hayes Miller. A list of his classmates who are also known as representational artists included George Bellows, Rockwell Kent and Walter Tittle. Hopper’s was a profitable career providing illustrations to Scribner’s, Adventure and a number of other popular periodicals. He taught himself printmaking, and the etchings were a way to escape the workaday world of the illustrator.

From 1906 on, Hopper made several trips to Europe and was exposed to the art circles of Ondon, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid and Brussels. In this regard, he was like most, if not all, American artists – they longed to visit Europe and particularly Paris. And yet, very much like Eakins’ experience, not much of the "modernist" sensibility of European painting rubbed off on Hopper. He noted, "Whom did I meet? Nobody. I’d heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don’t remember having heard of Picasso at all. I used to go to the cafés at night and sit and watch. I went to the theater a little. Paris had no great or immediate impact on me."

In fact, the art that impressed Hopper the most was Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Later, he also would spend time during the summers at two of the most famous art colonies in the United States: Gloucester, Mass., and Monhegan Island in Maine. Hopper’s first exhibition was of etchings at the Chicago Society of Etchers and at the MacDowell Club in New York, in 1918.

Meanwhile, the illustrator was successful enough to buy a home in 1913 on Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, where he lived and worked until his death in 1967. At the time of Hopper’s death, the American art world was caught up in abstract expressionism, an art movement that left his work isolated and of which many aspects he disapproved.

Not until many years after his death did Hopper earn recognition for his importance as an artist and his place in the ongoing and vital American realist tradition.

At the Window: Etchings by Edward Hopper
through July 31
Alfred Stieglitz Gallery
Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway
215-684-7500
www.philamuseum.org
Adults, $10; seniors (62+), $7; students with valid ID, $7; ages 13-18, $7; 12 and under, free; Sundays, pay what you wish