Aside from summers on Cape Cod, Edward Hopper was a lifelong city guy. From his Greenwich Village apartment, he roamed the streets of Manhattan, ducking into theaters and movie houses to sketch their plush interiors, noting shafts of light angled over stoops and walls, studying lonely figures in cafes and gloomy hotel lobbies.
Introverted and taciturn, the painter turned what he observed into strangely haunting images that have lodged deep in the public psyche. Filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock to Wim Wenders have quoted his work, Madonna's 1993 world tour was inspired by his 1941 painting "Girlie Show," and the Brit-pop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark mentioned seven of his pictures in their 2013 single "Night Cafe." And then there's Homer Simpson, bellying up to the counter in a cartoon version of Hopper's "Nighthawks."
"It's not just the world of art that he influenced, it's culture," said Walker Art Center curator Siri Engberg, who oversaw the installation of "Hopper Drawing: A Painter's Process." The show opens Friday at the Walker and runs through June 20.
Along with 22 key paintings, the exhibit includes more than 200 drawings spanning Hopper's 60-year career, from precocious student sketches to self-portraits, Parisian scenes, studies and watercolors for the paintings. Multimedia interludes include a filmed interview with the artist and video enactments of several paintings recently produced for French television. Many of the drawings have not been shown before this exhibit, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Not all of his signature paintings made the trip, however: "Nighthawks" is on loan to another exhibition, and "Girlie Show" is not included.
Early years
The Walker presentation follows a loose, thematic chronology starting with skillful early sketches. Born in Nyack, N.Y., Hopper (1882-1967) took an early interest in the yachts and sailboats built there, turning out bold studies of shipyards and vessels in full sail along with keenly observed still lifes and beautifully modeled nudes. In 1900 he enrolled in the New York Institute of Art and Design, where he trained as an illustrator but fell under the influence of realist painter Robert Henri, who urged students to record not just a scene but also what they felt about it.
Hopper's Parisian moment comes as a surprise in the career of an artist so deeply identified with American motifs. Before 1910 he made three trips to France, filling his sketchbooks with crisp studies of cafe scenes and street characters, clowns, hustlers, boulevardiers. Back in the studio he compiled these types into "Soir Bleu," a memorable surrealist tableau.
Isolation and loneliness are recurrent motifs, whether he's painting the upper stories of buildings glimpsed while riding the elevated train or the claustrophobic interiors that recur throughout his career. Such moods were carefully observed and planned, almost as if he were laying out a film storyboard.