Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look on Landscape - by Ulf Küster (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A fresh look at Hopper's iconic vision of the American landscape--its gas stations, diners and highways

Edward Hopper's world-famous, instantly recognizable paintings articulate an idiosyncratic view of modern life, unfolding in a world of lonely lighthouses, gas stations, movie theaters, bars and hotel rooms. With his impressive subjects, independent pictorial vocabulary and virtuoso play of colors, Hopper's work continues to this day to color our memory and imaginary of the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

Hopper began his career as an illustrator and became famous around the globe for his oil paintings. These paintings testify to the artist's great interest in the effects of color and his mastery in depicting light and shadow, at work whether the artist was painting alienated figures in dreamlike interiors or desolate American landscapes.

Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look on Landscape is published to accompany a major exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler of Hopper's iconic images of the vast American landscape. The catalog gathers together paintings, watercolors and drawings made by the artist between the 1910s and the 1960s, and supplements them with essays by Erika Doss, David Lubin and Katharina Rüppell, focused on the subject of depicting the landscape.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was the master of American Realism. His paintings captured the mood and atmosphere of his era. His style of painting and subject matter became the stylistic foundation for a distinct type of American modernism. A source of inspiration for countless painters, photographers and filmmakers, Hopper's body of work continues to be influential to this day.

Review Quotes

A fresh look at Hopper's iconic vision of the American landscape - its gas stations, diners and highways. Edward Hopper's world-famous, instantly recognizable paintings articulate an idiosyncratic view of modern life, unfolding in a world of lonely lighthouses, gas stations, movie theaters, bars and hotel rooms. With his impressive subjects, independent pictorial vocabulary and virtuoso play of colors, Hopper's work continues to this day to color our memory and imaginary of the United States in the first half of the Twentieth Century.-- "Antiques and The Arts Weekly"

Hopper rejected the formulas and rules that governed landscape painting before his time. While the Hudson River School and its European predecessors saw land as a well-composed, static entity, Hopper's landscapes suggest that not everything has been neatly captured in view. "Landscape is an image of nature that doesn't change, but nature is changing," the exhibition's curator Ulf Küster recently said, mentioning the Australian bushfires and the threat of climate change. "Hopper makes changing nature visible. He shows landscape as part of something bigger, something that is perhaps beyond our control."--Lauren Ford "Art and Object"

The visual bard of American solitude--not loneliness, a maudlin projection--speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance. [...] I haven't seen "Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape," a large show at the lately reopened Beyeler Foundation... I take its fine catalogue, edited by the exhibition's curator, Ulf Küster, as occasion enough for reflecting anew on the artist's stubborn force.--Peter Schjeldahl "New Yorker"

Casting a caustic eye on modernity and a watchful one upon nature, Hopper ranks among the most haunting of the last Romantics.--David Anfam "Art Newspaper"

Edward Hopper's world-famous, instantly recognizable paintings articulate an idiosyncratic view of modern life, unfolding in a world of lonely lighthouses, gas stations, movie theaters, bars and hotel rooms.--Editors "ARTFIXdaily"