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More Featured Artists : Kiki Smith | Edward Hopper | Edward Kienholz | Tim Hawkinson | Louise Nevelson | David Wojnarowicz |
Edward Hopper The career of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is interwoven with the history of the Whitney Museum, beginning with its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Hopper's work. In 1920, Hopper had his first one-artist show at the Whitney Studio Club, the precursor to the Whitney Museum. Throughout his life, he exhibited in numerous Annuals and Biennials and he was given important retrospective exhibitions in 1950, 1964, and 1980. This close relationship between the artist and the Whitney prompted Hopper's widow, Josephine, to bequeath his entire artistic estate to the Museum in 1970. Consisting of more than 2,500 oils, watercolors, drawings, and prints dating from Hopper's student days to his later years, as well as his illustrated journals, it is the largest single gift of art work in the history of the Museum. Hopper's paintings of empty streets, storefronts, and solitary figures in urban settings evoke a sense of such profound loneliness and alienation that they seem to transcend their particular time and place. Iconic in their stillness and psychological force—achieved as much through composition and palette as through outright theme or subject—paintings such as Early Sunday Morning (1930), Seven A.M. (1948), and A Woman in the Sun (1961) have made Hopper one of America's most beloved artists. These cornerstones of the Whitney Museum's Hopper collection, as well as the numerous early paintings, loosely painted watercolors, and revealing charcoal and pencil studies, have made the Whitney a crucial center for the study and exhibition of this important American artist's life and work. The works shown here represent a tiny fraction of the Whitney's Edward Hopper holdings, but nonetheless provide a glimpse of his entire career. (A definitive catalogue raisonné by Gail Levin was published in 1995.) The number before the decimal in the accession number indicates the year in which the work entered the Whitney's Permanent Collection. Works left untitled by the artist were given descriptive titles (in parentheses) by the Museum. Visit www.amico.org, the public website of the Art Museum Image Consortium, to browse through additional Hopper images and thousands of art works from twenty-seven member art institutions from across North America and Europe. Return to AMICO in June 1999 to view the Whitney's initial contribution to this pioneering digital library: five hundred thumbnails of oil paintings, prints, and works on paper by Edward Hopper. | AMICO |
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