Edward Hopper, American Artist

Do I need a reason to post paintings by Edward Hopper or a song that would have been called a torch song back in the day, as they now say.

EDWARD HOPPER ON SLATE

SLATE has an incredibly good piece on Edward Hopper this morning. It includes a ten painting slide show and great information about the painter at each location. I would like to show it all but I can't, but you can see it all if you go to: http://www.slate.com/id/2165773/fr/rss/



It was Hopper's best-known work, Nighthawks—which he began painting a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the blackouts that followed—that made that image a trademark. Hopper was a huge fan of Hemingway's story "The Killers," a violent tale built around terse dialogue in a diner, and a similar air of menace hangs over Hopper's indelible film-noir scenario. Hopper's wife, Jo, a fellow artist he met in 1923, modeled for the hard-faced woman, as she did for nearly all Hopper's female subjects. Her fingers almost touch the beak-nosed "hawk" on her right. Hopper was a supreme poet of anticipation. "The street was too empty," Rilke's Malte wrote; "its emptiness was bored." We don't know what's going to happen in Hopper's empty street, but it's easy to imagine the coiled action hurtling around the corner into the surrounding darkness. Around the time he painted Nighthawks, Hopper copied out a passage from French poet and critic Paul Valéry about the challenge of making "expectation, doubt, and concentration … visible things."

From the book: THE POETRY OF SOLITUDE-A TRIBUTE TO EDWARD HOPPER.

Poems gathered from noted poets inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Sidney Wade
GAS-after Edward Hopper

The lonely man
performs some necessary ritual
behind a pump. We cannot tell
exactly what it is he does because
the angle is so odd. A rack of cans

of oil between
two pumps on the island stands, as they always
do, conveniently available
in easy reach of any needy
motorist. The light is low, and the trees,

massed heavily
behind the man and his pumps, march darkly
off to the right. A modest shock
of roadside weeds attends the greenery
as it condenses. On the periphery,

out of our ken,
shines a source of artificial light. We
are meant to feel the clutch of the
evening. It is not benevolent.
The artist has invested his talent.

in loneliness.
The values and the crusty inflections
of his particular diction
demonstrate devotion to the modest
fears of the soul in the longest moments

of late after-
noon. A sign hangs white above the station.
Mobilgas and Pegasus. A
flag of sorts, a standard, here, to more
than gas. The language, though hard, is clear.