Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (1882-1967), the quintessential realist painter of twentieth-century America, portrayed the commonplace and made the ordinary poetic. (…)
His choices of subject matter – particularly the places he painted – seem to have been somewhat unpredictable, since they were part of his constant battle with the chronic boredom that often stifled his urge to paint. This is what kept Hopper on the move – his search for inspiration, least painfully found in the stimulation of new surroundings as he explained to one critic: “To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you are traveling.”
Maybe it is just this sense of going on that attracts me the most in Edward Hopper’s oeuvre. I can certainly relate to it. In most of his paintings I can feel his unwillingness to stay and become part of the surroundings or of the confined spaces he depicts. A traveler’s mind indeed.
There seem to be constant exhibitions about Edward Hopper around the world. The one organized in Rome by Fondazione Roma Museo, where I was able to admire in real life many of his paintings, ended in June 2010. The exhibition organized by the Fondation Hermitage in Switzerland ended in October 2010 while the one presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York ended in April 2011.
The most important one though seems the retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, from the 10th of October 2012 till the 28th of January 2013. It is the result of a collaboration between Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and France’s Réunion des Musées Nationaux. It presents an impressive selection of paintings, drawings and watercolors and depicts the iconic American painter’s career giving a sense both of his development as an artist and of the complexity of his work. Thanks to a series of coincidences I was asked to voice a radio commercial for the exhibition in Rome in 2010 and recently part of the Italian audio guide for the Grand Palais retrospective.
Did I already mention that I love my work?
A radio ad for the Edward Hopper exhibition at Museo Fondazione Roma
An excerpt from the audio guide for the Grand Paleis retrospective on Edward Hopper
Simonetta Ronconi
P.s.: A unique resource on Edward Hopper can be found here
Featured image credits: upload.wikimedia.org
Attribution: By Ɱ [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons