Aziz Art Sep 2019

Aziz Art
Sep 2019
Edward Hopper
Nadim Karam

1-Edward Hopper
20-Nadim Karam
Director: Aziz Anzabi
Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi
Translator : Asra Yaghoubi
Research: Zohreh Nazari
Iranian art department:
Mohadese Yaghoubi
http://www.aziz-anzabi.com

Edward Hopper
July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967
was an American realist painter
and printmaker. While he is best
known for his oil paintings, he was
equally proficient as a
watercolorist and printmaker in
etching. Both in his urban and
rural scenes, his spare and finely
calculated renderings reflected his
personal vision of modern
American life.
Early life
Hopper was born in 1882 in
Upper Nyack, New York, a yachtbuilding
center on the Hudson
River north of New York City.He
was one of two children of a
comfortably well-to-do family. His
parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry,
were Elizabeth Griffiths Smith and
Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods
merchant.Although not so
successful as his forebears, Garrett
provided well for his two children
with considerable help from his
wife's inheritance. He retired at
age forty-nine.Edward and his
only sister Marion attended both
private and public schools. They
were raised in a strict Baptist
home.His father had a mild nature,
and the household was dominated
by women: Hopper's mother,
grandmother, sister, and maid.
His birthplace and boyhood home
was listed on the National Register
of Historic Places in 2000. It is now
operated as the Edward Hopper
House Art Center.It serves as a
nonprofit community cultural
center featuring exhibitions,
workshops, lectures, performances,
and special events.
Hopper was a good student in
grade school and showed talent in
drawing at age five. He readily
absorbed his father's intellectual
tendencies and love of French and
Russian cultures. He also
demonstrated his mother's artistic
heritage. Hopper's parents
encouraged his art and kept him
amply supplied with materials,
instructional magazines, and
illustrated books. By his teens, he
was working in pen-and-ink,
charcoal, watercolor, and oil—
drawing from nature as well as
making political cartoons. In 1895,
he created his first signed oil
painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove. It
shows his early interest in nautical
subjects
1

In his early self-portraits, Hopper
tended to represent himself as
skinny, ungraceful, and homely.
Though a tall and quiet teenager,
his prankish sense of humor found
outlet in his art, sometimes in
depictions of immigrants or of
women dominating men in comic
situations. Later in life, he mostly
depicted women as the figures in
his paintings.In high school, he
dreamed of being a naval architect,
but after graduation he declared
his intention to follow an art
career. Hopper's parents insisted
that he study commercial art to
have a reliable means of income.
In developing his self-image and
individualistic philosophy of life,
Hopper was influenced by the
writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He later said, "I admire him
greatly...I read him over and over
again."
Hopper began art studies with a
correspondence course in 1899.
Soon he transferred to the New
York School of Art and Design, the
forerunner of Parsons The New
School for Design. There he studied
for six years, with teachers
including William Merritt Chase,
who instructed him in oil
painting.Early on, Hopper modeled
his style after Chase and French
Impressionist masters Édouard
Manet and Edgar Degas.Sketching
from live models proved a
challenge and a shock for the
conservatively raised Hopper.
Another of his teachers, artist
Robert Henri, taught life class.
Henri encouraged his students to
use their art to "make a stir in the
world". He also advised his
students, "It isn't the subject that
counts but what you feel about it"
and "Forget about art and paint
pictures of what interests you in
life."In this manner, Henri
influenced Hopper, as well as future
artists George Bellows and
Rockwell Kent. He encouraged
them to imbue a modern spirit in
their work. Some artists in Henri's
circle, including John Sloan, became
members of "The Eight", also
known as the Ashcan School of
American Art.Hopper's first existing
oil painting to hint at his use of
interiors as a theme was Solitary
Figure in a Theater (c.1904).During
his student years, he also painted
dozens of nudes, still life studies,
landscapes, and portraits, including
his self-portraits.

In 1905, Hopper landed a parttime
job with an advertising
agency, where he created cover
designs for trademagazines.
Hopper came to detest illustration.
He was bound to it by economic
necessity until the mid-1920s.
He temporarily escaped by making
three trips to Europe, each
centered in Paris, ostensibly to
study the art scene there. In fact,
however, he studied alone and
seemed mostly unaffected by the
new currents in art. Later he said
that he "didn't remember having
heard of Picasso at all."He was
highly impressed by Rembrandt,
particularly his Night Watch, which
he said was "the most wonderful
thing of his I have seen; it's past
belief in its reality."
Hopper began painting urban and
architectural scenes in a dark
palette. Then he shifted to the
lighter palette of the
Impressionists before returning to
the darker palette with which he
was comfortable. Hopper later
said, "I got over that and later
things done in Paris were more the
kind of things I do now."Hopper
spent much of his time drawing
street and café scenes, and going
to the theater and opera. Unlike
many of his contemporaries who
imitated the abstract cubist
experiments, Hopper was attracted
to realist art. Later, he admitted to
no European influences other than
French engraver Charles Méryon,
whose moody Paris scenes Hopper
imitated.
Years of struggle
After returning from his last
European trip, Hopper rented a
studio in New York City, where he
struggled to define his own style.
Reluctantly, he returned to
illustration to support himself.
Being a freelancer, Hopper was
forced to solicit for projects, and
had to knock on the doors of
magazine and agency offices to find
business.His painting languished:
"it's hard for me to decide what I
want to paint. I go for months
without finding it sometimes. It
comes slowly."His fellow illustrator
Walter Tittle described Hopper's
depressed emotional state in
sharper terms, seeing his friend
"suffering...from long periods of
unconquerable inertia, sitting for
days at a time before his easel in
helpless unhappiness, unable to
raise a hand to break the spell."

In 1912, Hopper traveled to
Gloucester, Massachusetts, to
seek some inspiration and made
his first outdoor paintings in
America.He painted Squam Light,
the first of many lighthouse
paintings to come.
In 1913, at the Armory Show,
Hopper earned $250 when he
sold his first painting, Sailing
(1911), which he had painted
over an earlier self-portrait.
Hopper was thirty-one, and
although he hoped his first sale
would lead to others in short
order, his career would not catch
on for many more years.He
continued to participate in group
exhibitions at smaller venues,
such as the MacDowell Club of
New York.Shortly after his father's
death that same year, Hopper
moved to the 3 Washington
Square North apartment in the
Greenwich Village section of
Manhattan, where he would live
for the rest of his life.
The following year he received a
commission to create some movie
posters and handle publicity for a
movie company.Although he did
not like the illustration work,
Hopper was a lifelong devotee of
the cinema and the theatre, both of
which he treated as subjects for his
paintings. Each form influenced his
compositional methods.
At an impasse over his oil paintings,
in 1915 Hopper turned to etching.
By 1923 he had produced most of
his approximately 70 works in this
medium, many of urban scenes of
both Paris and New York.He also
produced some posters for the war
effort, as well as continuing with
occasional commercial
projects.When he could, Hopper
did some outdoor watercolors on
visits to New England, especially at
the art colonies at Ogunquit, and
Monhegan Island.
During the early 1920s his etchings
began to receive public recognition.
They expressed some of his later
themes, as in Night on the El Train
(couples in silence), Evening Wind
(solitary female), and The Catboat
(simple nautical scene).
Two notable oil paintings of this
time were New York Interior (1921)
and New York Restaurant (1922).He
also painted two of his many
"window" paintings to come: Girl at
Sewing Machine and Moonlight
Interior

oth of which show a figure
(clothed or nude) near a window
of an apartment viewed as gazing
out or from the point of view from
the outside looking in.
Although these were frustrating
years, Hopper gained some
recognition. In 1918, Hopper was
awarded the U.S. Shipping Board
Prize for his war poster, "Smash the
Hun." He participated in three
exhibitions: in 1917 with the
Society of Independent Artists, in
January 1920 (a one-man
exhibition at the Whitney Studio
Club, which was the precursor to
the Whitney Museum), and in
1922 (again with the Whitney
Studio Club). In 1923, Hopper
received two awards for his
etchings: the Logan Prize from the
Chicago Society of Etchers, and the
W. A. Bryan Prize.
Marriage and breakthrough
By 1923, Hopper's slow climb
finally produced a breakthrough.
He re-encountered Josephine
Nivison, an artist and former
student of Robert Henri, during a
summer painting trip in
Gloucester, Massachusetts. They
were opposites: she was short,
open, gregarious, sociable, and
liberal, while he was tall, secretive,
shy, quiet, introspective, and
conservative.They married a year
later. She remarked: "Sometimes
talking to Eddie is just like dropping
a stone in a well, except that it
doesn't thump when it hits
bottom."She subordinated her
career to his and shared his
reclusive life style. The rest of their
lives revolved around their spare
walk-up apartment in the city and
their summers in South Truro on
Cape Cod. She managed his career
and his interviews, was his primary
model, and was his life companion.
With Nivison's help, six of Hopper's
Gloucester watercolors were
admitted to an exhibit at the
Brooklyn Museum in 1923. One of
them, The Mansard Roof, was
purchased by the museum for its
permanent collection for the sum
of $100. The critics generally raved
about his work; one stated, "What
vitality, force and directness!
Observe what can be done with the
homeliest subject."Hopper sold all
his watercolors at a one-man show
the following year and finally
decided to put illustration behind
him.

The artist had demonstrated his
ability to transfer his attraction to
Parisian architecture to American
urban and rural architecture.
According to Boston Museum of
Fine Arts curator Carol Troyen,
"Hopper really liked the way these
houses, with their turrets and
towers and porches and mansard
roofs and ornament cast
wonderful shadows. He always
said that his favorite thing was
painting sunlight on the side of a
house."
At forty-one, Hopper received
further recognition for his work.
He continued to harbor bitterness
about his career, later turning
down appearances and
awards.With his financial stability
secured by steady sales, Hopper
would live a simple, stable life and
continue creating art in his
personal style for four more
decades.
His Two on the Aisle (1927) sold
for a personal record $1,500,
enabling Hopper to purchase an
automobile, which he used to
make field trips to remote areas of
New England. In 1929, he produced
Chop Suey and Railroad Sunset. The
following year, art patron Stephen
Clark donated House by the
Railroad (1925) to the Museum of
Modern Art, the first oil painting
that it acquired for its
collection.Hopper painted his last
self-portrait in oil around 1930.
Although Josephine posed for many
of his paintings, she sat for only one
formal oil portrait by her husband,
Jo Painting (1936).
Hopper fared better than many
other artists during the Great
Depression. His stature took a
sharp rise in 1931 when major
museums, including the Whitney
Museum of American Art and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, paid
thousands of dollars for his works.
He sold 30 paintings that year,
including 13 watercolors.The
following year he participated in
the first Whitney Annual, and he
continued to exhibit in every
annual at the museum for the rest
of his life.In 1933, the Museum of
Modern Art gave Hopper his first
large-scale retrospective.
In 1930, the Hoppers rented a
cottage in South Truro, on Cape
Cod.

They returned every summer for
the rest of their lives, building a
summer house there in 1934.
From there, they would take
driving
trips into other areas when
Hopper needed to search for
fresh material to paint. In the
summers of 1937 and 1938, the
couple spent extended sojourns
on Wagon Wheels Farm in South
Royalton, Vermont, where Hopper
painted a series of watercolors
along the White River.
however, he suffered a period of
relative inactivity. He admitted: "I
wish I could paint more. I get sick of
reading and going to the
movies."During the next two
decades, his health faltered, and he
had several prostate surgeries and
other medical problems.But, in the
1950s and early 1960s, he created
several more major works,
including First Row Orchestra
(1951); as well as Morning Sun and
Hotel by a Railroad, both in 1952;
and Intermission in 1963.
These scenes are atypical among
Hopper's mature works, as most
are "pure" landscapes, devoid of
architecture or human figures.
First Branch of the White River
(1938), now in the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, is the most
well-known of Hopper's Vermont
landscapes.
Hopper was very productive
through the 1930s and early
1940s, producing among many
important works New York Movie
(1939), Girlie Show (1941),
Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby
(1943), and Morning in a City
(1944). During the late 1940s,
Death
Hopper died in his studio near
Washington Square in New York
City on May 15, 1967. He was
buried two days later in the family's
grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in
Nyack, New York, his place of birth.
His wife died ten months later.
His wife bequeathed their joint
collection of more than three
thousand works to the Whitney
Museum of American Art.Other
significant paintings by Hopper are
held by the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, The Des Moines Art
Center, and the Art Institute of
Chicago.

Personality and vision
Always reluctant to discuss
himself and his art, Hopper
simply said, "The whole answer is
there
on the canvas."Hopper was stoic
and fatalistic—a quiet introverted
man with a gentle sense of humor
and a frank manner. Hopper was
someone drawn to an emblematic,
anti-narrative symbolism, who
"painted short isolated moments
of configuration, saturated with
suggestion".His silent spaces and
uneasy encounters "touch us
where we are most vulnerable
",and have "a suggestion of
melancholy, that melancholy
being enacted".His sense of color
revealed him as a pure painter as
he "turned the Puritan into the
purist, in his quiet canvasses
where blemishes and blessings
balance".According to critic Lloyd
Goodrich, he was "an eminently
native painter, who more than any
other was getting more of the
quality of America into his
canvases".
Conservative in politics and
social matters (Hopper asserted
for example that "artists' lives
close to them"),he accepted things
as they were and displayed a lack of
idealism. Cultured and
sophisticated, he was well-read,
and many of his paintings show
figures reading.He was generally
good company and unperturbed by
silences, though sometimes
taciturn, grumpy, or detached. He
was always serious about his art
and the art of others, and when
asked would return frank opinions.
Hopper's most systematic
declaration of his philosophy as an
artist was given in a handwritten
note, entitled "Statement",
submitted in 1953 to the journal,
Reality.
Great art is the outward expression
of an inner life in the artist, and this
inner life will result in his personal
vision of the world. No amount of
skillful invention can replace the
essential element of imagination.
One of the weaknesses of much
abstract painting is the attempt to
substitute the inventions of the
human intellect for a private
imaginative conception.

The inner life of a human being is
a vast and varied realm and does
not concern itself alone with
stimulating arrangements of color,
form and design.
The term life used in art is
something not to be held in
contempt, for it implies all of
existence and the province of art
is to react to it and not to shun it.
Painting will have to deal more
fully and less obliquely with life
and nature's phenomena before it
can again become great.
Though Hopper claimed that he
didn't consciously embed
psychological meaning in his
paintings, he was deeply
interested in Freud and the
power of the subconscious mind.
He wrote in 1939, "So much of
every art is an expression of the
subconscious that it seems to me
most of all the important qualities
are put there unconsciously, and
little of importance by the
conscious intellec.
Methods
Although he is best known for his
oil paintings, Hopper initially
achieved recognition for his
watercolors and he also produced
some commercially successful
etchings. Additionally, his
notebooks contain high-quality pen
and pencil sketches, which were
never meant for public viewing.
Hopper paid particular attention to
geometrical design and the careful
placement of human figures in
proper balance with their
environment. He was a slow and
methodical artist; as he wrote, "It
takes a long time for an idea to
strike. Then I have to think about it
for a long time. I don't start
painting until I have it all worked
out in my mind. I'm all right when I
get to the easel".He often made
preparatory sketches to work out
his carefully calculated
compositions. He and his wife kept
a detailed ledger of their works
noting such items as "sad face of
woman unlit", "electric light from
ceiling", and "thighs cooler".
For New York Movie (1939), Hopper
demonstrates his thorough
preparation with more than 53
sketches of the theater interior and
the figure of the pensive usherette.

The effective use of light and
shadow to create mood also is
central to Hopper's methods.
Bright sunlight (as an emblem of
insight or revelation), and the
shadows it casts, also play
symbolically powerful roles in
Hopper paintings such as Early
Sunday Morning (1930),
Summertime (1943), Seven A.M.
(1948), and Sun in an Empty Room
(1963). His use of light and shadow
effects have been compared to the
cinematography of film noir.
Although a realist painter,
Hopper's "soft" realism simplified
shapes and details. He used
saturated color to heighten
contrast and create mood.
Subjects and themes
Hopper derived his subject matter
from two primary sources: one, the
common features of American life
(gas stations, motels, restaurants,
theaters, railroads, and street
scenes) and its inhabitants; and
two, seascapes and rural
landscapes. Regarding his style,
Hopper defined himself as "an
amalgam of many races" and not a
member of any school, particularly
the "Ashcan School".Once Hopper
achieved his mature style, his art
remained consistent and selfcontained,
in spite of the numerous
art trends that came and went
during his long career.
Hopper's seascapes fall into three
main groups: pure landscapes of
rocks, sea, and beach grass;
lighthouses and farmhouses; and
sailboats. Sometimes he combined
these elements. Most of these
paintings depict strong light and
fair weather; he showed little
interest in snow or rain scenes, or
in seasonal color changes. He
painted the majority of the pure
seascapes in the period between
1916 and 1919 on Monhegan
Island.Hopper's The Long Leg
(1935) is a nearly all-blue sailing
picture with the simplest of
elements, while his Ground Swell
(1939) is more complex and depicts
a group of youngsters out for a sail,
a theme reminiscent of Winslow
Homer's iconic Breezing Up (1876).
Urban architecture and cityscapes
also were major subjects for
Hopper. He was fascinated with the
American urban scene,

"our native architecture with its
hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs,
pseudo-gothic, French Mansard,
Colonial, mongrel or what not,
with eye-searing color or delicate
harmonies of faded paint,
shouldering one another along
interminable streets that taper off
into swamps or dump heaps."
In 1925, he produced House by
the Railroad. This classic work
depicts an isolated Victorian wood
mansion, partly obscured by the
raised embankment of a railroad.
It marked Hopper's artistic
maturity. Lloyd Goodrich praised
the work as "one of the most
poignant and desolating pieces of
realism."The work is the first of a
series of stark rural and urban
scenes that uses sharp lines and
large shapes, played upon by
unusual lighting to capture the
lonely mood of his subjects.
Although critics and viewers
interpret meaning and mood in
these cityscapes, Hopper insisted
"I was more interested in the
sunlight on the buildings and on
the figures than any symbolism.
" As if to prove the point, his late
painting Sun in an Empty Room
(1963) is a pure study of sunlight.
Most of Hopper's figure paintings
focus on the subtle interaction of
human beings with their
environment—carried out with solo
figures, couples, or groups. His
primary emotional themes are
solitude, loneliness, regret,
boredom, and resignation. He
expresses the emotions in various
environments, including the office,
in public places, in apartments, on
the road, or on vacation. As if he
were creating stills for a movie or
tableaux in a play, Hopper
positioned his characters as if they
were captured just before or just
after the climax of a scene.
Hopper's solitary figures are mostly
women—dressed, semi-clad, and
nude—often reading or looking out
a window, or in the workplace. In
the early 1920s, Hopper painted his
first such images Girl at Sewing
Machine (1921), New York Interior
(another woman sewing) (1921),
and Moonlight Interior (a nude
getting into bed) (1923). Automat
(1927) and Hotel Room (1931),
however, are more representative
of his mature style, emphasizing
the solitude more overtly.

As Hopper scholar, Gail Levin,
wrote of Hotel Room:
The spare vertical and diagonal
bands of color and sharp electric
shadows create a concise and
intense drama in the
night...Combining poignant
subject matter with such a
powerful formal arrangement,
Hopper's composition is pure
enough to approach an almost
abstract sensibility, yet layered
with a poetic meaning for the
observer.
Hopper's Room in New York (1932)
and Cape Cod Evening (1939) are
prime examples of his "couple"
paintings. In the first, a young
couple appear alienated and
uncommunicative—he reading the
newspaper while she idles by the
piano. The viewer takes on the role
of a voyeur, as if looking with a
telescope through the window of
the apartment to spy on the
couple's lack of intimacy. In the
latter painting, an older couple
with little to say to each other, are
playing with their dog, whose own
attention is drawn away from his
masters.Hopper takes the couple
theme to a more ambitious level
with Excursion into Philosophy
(1959). A
middle-aged man sits dejectedly on
the edge of a bed. Beside him lies
an open book and a partially clad
woman. A shaft of light illuminates
the floor in front of him. Jo Hopper
noted in their log book, "he open
book is Plato, reread too late".
Levin interprets the painting:
Plato's philosopher, in search of the
real and the true, must turn away
from this transitory realm and
contemplate the eternal Forms and
Ideas. The pensive man in Hopper's
painting is positioned between the
lure of the earthly domain, figured
by the woman, and the call of the
higher spiritual domain,
represented by the ethereal
lightfall. The pain of thinking about
this choice and its consequences,
after reading Plato all night, is
evident. He is paralysed by the
fervent inner labour of the
melancholic.
In Office at Night (1940), another
"couple" painting, Hopper creates a
psychological puzzle. The painting
shows a man focusing on his work
papers, while nearby his attractive
female secretary pulls a file.

Several studies for the painting
show how Hopper experimented
with the positioning of the two
figures, perhaps to heighten the
eroticism and the tension. Hopper
presents the viewer with the
possibilities that the man is either
truly uninterested in the woman's
appeal or that he is working hard
to ignore her. Another interesting
aspect of the painting is how
Hopper employs three light
sources,from a desk lamp,
through a window and indirect
light from above. Hopper went on
to make several "office"
pictures, but no others with a
sensual undercurrent.
The best-known of Hopper's
paintings, Nighthawks (1942), is
one of his paintings of groups. It
shows customers sitting at the
counter of an all-night diner.
The shapes and diagonals are
carefully constructed. The
viewpoint is cinematic—from the
sidewalk, as if the viewer were
approaching the restaurant. The
diner's harsh electric light sets it
apart from the dark night outside,
enhancing the mood and subtle
emotion.As in many Hopper
paintings, the interaction is
minimal. The restaurant depicted
was inspired by one in Greenwich
Village. Both Hopper and his wife
posed for the figures, and Jo
Hopper gave the painting its title.
The inspiration for the picture may
have come from Ernest
Hemingway's short story "The
Killers", which Hopper greatly
admired, or from the more
philosophical "A Clean, Well-
Lighted Place".
In keeping with the title of his
painting, Hopper later said,
Nighthawks has more to do with
the possibility of predators in the
night than with loneliness.
His second most recognizable
painting after Nighthawks is
another urban painting, Early
Sunday Morning (originally called
Seventh Avenue Shops), which
shows an empty street scene in
sharp side light, with a fire hydrant
and a barber pole as stand-ins for
human figures. Originally Hopper
intended to put figures in the
upstairs windows but left them
empty to heighten the feeling of
desolation.

Hopper's rural New England
scenes, such as Gas (1940), are no
less meaningful. Gas represents "a
different, equally clean,
well-lighted refuge...open for
those in need as they navigate
the night, traveling their own
miles to go before they sleep.
" The work presents a fusion of
several
Hopper themes: the solitary
figure, the melancholy of dusk,
and the lonely road.
accompaniment of the musicians
in the pit.
Girlie Show was inspired by
Hopper's visit to a burlesque show
a few days earlier. Hopper's wife, as
usual, posed for him for the
painting, and noted in her diary,
"Ed beginning a new canvas—a
burlesque queen doing a strip
tease—and I posing without a stitch
on in front of the stove—nothing
but high heels in a lottery dance
pose."
Hopper approaches Surrealism
with Rooms by the Sea (1951),
where an open door gives a view
of the ocean, without an apparent
ladder or steps and no indication
of a beach.
After his student years, Hopper's
nudes were all women. Unlike
past artists who painted the
female nude to glorify the female
form and to highlight female
eroticism, Hopper's nudes are
solitary women who are
psychologically exposed.One
audacious exception is Girlie Show
(1941), where a red-headed striptease
queen strides confidently
across a stage to the
Hopper's portraits and selfportraits
were relatively few after
his student years.Hopper did
produce a commissioned "portrait"
of a house, The MacArthurs' Home
(1939), where he faithfully details
the Victorian architecture of the
home of actress Helen Hayes. She
reported later, "I guess I never met
a more misanthropic, grumpy
individual in my life." Hopper
grumbled throughout the project
and never again accepted a
commission.Hopper also painted
Portrait of Orleans (1950), a
"portrait" of the Cape Cod town
from its main street.

Though very interested in the
American Civil War and Mathew
Brady's battlefield photographs,
Hopper made only two historical
paintings. Both depicted soldiers on
their way to Gettysburg.Also rare
among his themes are paintings
showing action. The best example
of an action painting is Bridle Path
(1939), but Hopper's struggle with
the proper anatomy of the horses
may have discouraged him from
similar attempts.
meaning can be added to a painting
by its title, but the titles of
Hopper's paintings were sometimes
chosen by others, or were selected
by Hopper and his wife in a way
that makes it unclear whether they
have any real connection with the
artist's meaning. For example,
Hopper once told an interviewer
that he was "fond of Early Sunday
Morning... but it wasn't necessarily
Sunday. That word was tacked on
later by someone else."
Hopper's final oil painting, Two
Comedians (1966), painted one
year before his death, focuses on
his love of the theater. Two French
pantomime actors, one male and
one female, both dressed in bright
white costumes, take their bow in
front of a darkened stage. Jo
Hopper confirmed that her
husband intended the figures to
suggest their taking their life's last
bows together as husband and
wife.
Hopper's paintings have often
been seen by others as having a
narrative or thematic content that
the artist may not have intended.
Much
The tendency to read thematic or
narrative content into Hopper's
paintings, that Hopper had not
intended, extended even to his
wife. When Jo Hopper commented
on the figure in Cape Cod Morning
"It's a woman looking out to see if
the weather's good enough to hang
out her wash," Hopper retorted,
"Did I say that? You're making it
Norman Rockwell. From my point
of view she's just looking out the
window."Another example of the
same phenomenon is recorded in a
1948 article in Time:
Hopper's Summer Evening, a young
couple talking in the harsh light of a
cottage porch

is inescapably romantic, but Hopper was hurt by one critic's suggestion
that it would do for an illustration in "any woman's magazine." Hopper
had the painting in the back of his head "for 20 years and I never
thought of putting the figures in until I actually started last summer.
Why any art director would tear the picture apart. The figures were not
what interested me; it was the light streaming down, and the night all
around."

Nadim Karam born 1957is a
multidisciplinary Lebanese artist,
painter, sculptor and architect who
fuses his artistic output of
sculpture, painting, drawing with
his background in architecture to
create large-scale urban art
projects in different cities of the
world. He uses his vocabulary of
forms in urban settings to narrate
stories and evoke collective
memory with a very particular
whimsical, often absurdist
approach; seeking to 'create
moments of dreams' in different
cities of the world.
Early life and education
Nadim Karam grew up in Beirut.
He received a Bachelor of
Architecture from the American
University of Beirut in 1982, at the
height of the Lebanese civil
war,and left the same year to
study in Japan on a Monbusho
scholarship. At the University of
Tokyo he developed an interest in
Japanese philosophy of space,
which he studied under Hiroshi
Hara, and was also taught by
Fumihiko Maki and Tadao Ando.
He created several solo art
performances and exhibitions in
Tokyo while completing master and
doctorate degrees in architecture.
Teaching
Nadim Karam taught at the
Shibaura Institute of Technology in
Tokyo in 1992 with Riichi Miyake
and then returned to Beirut to
create his experimental group,
Atelier Hapsitus. The name, derived
from the combination of Hap
(happenings) and Situs (situations),
comes from Karam's enjoyment of
the fact that the encounter of these
two factors often gives rise to the
unexpected. He taught
architectural design at the
American University of Beirut
(1993-5, 2003–4), and was Dean of
the Faculty of Architecture, Art and
Design at Notre Dame University in
Lebanon from 2000–2003. He cochaired
in 2002 the UN/New York
University conference in London for
the reconstruction of Kabul and
was selected as the curator for
Lebanon by the first Rotterdam
Biennale.From 2006–7 he served
on the Moutamarat Design Board
for Dubai and regularly gives
lectures at universities and
conferences worldwide.
20

Urban art projects
With Atelier Hapsitus, the pluridisciplinary
company he founded
in Beirut, he created large-scale
urban art projects in different
cities including Beirut, Prague,
London, Tokyo, Nara and
Melbourne. His project for
Prague's Manes Bridge in the
spring of 1997 was both a
commemoration of the city's postcommunist
liberalization and an
echo of its history, with the
placement of his works in parallel
to the baroque sculptures on the
Charles Bridge. The post-civil war
1997–2000 itinerant urban art
project he created for central
Beirut was one of five worldwide
selected by the Van Alen Institute
in New York in 2002 to highlight
the role they played in the
rejuvenation of city life and
morale after a disaster. In Japan,
'The Three flowers of Jitchu'
realized at Tōdai-ji Temple in Nara
in 2004, was a temporary
installation commemorating the
achievements of a Middle Eastern
monk, Jitchu, whose performance
is still enacted yearly since the
year 752 in the temple he
designed for it. Karam's project
took 20 years to gain acceptance
from the Tōdai-ji Temple
authorities. His 2006 Victoria State
commission'The Travellers' a
permanent art installation of ten
sculptures which travel across
Melbourne's Sandridge Bridge
three times daily, tells the story of
Australian immigrants and creates
an urban clock in the city.
Selected public art installations
2017 Trio Elephants- Lovers’ Park,
Yerevan, Armenia
2017 Wheels of Innovation- Nissan
Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan
2016 Stretching Thoughts:
Shepherd and Thinker- UWC
Atlantic College, Wales, UK
2014 Wishing Flower- Zaha Hadid's
D’Leedon residential project,
Leedon Heights, Singapor
Architectural work
Nadim Karam is mainly known for
his conceptual work, like 'Hilarious
Beirut', the 1993 post-war antiestablishment
project for the
reconstruction of Beirut city centre,
and 'The Cloud"a huge public
garden resembling a raincloud that
stands at 250m above ground..

Inspired by the city of Dubai, it
proposes a visual and social
alternative to the exclusivity of
the skyscrapers in Gulf cities.
Karam's signature un-built
projects include the 'Net Bridge' a
pedestrian
bridge conceived as a gateway to
Beirut city centre from the marina
with five lanes that playfully
intersect and interweave.
Similarly, his winning design of a
competition
for the BLC Bank headquartersfor
Beirut features the new
headquarters straddling the old.
Karam collaborates closely with
Arup Engineers in London, who
give structural and technical
reality to his most unusual ideas.
Ongoing projects
The Dialogue of the Hills is an
urban art project conceived to
invigorate the historic core of
Amman through a series of public
gardens and sculpture for each hill
community. The sculptures are
designed to create a dialogue with
the others on the surrounding hills
of the city, physically and visually
linking diverse socio-economic
communities. The Wheels of
Chicago is a project inspired by the
city where the Ferris wheel was
invented. An iconic project for the
city shoreline, through several
wheels, symbolizes the different
city communities and harnesses sea
breezes to provide energy for the
surrounding parklands

http://www.aziz-anzabi.com