Hopper
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Now in rich color, thirty of American painter Edward Hopper’s masterpieces with critiques from acclaimed poet Mark Strand. Strand deftly illuminates the work of the frequently misunderstood American painter, whose enigmatic paintings—of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias, and hotel rooms—number among the most powerful of our time.
In brief but wonderfully compelling comments accompanying each painting, the elegant expressiveness of Strand’s language is put to the service of Hopper’s visual world. The result is a singularly illuminating presentation of the work of one of America’s best-known artists. Strand shows us how the formal elements of the paintings—geometrical shapes pointing beyond the canvas, light from unseen sources—locate the viewer, as he says, “in a virtual space where the influence and availability of feeling predominate.”
An unforgettable combination of prose and painting in their highest forms, this book is a must for poetry and art lovers alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Strand intuitively captures the spirit of American realist Edward Hopper's (1882-1967) paintings in this latest entry in Ecco's Writers on Art series. Hopper's people, he writes, whether glimpsed in hotel rooms, diners, storefronts or gas stations, ``seem to have nothing to do. They are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company with no clear place to go, no future.'' In his spare, precise commentaries on two dozen paintings, which are reproduced here in black-and-white, Strand peels away layers of poetic meaning and symbolism to pierce the private dramas implicit in Hopper's lonely, brooding canvases. Strand calls Sun in an Empty Room (1963) ``a vision of the world without us; not merely a place that excludes us, but a place emptied of us.'' That formulation suggests the stark, slightly menacing atmosphere that makes Hopper's pictures still look so modern.
