Edward Hopper: Night Becomes You

Edward Hopper - Night Windows - 1928 - Oil on canvas - 29 x 34" (73.7 x 86.4 cm) - Gift of John Hay Whitney - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York (click photo for larger image)Many of Edward Hopper’s (1882–1967) most admired paintings are night scenes. An enthusiast of both movies and the theater, he adapted the device of highlighting a scene against a dark background, providing the viewer with a sense of sitting in a darkened theater waiting for the drama to unfold. By staging his pictures in darkness, Hopper, was able to illuminate the most important features while obscuring extraneous detail. Hopper’s approach to all of his works is cinematic. His canvas become a movie screen. The unidentified woman in “Night Windows” is unaware of the viewer’s gaze. She quietly attends to the personal details of her life, while we watch and wait for something to happen. “The painting exposes the voyeuristic opportunities of the modern American city, and the contradiction it offers between access to the intimate lives of strangers and urban loneliness and isolation.” Isolation was a recurring theme in Hopper’s work.

Jackson Pollock—Redefining Composition

Jackson Pollock - Eyes in the Heat - 1946 - Oil on canvas, 54 x 43 in; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (click photo for larger image)

“On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally 'in' the painting.”

These words were spoken by American painter Jackson Pollock in 1947. Pollock (1912-1956) is associated with the introduction of the “All-over” style of painting that avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas. Pollock abandoned the traditional idea of composition as a relationship among parts. The design of his paintings had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas, finished works were sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. All these characteristics were important for the new American painting that matured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

An American Original

Lois Mailou Jones - The Ascent of Ethiopia, 1932, oil on canvas, Milwaukee Art Museum (click photo for larger image)American artist Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) was one of the great figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Determined from an early age to become an artist of recognition—she achieved her goal. Jones died at age ninety-two. Her artistic legacy is recorded in hundreds of her canvases—and in the passion and discipline she communicated to some 2,500 students. She integrated the African heritage and American black experience of her time into her work—in a style uniquely her own.

An Ashcan Schooler

William Glackens - La Villette - 1895 - Oil on canvas - Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (click photo for larger image)William James Glackens (1870-1938) was an American artist whose paintings of street scenes and middle-class urban life rejected the dictates of 19th-century academic art and introduced a matter-of-fact realism into the art of the United States. Glackens was associated with the Ashcan School—also known as the New York Realists.

Palmer Haydn and the Harlem Renaissance

Palmer Haydn - The Janitor Who Paints - ca. 1930 - oil on canvas - 39 1/8 x 32 7/8 in. (99.3 x 83.6 cm.) - Smithsonian American Art Museum (click photo for larger image)The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American social thought that was expressed through the visual arts, as well as through music (Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller and Billie Holiday), literature (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. DuBois), theater (Paul Robeson) and dance (Josephine Baker). Centered in the Harlem district of New York City, the New Negro Movement (as it was called at the time) had a profound influence across the United States and even around the world. Palmer Haydn (1890-1973) was well known for his treatments of both urban life (in New York City) and in the rural South. The Janitor Who Paints, created around 1930, was described by the artist as "a sort of protest painting" of his own economic and social standing ,as well as that of his fellow African Americans.