Edward Hopper's first-ever retrospective in Korea untangles 20th-century Realist icon

Edward Hopper's "Night Windows" (1928) / Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

In 'From City to Coast,' Hopper is more than painter of urban loneliness

By Park Han-sol

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is a painter whose art is as enigmatic as it is iconic.

His most celebrated masterpiece, "Nighthawks," captures the essence of urban loneliness through a hauntingly mysterious snapshot of a brightly-lit all-night diner in an otherwise deserted streetscape.

While it was downtown New York that inspired Hopper the most, he trained his lens on such eerily quiet moments of solitude and detachment far from the hustle and bustle of the metropolis ― unpopulated streets and isolated figures in confined interiors.

Little happens on his canvas, yet there is an understated tension that lies beneath.

The painter himself was known to be somewhat like his own art ― conspicuously inscrutable and taciturn.

Yet, like any public icon, there is more to Hopper and his oeuvre than meets the eye ― as shown in "Edward Hopper: From City to Coast," a newly mounted exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) in central Seoul.

Co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the world's largest holder of Hopper's works with over 3,100 pieces in its collection, this is Korea's first-ever showcase of the American realist master.

The excitement among the art lovers here seems palpable, as evidenced by the fact that a total of 100,000 early bird tickets released at a discount price since March 23 have already been sold out.

Spanning all three floors of the museum, the major retrospective offers a peek into the artist's emblematic depiction of 20th-century Americana (and a bit of Paris) through some 160 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings and etchings, as well as 110 rarely-seen items dusted off from archives.

Edward Hopper's "Two on the Aisle" (1927) / Courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

As Hopper spent most of his life in his home studio at 3 Washington Square North in New York ― which, in his own words, was "the American city that I know best and like most" ― it was natural for the metropolis to become his major and most-remembered subject on canvas.

But the show intends to present a fuller picture of "Hopper's private New York" that goes beyond his more well-known pieces representing modern urban solitude through seemingly detached and soulless individuals.

This includes works like "City Roofs," a plain sight observed from the rooftop above his studio that offers a surprising moment of tranquility. "Apartment Houses, East River" and "Study for Macomb's Dam Bridge" bring to life his penchant for panoramic views of New York's architecture and bridges ― instead of the vertical skyscrapers that began crowding the city during his lifetime.

His lesser-known watercolors and etchings portraying the city's residential districts and riverside also add an intriguing layer to the development of his visual language ― forms outlined in strongly defined lighting and a bold composition with a cinematic feel.

But as indicated by its title, "From City to Coast," the exhibition eventually moves beyond the fabric of New York to spotlight other significant places the artist traveled and stayed throughout his life ― Paris, New England and Cape Cod.

"Wherever Hopper was, he was an observer," said Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum, during a recent press preview.

"While riding on the elevated trains through the city of New York, or strolling along the banks of the Seine in Paris, or crossing the windy shores of Ogunquit in Maine, or watching his wife and fellow artist Jo Hopper sketching a window overlooking Cape Cod Bay, Hopper employed his unique visual language and his inner impressions to capture the extraordinary in the mundane."

Alongside New York, the three places each illuminate different aspects of the artist's creative development. It was in Paris, the city he visited in his earlier years from 1906 to 1910, that he became influenced by Impressionism and explored the effects of light as well as compositional approaches to the urban mise-en-scene.

In Maine, one of six states comprising the region of New England, Hopper sketched the rocky northern coastlines and the windswept sand dunes to observe the ever-changing state of nature ― something he could not easily witness within the bustling city.

And after being mesmerized by the charms of Cape Cod, he built his second home and studio in the region's Truro in 1934 and would return to the place every summer for the rest of his life. Here, the artist "gravitated toward compositions that capture collisions between nature and the built environment," said Kim Conaty, a curator at the Whitney who was behind the New York museum's "Edward Hopper's New York" exhibition last year.

SeMA's curator Lee Seung-ah noted that the Seoul show brings up one interesting point for the audience to consider when viewing the American painter's work ― whether his popular label as a "realist" should be accepted purely as it is.

While Hopper's oeuvre is grounded in realism, his image was not an exact documentation of a specific site. Rather, he infused his own memory and cinematic fantasy into the existing places, birthing a composite scene that sits somewhere between reality and imagination.

"Railroad Sunset," completed after one of his transcontinental trips, captures a dreamy American landscape as if viewed from the window of a moving train. In "Apartment Houses, East River," he replaces the racing train in front of the gray residential complex with a mystic forest. And "Soir Bleu" visualizes his reimagined scene of Paris filled with caricatures of a clown, a sex worker and a working-class man, among others.

The Woman behind the Man

While "From City to Coast" is, first and foremost, a dive into Edward Hopper and his artistic evolution, his wife and fellow artist Josephine Hopper (1883-1968) remains a notable presence throughout the show.

Not only was she the sole model for her husband's female figures on canvas ― as witnessed in "A Woman in the Sun," "Jo Sketching in the Truro House" and even "Nighthawks" ― she was his muse, creative companion and manager.

Josephine, or Jo, was the one who inspired Edward to experiment with watercolors after the couple met in Massachusetts in 1923.

"Artist's Ledger ― Book III" (1924-67), kept by Edward Hopper and Josephine Nivison Hopper ⓒ 2023 Heirs of Josephine Hopper/Licensed by SACK, Seoul / Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

She was also responsible for communicating with patrons and galleries to promote her reticent husband's body of works in his stead. And she kept meticulous ledger books of his creations and exhibitions for over three decades ― the pages of which offer rare insight into the iconic yet still-elusive man of the 20th century.

And guess who bequeathed the bulk of Edward's artistic estate to the Whitney Museum in 1968 and made it the world's largest repository of his works?

At the Seoul show, Jo's critical role in the growth of Hopper's career ― much at the expense of her own ― is brought to light through several mediums: his paintings modeled after her, the digitally reproduced pages from the ledger books and the 2022 documentary "Hopper: An American Love Story" that highlights the artist couple's undeniably tumultuous yet creative union.

"Edward Hopper: From City to Coast" runs through Aug. 20 at SeMA.