Edward Hopper: Between Realism and Abstraction

Published by Flammarion for a major Hopper exhibition held at museums in Boston, Washington, and Chicago in 2007–2008, this collective volume gathers contributions from directors and curators of those institutions. It traces a chronological path with academic rigor, emphasizing historical data and detailing the painter's career and the reception of his work in the 20th century. The book reasserts Hopper's dual cultural and pictorial heritage: French Impressionists and Symbolist writers, as well as Walt Whitman's poetry of the ordinary and the realism of John Sloan, Fritz Henry, and Walker Evans. Hopper is undeniably a realist but also a maker of images whose painting tends toward abstraction. He paints the anonymous: anonymous places—'slumbering' architectures and landscapes, in Guy Pène du Bois's words—and anonymous people as repeated motifs. His interplay of interior and exterior, wide-open yet completely closed spaces, leads in his later works to solitary figures in modest interiors lit by rays of light. When figures disappear, leaving only cutouts made by sunlight or lamplight (Sun in an Empty Room, 1963), Hopper's painting opens further to silence. Christophe Kihm notes that Paul Valéry's program—'to render the figure of a thought' and 'make waiting, doubt, concentration visible'—could precisely describe its abstract nature.