"The painter, draftsman, and illustrator Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is one of America's best-known and most frequently exhibited artists. This revealing volume unfolds the layered meanings of a key motif in Edward Hopper's work, exploring the hotel-motel subject as an agent of cultural transformation and emblem of its time." --publisher's description, lower cover.
An examination of the hotel and motel imagery-and the culture it represents--in Edward Hopper's iconic paintings and watercolors. The painter, draftsman, and illustrator Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is one of America's best-known and most frequently exhibited artists. Hotels, motels, and tourist homes are recurring motifs in his work, along with streets, lighthouses, and gas stations forming a visual vocabulary of transportation infrastructure. In ten essays, this fascinating volume explores Hopper's lifelong investigation of such spaces, shedding light on both his professional practice and far-reaching changes in transportation and communications, which affected not only work and leisure but also dynamics of race, class, and gender. Hopper's covers for the trade journal Hotel Management, in addition to other well-known works, invite reflection on the complicated roles of the nascent New Woman; the erasure of hotel work and workers; contemporary associations of the color white with cleanliness and purity; the watercolors Hopper made from hotel windows and rooftops in Mexico; and the broader context of transportation history. A final section traces journeys that Hopper and his wife, the artist Josephine "Jo" Nivison Hopper, took by car in the 1940s and 1950s; selected correspondence and quotations from Jo's diaries join reproductions of postcards and ephemera illuminating their-and fellow Americans'-shifting travel habits.
Notes
Published to accompany an exhibition held at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, October 26, 2019-February 23, 2020, and at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, June 4-September 13, 2020.
Two accompanying maps: Edward and Josephine Hopper's Road Trips, 1941 and 1952-53.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Time and place of event
"Edward Hopper and the American Hotel" : October 26, 2019-February 23, 2020, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, United States.
"Edward Hopper and the American Hotel" : June 4-September 13, 2020, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.
Language note
Text in English.
Contents
Introducing Hopper's Hotels / Leo G. Mazow
Edward Hopper, 'Hotel Managment', and the Work of Art / Leo G. Mazow
Accomodating Home: Marjorie Hillis, Edward Hopper, and the Meaning of "Home" in Modern America / Erika Doss
Room, Lobby, and Window: Hopper and the Invisibility of Hotel Labor / David Brody
Edward Hopper and the Legibility of Whiteness / Carmenita Higginbotham
The Dialectic of the Lobby / Leo G. Mazow
Driven Inside: Cars, Mobility, and Hopper's Traveling Chambers / Jason Weems
The Tower Effect: Edward Hopper in Mexico / Sarah G. Power
Later Hopper: 'Western Motel', 'People in the Sun', and the El Paso Interlude / Leo G. Mazow
The Hotel in American Art / Kirsten M. Jensen
The Road Trips: Life on the Road with Edward and Josephine Hopper, 1941-1953 / Sarah G. Powers.
Place name(s)
United States Virginia Richmond.
ISBN
9780300246889 (paperback)
0300246889 (paperback)
LCCN
2019947853
OCLC
1143807860
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