9 Hopper Paintings in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition

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Edward Hopper, Western Motel, oil, 1957, Yale University
Art Gallery


Edward Hopper and the American Hotel at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (through Feb. 23, 2020). It's a great survey of the artist's work over the decades.

One theme Hopper returned to again and again was placing prominent windows in his compositions- he loved juxtaposing the inside with the outside.  Here are just four examples in the exhibition. I like the comment the exhibition's Curator Leo Mazow made to me about their role in the paintings: The windows seem like impasses, both connecting and detaching private and public realms.




Edward Hopper. Room in New York, oil, 1932, Sheldon
Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Looking at Room in New York from a painters' point of view I'm struck by the icy grays of the outside space. The white sleeves of the man's shirt and the sheet music on the piano are like white exclamation points in the otherwise somber greenish interior light.


Edward Hopper, Eleven A. M., oil, 1926, Hirshhorn Museum and 
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC


Always loved Eleven A.M. for its artfully interlocking composition. Also got a kick out of the woman's apparent unconcern sitting exposed in front of that big window.



Edward Hopper,  Morning Sun, oil, 1952, Columbus
Museum of Art, Ohio


One of my favorites in the show, Morning Sun's figure felt just so monumental. I confess I totally fell in love with the way Hopper painted the little folds in the bedsheets.



Philip Koch, Edward Hopper's Parlor, Nyack,
NY, oil, 32 x 24 inches, 2019


Hopper often chose to paint really big windows because it helped him come up with more inventive compositions. On an unconscious level I believe he was echoing a favorite childhood memory- the oversized French door windows in the living room of his boyhood home in Nyack, NY (now the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center). Above is a painting I made on location in the Hopper home's parlor of one of the windows.



Edward Hopper, Bob Slater's Hill, watercolor, 1938,
Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia

I'm a landscape painter so naturally I have a special interest in those pieces in the show. Above Hopper deftly corrals all his fluffy trees into a tight geometric arc on his hillside.



Edward Hopper, Sierra Madre at Monterrey, watercolor,
1943, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago

 Sierra Madre at Monterrey was new to me. Its color wonderfully celebrates deep space and the sculpted volumes of the mountain peaks. Below is one of his drawings from the same mountains.


Edward Hopper, Mexico, chalk, 1943?



Edward Hopper, Untitled (Cove at Ogunquit), oil, 1914
Whitney Museum of American Art


Terrific color in the above piece. It's intriguing how Hopper didn't want to overload this painting and chose to leave all the details out of some of the rocks.



Edward Hopper, Study for Seawatchers, graphite, 1952,
Provincetown Art Association and Museum

On a personal note I got a big kick out of this drawing above. It's one of the few pieces Hopper made featuring the studio he designed and built in Truro on Cape Cod. Here's my wife Alice standing on that same side of the studio in a photo I took during our 2016 residency there. A deck has been added since Hopper's day, but otherwise the building looks just as he left it.




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