2011: A YEAR OF EDWARD HOPPER
Edward Hopper House celebrated its 40th anniversary as an art center in 2011 with a series of events and exhibits related to Edward Hopper. The highlight of our year was an unprecedented exhibition of Edward Hopper's early work.
Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years (May 21 - July 17, 2011) was the first exhibition to concentrate on the works Hopper created during his years in Nyack, New York. Supported by loans from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust, the show included paintings, drawings, watercolors and memorabilia, some of which have never before been published or exhibited. This exhibition offered a unique opportunity to experience Hopper’s work in the very place that helped shape his vision and where he lived when the work was created. Curated by Elizabeth Thompson Colleary and organized by Carole Perry. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Avis Berman is available for purchase here.
Edward Hopper and Nyack
In 1935, a quarter-century after he had moved from his boyhood home in Nyack and was well on his way to establishing himself as the preeminent American realist painter of the twentieth century, Edward Hopper famously wrote:
“In every artist’s development the germ of the later work is always found in the earlier. The nucleus around which the artist’s intellect builds his work is himself: and this changes little from birth to death. What he was once, he always is, with slight modifications. Changing fashions in methods or subject matter alter him little or not at all.”
In the works exhibited here in the intimate setting of Hopper’s boyhood home, in rooms occupied by his family for more than a century, the “germs” of Hopper’s later art, the masterworks on which his fame rests, can clearly be found. In his choice of subjects and in the development of his style, the art he produced during the Nyack years represents a crucial prelude to the mature works that would secure his position in the pantheon of American art.
In reappraising a sampling of Hopper’s early seminal works it is clear that during the Nyack years, when he was drawing and painting local scenes and then branching out to commute to art school in New York City and travel to Paris, his artistic foundation was in the process of being laid.
Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years provides long overdue recognition of the role that Nyack played in the artist’s early development. The art and memorabilia on display document Hopper’s artistic growth and present new insights into his original sources of inspiration that would sustain him for years to come.
Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, Curator
“In every artist’s development the germ of the later work is always found in the earlier. The nucleus around which the artist’s intellect builds his work is himself: and this changes little from birth to death. What he was once, he always is, with slight modifications. Changing fashions in methods or subject matter alter him little or not at all.”
In the works exhibited here in the intimate setting of Hopper’s boyhood home, in rooms occupied by his family for more than a century, the “germs” of Hopper’s later art, the masterworks on which his fame rests, can clearly be found. In his choice of subjects and in the development of his style, the art he produced during the Nyack years represents a crucial prelude to the mature works that would secure his position in the pantheon of American art.
In reappraising a sampling of Hopper’s early seminal works it is clear that during the Nyack years, when he was drawing and painting local scenes and then branching out to commute to art school in New York City and travel to Paris, his artistic foundation was in the process of being laid.
Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years provides long overdue recognition of the role that Nyack played in the artist’s early development. The art and memorabilia on display document Hopper’s artistic growth and present new insights into his original sources of inspiration that would sustain him for years to come.
Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, Curator
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40th Anniversary Advisory Board
Jane Alexander Avis Berman Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Karen Finley Eric Fischl Jeffrey Fraenkel Richard Kendall Mark Rosenthal Philip Sanborn Carol Troyen Anthony Vidler Adam Weinberg |
