Hopper (Writers on Art Series) - Hardcover

Mark Strand

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880013435 ISBN 13: 9780880013437

Publisher: Ecco Press, 1994

Synopsis

Edward Hopper's paintings are icons of American culture. His representations of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias and hotel rooms embody the solitude of travel and adult life in the America of the thirties, forties and fifties. Because of the familiarity of his subject matter, Hopper has been pigeon-holed both historically, as an American realist, and thematically, as an artist of alienation.
Mark Strand, recent poet laureate and writer of many books of award-winning poetry, approaches Hopper's work with a fresh eye, exploring the aesthetic principles behind the paintings. Strand, whose poems move through a terrain similar to that portrayed by Hopper, possesses a unique and powerful understanding of what makes the paintings so moving and memorable. He writes with his distinctive clarity and grace, examining twenty-three of Hopper's most important works. He cites aesthetic reasons for Hopper's continuing ability to deeply move people in an America that has grown considerably more complex both politically and socially since mid-century.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Strand (1934–2014) was born in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was the author of many books of poems, three volumes of translations, and one book of short stories. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he died in November 2014, after being nominated for a National Book Award for Collected Poems.

Reviews

Poet Strand intuitively captures the spirit of American realist Edward Hopper's (1882-1967) paintings in this latest entry in Ecco's Writers on Art series. Hopper's people, he writes, whether glimpsed in hotel rooms, diners, storefronts or gas stations, "seem to have nothing to do. They are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company with no clear place to go, no future." In his spare, precise commentaries on two dozen paintings, which are reproduced here in black-and-white, Strand peels away layers of poetic meaning and symbolism to pierce the private dramas implicit in Hopper's lonely, brooding canvases. Strand calls Sun in an Empty Room (1963) "a vision of the world without us; not merely a place that excludes us, but a place emptied of us." That formulation suggests the stark, slightly menacing atmosphere that makes Hopper's pictures still look so modern.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0880013435
• ISBN 13: 9780880013437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 65