Editorial Reviews
Edward Hopper resided in the Washington Square area of New York City from 1905 until his death in 1967, pursuing the visual essence of Gotham in various media and taking the measure of ordinary city dwellers. He embraced the architecture of the great city, revealing its solidity and bulk in "convincing three dimensional pictorial space." Today his most evocative canvases resonate with a contemporary power. Whether in oils and watercolors such as Automat, Nighthawks, or New York Pavements or in etchings like The El Station and Night Shadows, Hopper gave us stark yet intimate interpretation of urban existence that are touchstones of American art.
Avis Berman's essay explores how Hopper and his work illuminate each other by analyzing what his New York is--and is not. The artist preferred nondescript vernacular buildings, eschewing the new, the gigantic, the technologically exciting. He truly made emptiness full, silence articulate, plainness mysterious, and tawdriness noble.
Customer Reviews
A unique tour of the city itself,
2005-05-10
by Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
With an informed and informative text by New York resident, writer and art historian Avis Berman, Edward Hopper's New York showcases more than 50 color and b/w paintings, etchings and drawings focusing exclusively on famed artist's Edward Hopper's New York City inspired artwork. Many of the artworks have a paragraph of commentary exclusive to them, but the overall narrative tour continues from cover to cover. Realistic in its artistic style, with a slightly softer than life texture to the paintings that is just about the only thing that prevents one from mistaking them for photographs, Edward Hopper's New York is a unique tour of the city itself.