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As a painter and a painting teacher, Hoppers work is a real problem for me.
On one hand, his paint handling is terrible. He spreads paint on the canvas like icing sugar on a cake. All the nuance of application I teach he happily ignores… no scumbling, glazing, tonking etc. The way he paints figures is also terrible. They look stiff and unnatural, like they have been stuffed.
On the other hand, he is a genuine poet. But His visual poetry owes nothing to European traditions. It comes from the cinema and from photography, a true American creation. A classic.
The outcome is an artist who is easy to like but hard to learn from. He succeeds on his own unique terms and by a narrow margin. I sigh when one of my students discovers him. I have to find a way to say that hopper could pull it off, but almost certainly you can’t.
I think this is kind of sad. Knowing those techniques doesn't make you an artist, it makes you a painter. You can be a brilliant painter and yet paint things which are not very imaginative. You can be a great artist and produce paintings that are not technically brilliant but are still recognised for their imagination.
I like painting. I didn't know what scumbling or tonking were, I just read about them. But I do those things anyway as it turns out, and I'm just an amateur messing about so they can't be that hard to discover. For all I know, Hopper knew those techniques and chose not to use them to achieve the artist style he wants to convey.
For those of you who have expressed confusion as to my use of the terms stumble and tonking, here is my course material on the subject…
https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/painting-ap...
Novice students don’t understand how subtle paint application can be. For them, it is a binary: on the canvas or not on the canvas. In reality, it can take a multitude of forms. It is this that can give a painting depth and impact. Most importantly, it works against the inherent flatness of the canvas surface, giving us something that can be looked into as well as looked at.
Thank you, that was fascinating. I especially liked the illustration of how some pigments, like Prussian Blue and Alizarin Crimson, can create a range from dark to light depending upon the paint application, while others cannot.
Clement Greenberg wrote that "Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".
Kind of like the Leonard Cohen of painters.
Cohen can't sing worth a damn, and the melodies are tonally simplistic, bordering on trivial and repetitive. But that doesn't matter because they're merely scaffolding for the real gold: the words. Plus his gravelly voice has a haunting aspect that he uses to great effect.
To this day one of my favorite songs ever is "Waiting for the Miracle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXvG0SMP7tw
You have captured Hopper so well in that one post it supersedes the hundreds of articles, gallery descriptions, and catalogs I’ve read about him in my 6+ decades.
Username greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Id love to see a good painter recreate his work using good painting techniques. As an outsider to art, I have no intuition as to why his technique is bad because to me, it looks exquisite!
Much of the stuff I am talking about can best be appreciated by actually standing in front of the actual painting, not something we can do so easily here in south east Asia.
Google arts and culture images give some idea as to the differences I am talking about. Below are two links, one to a Rubens painting one to Hoppers. Use the zoom function to show their incredible detail. A godsend for teaching.
Rubens was perhaps the most skilled painter to have ever lived, but has frequently been critiqued for his lack of content.
Hopper treated colors ‘locally’. This means that a red thing would be painted with red paint, and a blue thing with blue paint. Like a child with a coloring book. I show students how to moderate hue, saturation, lightness amusing a range of pigments.
If you have time, check out the difference between the two.
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-wrath-of-achille...
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/nighthawks-edward-ho...
Rubens and Hopper lived in different eras. Most notably, Hopper lived in a world in which cameras existed, and had led painters to eschew photorealism for more expressionistic images.
When you say Rubens is more skilled, do you mean he is just more complex? When one programmer solves the problem in 100 lines and another in 1000, we usually consider superior the former.
I would say that complexity is, to a degree, a metric of skill. To be more presice, a skilled coder, writer, painter can put together something that is incredibly complex, yet which also expresses great unity.
I see what you are saying about the merit of distillation. However, Of Rubens, I would say that he has an increadable economy to his brushwork. He suggests with a few marks, what other painters would painfully describe in longhand.
Perhaps he used his "bad" painting techniques on purpose. Consider the possibility that the techniques he uses are a part of his work's impact, just like the content.
There's a museum in New York, https://folkartmuseum.org/
where I actually went (I think this is it). It's small enough to see in a couple of hours.
There are artists who don't even know what's good technique or what's bad; they just create. I'm not saying this is better or worse, but it's always interesting.
I know some of these words.
Not scumbling or tonking, though.
> hopper could pull it off, but almost certainly you can’t.
I reminds me of what my piano teacher said when I pointed out to her the extremely eccentric postures that some great pianists had, or have.
I love the way Automat makes me feel every time I look at it. When I first started reading your comment I got defensive. After some thought, of course I agree with you.
I've enjoyed some of your other comments on art. Are there any books that you would recommend to someone who enjoys art but knows little about art history (or art in general)?
Thank you for your response.
Frankly... sorting the wheat from the cruft is a major task as there has been so much written on the subject. I would recommend that art be separately considered with respect to it's history (time/place), aesthetics (it's formal parameters) and process (how it was made).
On the subject of art history, I would recommend any art history book that places art in standard sequential order (i.e. 'canon'). Even a child's primer on the subject would be sufficient. A lot can be learned about art by simply placing it in sequential order. Only then can you see that art grew in response to the time/place of its manufacture. If you need a recommendation, then you could do no worse than 'The Art Book' (Phaidon).
More specifically, art produced pre- and post- 1900 needs different treatment as they are different things.
- For art produced pre 1900, the classic tome is 'The Story of Art' by Ernst Gombrich. He may be a bit sneered at nowadays, but he knew his stuff.
- For art produced post 1900 'The Shock of the New' by Robert Hughes is a great primer. Also 'Ways of Seeing' by John Berger is aimed at students and presents high-brow ideas in a very digestible manner.
On the subject of aesthetics, I would recommend 'Toward a Psychology of Art' by Rudolph Arnheim. He may now be considered rather old fashioned but he is one of the few thinkers on art who effectively addressed its formal attributes. He also drew, which is a plus. In the same vein there is Ruskin (Modern Painters) who really understood how an artist thinks, and was no slouch as an artist (draftsman) himself.
On color in art I would recommend Bruse MacEvoy's Handprint website. On the topic of color, he has forgotten more than most people would ever know. In my opinion, he is superior to Goethe and Johannes Itten (both art school favorites but both highly questionable). He does not always organize his thinking as well as might be hoped, but that is the nature of color: pan-dimensional and perverse. Also 'Color space and its divisions' Kuehni, R. G. (2001).
The making of art is a process, yet we only see the finished thing. This is our loss as there is much to be learned by studying this process. On the creative process much has been much written, some of it very high-brow. However, the book I would most highly recommend is rather coffee table: 'Daily Rituals: How Artists Work' by Currey, M. (2013). Nothing gives deeper insight into the mind of a creator than how they timetable their productive life.
Finally, I would recommend that art be experienced 'in situ', in front of the actual artwork. I was speaking to a student a few days ago who claimed to have seen the work of Rothko. Of course they had not, they had only seen photos of it. Nuf said.
Regarding the technique, wouldn't you say the same about so many primitivists, from Gauguin to Rousseau?
Absolutely yes. Roussseau was the classic naive and had man limitations,mbut also blissfully unaware of them. Most importantly, he simply loved painting. Picasso had a lot of respect for him and was one of the few to have attended his funeral.
Personally, I think this adds to his "artistness", rather than detracting from it.
What do you tell them about picasso? Twombly?
Picasso had the great advantage of being trained in painting since he was a child. His father was a very good painter, and supported and encouraged him a lot.
Picasso’s other strength was his refusal to be absorbed by the ever present academy/salon. They acted as a club, keeping a tight hold on what was and was not considered proper. Picasso could have easily become a part of this, but had the balls to walk away when he was (I think) no more than 16. He went his own way, jointing a studio in Barcelona.
Adding to this was that by the time he was in his early 20s, he had nearly died from illness, and lost a close freind to suicide. This gave his work an emotional back bone it had lacked before. In a sense, it made him.
His most creative move was to take an interest in African masks. Reconciling African sculpture with European painting was impossible. But as every tome on creativity will tell you, new things come from cross breeding old things, all the better if they can’t be interbred.
But whatever Picasso did, he never stopped being a classicist, which is what he had learned when he was a child.
Twombly… I like but with reservation. He died only recently, and has therefore only recently become ‘art history’. He had his thing, and many people liked his thing and would pay good money for it. However, he had none of the scope of some of his peers (eg jasper johns). Certainly, he is far more difficult to use in a classroom unless you are talking about his work. In other words, he is the perfect example of himself (if that makes sence).
Do you think it's possible some of his early representational work that is hailed as "traditionally sound" could have been completed by his father? I often see it claimed that he had achieved absolute mastery as a teenager, but only a handful of works are ever presented to support this claim. To a layman they're impressive, but if you compare them to student work from current ateliers like GCA they're pretty middle of the road.
>never stopped being a classicist
I'm totally lost on this bit, please elaborate
Thanks for sharing. While we are on the subject, how would you see someone like Rothko in this measure?
They're quite the opposite of L.S Lowry aren't they.
Hopper's figures are surrounded by space, like mis-sized players in an oversized 3D game map. And they stare away into the distance. Lowry depicts what some would call "urban alienation" - grim northern factories - but they're packed together, with intimacy, proximity and movement.
Is she imitating using a modern phone in “Sunlight in a Cafeteria”. Looks like it!
I think she’s taking a cigarette out of a case, similar to this: https://img.freepik.com/premium-photo/vintage-cigarette-case...
One of my favorite 20th Century artists. Nighthawks is at the Art Institute in Chicago.
Bueller...anyone...anyone?