«If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.»
That is the sentence that greets visitors to Edward Hopper: New York and Beyond at Palazzo Blu in Pisa.
A short, simple line that has become, in its way, a small manifesto of Hopper's work. It holds in a few words what you feel in front of one of his paintings, and above all what comes over you when you try to turn that feeling into language.
Let's begin with a concrete fact about how rare it is to find an exhibition devoted to the American painter in Italy or in Europe.
You have to go back to 2020 for a monographic show on Hopper's landscapes, in Basel, and as far back as 2016 for one in Italy, in Rome.
Something truly comparable to Edward Hopper: New York and Beyond only turns up in 2009, when Milan and Rome hosted the first anthology exhibition devoted to him in Italy, with more than 160 works.
It goes without saying that all this shows how unusual it is to enjoy, in Italy, a show of more than 150 works by Hopper, in a setting as evocative as Palazzo Blu, a museum that looks almost as if the American painter had drawn it.
Along the route you probably won't find your favourite works by Edward Hopper, or the ones you already know. Wandering through the rooms in search of something that isn't there feels entirely in tune with the atmosphere of Hopper's paintings.
Edward Hopper and the Whitney Museum of American Art
For this exhibition, and for much else, we owe heartfelt thanks to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a sculptor and philanthropist who from the early 1900s began buying and showing works by innovative American artists who struggled to emerge.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art went as far as refusing the donation of the works she had gathered at her Whitney Studio Club, so Gertrude decided to found an institution of her own, one that would champion the art and the artists of the United States. The Whitney Museum of American Art was born in 1930, already rich in works by Hopper.
When Hopper died in 1967, followed by his wife Jo the next year, their artistic estate of almost three thousand pieces, mostly paintings and drawings, was bequeathed to the Whitney.
From New York to Paris
The route starts, inevitably, from the city that saw Edward Hopper born and that became the backdrop of most of his paintings: New York. From the New York School of Art and the teaching of Robert Henri he kept, for good, a habit of painting American reality raw and unvarnished, favouring expressive originality over technical mastery. In New York, Hopper also worked as an illustrator and commercial graphic artist, a job he loathed but which paid the bills for a while. The experience proved useful too, teaching him to frame in a few gestures and expressions the psychology and narrative tension of his subjects.
Between 1906 and 1907 Hopper discovers two different sides of Paris, which he calls the most beautiful city in the world. First the dark, rainy side, then painting en plein air and the influence of Impressionism.
Hopper goes beyond Parisian landscapes and starts painting the people he meets around the city, turning them into something close to archetypes.
The masterpiece that gathers this experience is Soir bleu (1914), a painting that was received very coldly at first and ended up hidden in the painter's home for many years, until his death.
Edward Hopper's New York
Hopper's New York is not the one of the collective imagination, made of crowds and a tumultuous, overwhelming energy. His New York belongs to solitary figures lost in, or swept away by, their own thoughts, to people who share a physical space and nothing else. There is no movement, no interaction. There is deep melancholy but no sadness.
Hopper opens our eyes in front of a frame that tells something, without saying what happened or what might happen: that part is up to us.
New England and Cape Cod
If New York always remained central to the work of Edward Hopper, the summers spent in New England and on Cape Cod gave the painter a setting that seems made to end up in his canvases. Solitary houses, cliffs, wind-swept dunes, back roads, the local lighthouse. Images that lend themselves perfectly to being reduced to essential geometries, set between lights and shadows of a tangible density.
Images suspended in time, catching the eye with their magnetic grandeur.
Jo
The bond between Edward and his wife Josephine is one of the least known details of Hopper's life and one of the most fascinating. They were fellow students in Robert Henri's painting class at the New York School of Art and met in 1914. They became engaged in 1923 and married a year later.
Jo would work as a figurative artist alongside Edward for the whole length of their marriage and would be his only model, besides managing with great care his archives and the notebooks of pen and ink drawings.
What stays with us after leaving Palazzo Blu
Immersing ourselves so deeply in the world and history of Edward Hopper can never leave us indifferent. His works and his vision have influenced many other artists, inspired directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Dario Argento, and left an indelible mark on audiences.
If his most famous paintings made us fall in love with him, the exhibition Edward Hopper: New York and Beyond allows us to rediscover him in our everyday lives, whether in a play of light and shadow that takes on a life of its own or in an expression we manage to glimpse on a passerby's face.