I have a postcard image of Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey above my desk, as a reminder that some of the best contemporary art came from America. Hopper, a realist painter, influenced by modernists Rothko and de Kooning as well as far-back impressionist, Edgar Degas, has a refined color palette and serves as a segue to the post-modern style of Alex Katz, Elizabeth Peyton and Alice Neel.
The majority of his oeuvre was donated to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where his vision of 1940’s and 50’s diners, women in green coats, and the clean architecture of the mid-century modern builders hang. Much of his work depicts the loneliness of the everyday. Getting dressed, getting undressed. Waiting. There was the Great Depression, which his paintbrush carefully captured, and there was his great depression, mirrored by the isolated characters in much of his work.
His work is characterized as a living history of life in the big city, in between the great wars, and during the second one. In his vision, we navigate the world alone, as he famously stated, “I don’t think I ever tried to paint the American scene; I’m trying to paint myself.”