The great popularity of Hopper, considered the best American realist painter of the twentieth century, derives from his absolutely personal style but above all from his attitude towards the subjects portrayed.
Hopper has been called, in part rightly, "the painter of solitude". However, another definition would be more appropriate: "painter of waiting". The protagonists of his paintings are certainly alone and show that they feel so even when they have someone next to them. But as far as this is true, there is a sense of suspension in their looks and attitudes. As in Cap Cod Morning (1950), Hopper's men and women wait for something to happen, for an event to intervene in their life, perhaps to change it or even to upset it. And certainly not by chance they are often imagined in places of passage. They are people in transit, in search of roots, of stability. Beyond their gaze, behind large windows or just beyond an open door, a wide world opens up and not infrequently saturated with light but not always reassuring.
The figurative universe of the great American artist, made up of ordinary environments, glimpses of metropolis and everyday banalities, is absolutely far from that widespread feeling of self-celebration of the American economy and industry so widespread around the middle of the last century.
His characters, ordinary people without identity, seem to be overwhelmed by modern society. Hopper represents the isolated, the alienated, human beings who live alone, not interested in making contacts, locked up in buildings and rooms that sometimes become real prisons.
And precisely the architectures and landscapes represent the other fundamental aspect of the artist's painting. The undisputed protagonist is the light that Hopper discovers in the Paris of Cézanne and Manet and which will never abandon him, although it declined in the following decades its impact on his work until it reached its peak in the XNUMXs, when the scenes of American life burst into his painting. Undoubtedly the choice of subjects is influenced by the climate of the Great Depression: his realism emerges which today we could define as metaphysical.
With clear and precise style, with subtle meticulousness, Hopper tells the American reality made up of boundless landscapes, large deserted expanses, provincial villages, metropolitan views populated by trivial objects: level crossings, petrol pumps, bars on the outskirts, the motels with their signs. In a word, the places of solitude and isolation. The immobile and immutable reality of things and the existential one of human beings.
We find this atmosphere in Gas (1940), the famous service station located on the curve of a road so lonely, dark and alarming that it looks like the set of a detective film by Hitchcock, a director whose shots were often inspired by images taken from the works by Hopper.
The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, precisely because it does not present the artist's major masterpieces from Nighthawks (1942) to Morning Sun (1952), intends to correct the usual and perhaps somewhat worn reading of Hopper, master of realism, to lead his painting in the territories of metaphysics, showing through the presence of numerous preparatory drawings and sketches, how each of his paintings is born from the research and fusion of details taken from different realities, reworked into suspended images, full of expectation and restlessness.
Hopper was not a fruitful painter: taciturn and solitary, austere and frugal, he worked hard. And to those who asked him when he painted he replied laconic: “when I can impose it on myself”. His so essential paintings, built with perfect compositional balances and calibrated cuts of light, in fact arise from a progressive "stripping" of the image, from continuous subtractions with which he reaches an absolute synthesis, always fleeing the picturesque and the temptation of narration , even when he portrays the stately Victorian cottages as if they were old fashioned ladies.
His tidy and clear-cut painting is by no means academic, but is the result of a deeply meditated and personal artistic path. The scenes he reproduces are actually born from a mental reconstruction that brings together elements observed in different times and places. The reality that he represents has nothing heroic or obvious. Hopper's America is a sort of peephole through which the shy and solitary artist observes with melancholy the alienation of man in the face of the frenetic progress of modern society. A very topical theme that explains the success of the American artist so appreciated by the general public.
