Edward Hopper
66 quotes
Biography
"What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."
"Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world."
"Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet to the taste after the raw disorder of New York. Everything seems to have been planned with the purpose of forming a most harmonious whole, which certainly has been done.. .Every street here is alive with all sorts of conditions of people, priests, nuns, students, and always the little soldiers with wide red pants."
"The people here in fact seem to live in the streets, which are alive from morning until night, not as they are in New York with that never-ending determination for the 'long-green', but with a pleasure-loving crowd that doesn’t care what it does or where it goes, so that it has a good time."
"I do not believe there is another city on earth so beautiful as Paris, nor another people with such an appreciation of the beautiful as the French."
"Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' and let himself loose.. .Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part.. ..perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts.. ..the parade of the queens of the halls [Paris’ markets] is also one of the events.. ..Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects – perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastly white in the sunlight."
"The killing of the horses [a bullfight in Madrid, he visited in June 1910] by the bull is very horrible, much more so as they have no chance to escape and are ridden up to the bull to be butchered.. ..the entry of the bull into the ring however is very beautiful; his surprise and the first charges he makes are very pretty."
"It seemed awful crude and raw here when I got back [after his return from his third and last trip to Europe, in 1910]. It took me ten years to get over Europe."
"I was always interested in architecture, but the editors [of the magazines who demanded these subjects for the illustrations of Hopper] wanted people waving with their arms."
"So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle."
"I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation which neither literature nor a purely plastic art deals with."
"My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature."
"If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities."
"The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting."
"One must perhaps qualify this statement and say that seemingly opposite tendencies each contain some modicum of the other. I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me."
"The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate this form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted."
"I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.."
"I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom."
"The domination of France in the plastic arts has been almost complete for the last thirty years or more in this country [America]. If an apprenticeship to a master has been necessary, I think we have served it. Any further relation of such a character can only mean humiliation to us. After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface."
"It is true that the Impressionists perhaps gave a more faithful representation of nature through their discoveries in out-of-door painting. But that they increased their statute as artists by so doing is controversial.. .If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression."
"There may come, or perhaps has come, a time when no further progress in truthful representation is possible. There are those who say that such a point has been reached, an attempt to substitute a more and more simplified and decorative calligraphy. This direction is sterile and without hope to those who wish to give painting a richer and more human meaning and a wider scope. No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylized design."
"There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions."
"Originality is neither a matter of inventiveness nor method, it is the essence of personality."
"I do not know why I chose one subject rather than another unless I believe them to be the best synthesis of my inner experience."
"It is hard for me to know what to paint. It comes slowly."