Edward Hopper - ACE102.6

The following all watercolour: The Battery, Charleston, SC (1930), House with Verandah (1929), Adobes and Shed, New Mexico (1925), Roofs Saltillo (1943), El Palacio (1946); watercolours were done, Peck suggests, "rather like a journal" as an instantaneous record. The oil paintings were all done in the studio and could be reworked: Route 6, Eastham (1941) Macomb’s Dam Bridge (1935). Hopper’s voice talking about why and how he painted the latter. Sketches of the bridge. Sketch for detail of Nighthawks. The painting. Gas and sketches. Details from Cape Cod Evening (1939). Sketches of different cinemas forming a composite in New York Movie. One of Walker Evans’s photographs of the petrol station at Reedsville, West Virginia. Gas. Early Sunday Morning, a street that doesn’t actually exist. On the road on Route 6. Details from a number of paintings, including Hotel Room, Western Motel, Approaching a City (1946), Hotel Window, 11 A.M., Morning in a City (1944), Morning Sun (1952), The City (1927), Nighthawks and others. Peck thinks of the elements in the paintings as scenery, making up stage or film sets, with Hopper working in a traditional manner but with contemporary America as his subject matter. Peck comments on all the people in the pictures being "types" and inactive.