Edward Hopper Quotes (48 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Oral history interview with Edward Hopper' (1959, June 17), conducted by John Morse; 'Archives of American Art', Smithsonian Institution

“After I took up etchings [c. 1915], my paintings seemed to crystallize.”

Edward Hopper

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Edward Hopper: The Emptying Spaces', Suzanne Burrey; in 'Árt Digest', April 1, 1955 p. 10

“All I ever wanted to do is to paint sunlight on the side of a wall.”

Edward Hopper

Comment on his 'Early Sunday Morning' (1930) https://www.wikiart.org/en/Search/Early%20Sunday%20Morning
1941 - 1967

Edward Hopper Quotes about art

“I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation which neither literature nor a purely plastic art deals with.”

Edward Hopper

Letter to Charles Sawyer of Addison Gallery of Art October 19 , 1939
1911 - 1940

“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.”

Edward Hopper

Quote in Hopper's letter to Charles H. Sawyer, October 29, 1939; as cited in Edward Hopper, Lloyd Goodrich; New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1971, p. 164
1911 - 1940

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

“Sloan [American colleague artist who started his art by making etchings, c. 1920] not having been abroad [in contrary to Hopper himself], has seen these things with a truer and fresher eye than most... The hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves.”

Edward Hopper

posthumous
Source: 'Joan Sloan' Hopper', p. 172; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 39

“The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.”

Edward Hopper

1941 - 1967
Source: 'statement by the Chairman of the Jury', Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 1951, p. 7

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Edward Hopper Quotes

“More of me comes out when I improvise.”

Edward Hopper

“The man's the work. Something does not come out of nothing.”

Edward Hopper

Hopper's answer to journalists -quoted by Avis Berman in 'Hopper, the Supreme American Realist of the 20th Century' Smithsonian Magazine June 2007
1941 - 1967

“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.”

Edward Hopper

In a letter to his mother, Paris, May 11, 1907; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 27
1905 - 1910

Girl , Sun , Parting , Painting

“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.”

Edward Hopper

Alfred Barr & Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition Museum of Modern Art New York 1933
1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Mood , Nature , Thinking , Study

“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.”

Edward Hopper

Quote in Hopper's letter to his mother, Paris, October 30, 1906; as cited in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 13
1905 - 1910

People , Beauty

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Truth , Hope , Time , Painting

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Painting , Perfection

“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.”

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, in a letter to his mother, Paris, October 30, 1906; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 14
1905 - 1910

Love , People , Pleasure , Time

“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..”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Parting

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Painting , Personality

“The only real influence I have had was myself.”

Edward Hopper

1941 - 1967

“[on the question 'Why selecting certain subjects over others':] I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them [his chosen subjects] to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience.”

Edward Hopper

posthumous
Source: 'Edward Hopper', Goodrich; p. 152; as quoted in "Edward Hopper", Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 52

Question

“Originality is neither a matter of inventiveness nor method, it is the essence of personality.”

Edward Hopper

Quoted by Selden Rodman, inConversations with Artists, Capricorn Books, New York, 1961
1941 - 1967

Personality

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

Edward Hopper

Hopper quoted this from Ralph Waldo Emerson's book Self Reliance, the book he loved throughout his life
1941 - 1967
Source: 'How Edward Hopper Saw the Light', by Joseph Phelan, at Artcyclopedia online

Back To Work

“It takes a long time for an idea to strike.”

Edward Hopper

quoted by Sheena Wagstaff 'Edward Hopper', Tate Publishing (2004)
1941 - 1967

Idea , Time

“I could just go a few steps [from the house where he stayed in Paris in 1906- 1907] and I'd see the Louvre across the river. From the corner of the Rue de Bac and Lille (sic) you could see Sacré-Coeur. It hung like a great vision in the air above the city.”

Edward Hopper

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Portrait: Edward Hopper', Brian O'Doherty, 'Art in America', 1952 (December 1964), p. 73

Housing

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Faith , Nature , Painting

“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.”

Edward Hopper

quoted by Floyd Goodrich, in Edward Hopper, H. Abrams, New York 1971
1941 - 1967

“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.”

Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940
Source: 'Wake of the News, Washington Square North Boasts Strangers Worth Talking to', by Archer Winston, 'New York Post', November 26, 1935

People

“It's probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.”

Edward Hopper

Hopper’s respond on a comment of an interviewer about the 'lack of communication' in his painting art
1941 - 1967
Source: an interview with Aline Saarinen, 'Sunday Show', NBC-TV 1964, transcript, p. 3

Loneliness

“The whole answer is there on the canvas.”

Edward Hopper

Hopper's answer to journalists - quoted by Sherry Maker, in 'Edward Hopper' (1990)
1941 - 1967

“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.”

Edward Hopper

Quote of Hopper's letter to his sister, June 9, 1910; as cited in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 23
1905 - 1910

Beauty , Chance , Horse

“Partly through choice, I was never willing to hire out more than three days a week [making illustrations for the magazines to support himself, c. 1912] I kept some time to do my own work. Illustrating was a depressing experience. And I didn't get very good prices because I didn't often do what they wanted.”

Edward Hopper

Quote in: 'Edward Hopper: The Emptying Spaces', Suzanne Burrey; in 'Art Digest', April 1, 1955 pp. 8 - 10
1941 - 1967

Support , Time

“[about his painting 'Approaching a CityWell' Hopper painted in 1946:] I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics. There is a certain fear and anxiety and a great visual interest in the things that one sees coming into a great city. I think that's about all I can say about it.”

Edward Hopper

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Oral history interview with Edward Hopper' (1959, June 17), conducted by John Morse; 'Archives of American Art', Smithsonian Institution

Fear , Thinking , Painting , Training

“Ninety percent of them [artists in general] are forgotten ten minutes after they’re dead.”

Edward Hopper

1941 - 1967
Source: a letter to Margaret McKellar, 14 November 1965; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984

Dead

“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.”

Edward Hopper

In a letter to his mother, c. 1910; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 27
1905 - 1910

“Recognition does not mean so much, you never get it when you need it.”

Edward Hopper

2 Quotes in 'The Silent Witness', Time, December 24, 1956
1941 - 1967

“Though I studied with Robert Henri, I was never a member of the Ash-Can School. You see, it had a sociological trend which didn't interest me. [Hopper then proceeded to inform Kuh that his work contained no social content whatsoever! ]”

Edward Hopper

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Edward Hopper' (1962), Katherine Kuh, in 'The Artist's Voice: Interviews with Artists' New York: Harper and Row, 1962:140

School , Study

“They are in a high key, somewhat like impressionism or a modified impressionism. I think I'm still an impressionist.”

Edward Hopper

Interview in the late 1950's, Katherine Kuh and Avis Berman ed., in 'My Love Affair With Modern Art', New York 2006, p.276; as quoted in 'The Artist’s Voice', Katharine Kuh, New York and Evanston 1962, p.135
Hopper qualified his early Paris sketches, by adding that these sketches were direct, about the 'immediate impression', while being very much concerned to represent with representing depth
1941 - 1967

Thinking