Edward Hopper citations (48 citations)

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.”

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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

“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.”

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Edward Hopper

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

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

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Edward Hopper

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

“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.”

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Edward Hopper

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

“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.”

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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

“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.”

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Edward Hopper

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

“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.”

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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.”

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Edward Hopper

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

“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.”

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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

“Well, I have a very simple method of painting. It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method. It's very simple... Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer... I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.”

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Edward Hopper

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

“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..”

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Edward Hopper

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

“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.”

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Edward Hopper

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

“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.”

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Edward Hopper

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

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

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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.”

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Edward Hopper

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

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

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Edward Hopper

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

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

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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