'Morning Sun' Edward Hopper

This is some stuff I researched. There will definitely be duplicated or quadrupled information, just letting you know in advance, please bear with. I read every single piece here and more and wrote down most of it. If you have nothing to do for an hour, why not read all the information from the sources, I found it really fun and interesting, maybe you would too. There are many different interpretations of this artwork but the one detailed in the last source is my personal favourite and one I really like. A lot of the information is American with American spelling, in my notes I corrected it but here it most likely isn't correct. These are excerpts from other people's articles, I really enjoyed them so I wanted to share it with other people. Links to the sources are above the stuff.

https://www.edwardhopper.net/morning-sun.jsp

"Edward Hopper was one of the early American artists to paint the experience of human isolation in the modern city. In Morning Sun, the woman - modelled after Hopper's wife, Jo - faces the sun impassively and seemingly lost in thought. Her visible right eye appears sightless, emphasising her isolation. The bare wall and the elevation of the room above the street also suggest the bleakness and solitude of impersonal urban life.

A consideration of Hopper's work would be incomplete without looking at some of his later pictures, in which his ways of seeing and painting achieved full fruition. In connection with one of his early painting, Lighthouse Hill, we postulated an observer whose "absolute" way of perceiving does not categorize objects according to their usefulness nor seek to possess them. This way of perceiving the world, however, was not achieved by any of the human figures depicted in Hopper's paintings. Not until his later works did a changed view of man appear. In Morning Sun, for example, painted in 1952, a person is portrayed for the first time as a fully perceiving being; the picture successfully depicts the mediation between inner reality and the outside world."

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/mar/27/we-are-all-edward-hopper-paintings-now-artist-coronavirus-age

"The loss of direct human contact we’re agreeing to may be catastrophic. This, at least, is what Hopper shows us. This painter born in New York state in 1882 made solitude his life’s work. In the 1920s, while F Scott Fitzgerald was chronicling the party animals of the jazz age, he painted people who looked as if they had never been invited to a party in their lives.

Modern life is unfriendly in the extreme for Hopper. It doesn’t take a pandemic to isolate his poor souls. Cold plate-glass windows, towering urban buildings where everyone lives in self-contained apartments, gas stations in the middle of nowhere – the fabric of modern cities and landscapes is for him a machine that churns out solitude. Nor do his people find much to do with themselves.

In older art, being alone has its benefits. In paintings titled Saint Jerome in His Study, a scholarly hermit looks perfectly at ease in his well-designed home office with his books, his cool desk – and his pet lion. In another way, the Romantic out for a walk in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog actively seeks splendid isolation so he can absorb sublime nature without human disturbance. He’s happy by himself – terrifyingly so.

But it’s not such images of contented or chosen solitude that are being shared today. It’s Hopper’s horrors – and that isn’t too strong a word. One of the painter’s biggest fans was Alfred Hitchcock, who famously based the Bates mansion in Psycho on a Hopper painting of a strange old house isolated by a railroad. We all hope to defy Hopper’s terrifying vision of alienated, atomised individuals and instead survive as a community. But, ironically, we have to do that by staying apart and it may be cruelly dishonest – the empty propaganda of the virus war – to pretend everyone is perfectly OK at home.

For the message of Hopper is that modern life can be very lonely. His people are as isolated among others in a diner or restaurant as they are at their apartment windows. In this he is typical of modernist art. Edvard Munch had already shown in his nightmarish Evening on Karl Johan Street that a crowd can be a very isolating place to be.

Today, we’re simply better at hiding the isolation that these artists thought defined the modern condition. In normal times, we sit alone in cafes, too, except we’ve now got mobile phones to make us feel social. The fact is that modernity throws masses of people into urban lifestyles that are totally cut off from the gregariousness that was once the norm.

We choose modern loneliness because we want to be free. But now the art of Hopper poses a tough question: when the freedoms of modern life are removed, what’s left but loneliness?"

https://m.theartstory.org/artist/hopper-edward/artworks/

"This work was produced late in Hopper's life, when he was nearly 70 years old. Nevertheless it embodies the same themes of existentialism noted throughout his oeuvre, connecting him with the parallel efforts of contemporary artists such as Andrew Wyeth. The latter's exploration of Christina's world shares much of the same sentiment and effect. In Hopper's painting a woman (his wife Jo at age 68), is noted sitting upright on a neatly-made bed, staring out the window. The morning sun streams through the window, raking over the figure and onto the blank wall behind. The artist obscures details of her aging face and figure by a distinct lack of detail; her expression is ambiguous, perhaps pensive, perhaps regretful. As in much of his work, the figure is included to capture a mood or suggest a psychological effect, rather than to serve as the portrait of a specific individual. Beyond embodying dramatic means of delineation noted in other works of early modernism, including stark light, he adopts the window motif in order to add psychological weight, open to varied interpretation, as was done a century earlier by Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich."

https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-1-summer-2004/pleasures-sadness

"Edward Hopper belongs to a particular category of artist whose work appears sad but does not make us sad…perhaps because they allow us as viewers to witness an echo of our own griefs and disappointments, and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by them."

https://www.flickr.com/photos/quadralectics/39104760661

"Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolourist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

Hopper was born in 1882 in Upper Nyack, New York, a yacht-building centre on the Hudson River north of New York City. He was one of two children of a comfortably well-to-do family. His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Elizabeth Griffiths Smith and Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant. Although not so successful as his forebears, Garrett provided well for his two children with considerable help from his wife's inheritance. He retired at age forty-nine. Edward and his only sister Marion attended both private and public schools. They were raised in a strict Baptist home. His father had a mild nature, and the household was dominated by women: Hopper's mother, grandmother, sister, and maid.

Hopper was a good student in grade school and showed talent in drawing at age five. He readily absorbed his father's intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian cultures. He also demonstrated his mother's artistic heritage. Hopper's parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books. By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolour, and oil—drawing from nature as well as making political cartoons. In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove. It shows his early interest in nautical subjects.

In his early self-portraits, Hopper tended to represent himself as skinny, ungraceful, and homely. Though a tall and quiet teenager, his prankish sense of humour found outlet in his art, sometimes in depictions of immigrants or of women dominating men in comic situations. Later in life, he mostly depicted women as the figures in his paintings.

Hopper died in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on May 15, 1967. He was buried two days later in the family's grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack, New York, his place of birth. His wife died ten months later.

His wife bequeathed their joint collection of more than three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other significant paintings by Hopper are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Always reluctant to discuss himself and his art, Hopper simply said, "The whole answer is there on the canvas." Hopper was stoic and fatalistic—a quiet introverted man with a gentle sense of humour and a frank manner. Hopper was someone drawn to an emblematic, anti-narrative symbolism, who "painted short isolated moments of configuration, saturated with suggestion". His silent spaces and uneasy encounters "touch us where we are most vulnerable",[ and have "a suggestion of melancholy, that melancholy being enacted". His sense of colour revealed him as a pure painter as he "turned the Puritan into the purist, in his quiet canvasses where blemishes and blessings balance". According to critic Lloyd Goodrich, he was "an eminently native painter, who more than any other was getting more of the quality of America into his canvases".

Conservative in politics and social matters (Hopper asserted for example that "artists' lives should be written by people very close to them"), he accepted things as they were and displayed a lack of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was well-read, and many of his paintings show figures reading. He was generally good company and unperturbed by silences, though sometimes taciturn, grumpy, or detached. He was always serious about his art and the art of others, and when asked would return frank opinions.

Hopper's most systematic declaration of his philosophy as an artist was given in a handwritten note, entitled "Statement", submitted in 1953 to the journal, Reality:

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. No amount of skilful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of colour, form and design.

The term life used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Though Hopper claimed that he didn't consciously embed psychological meaning in his paintings, he was deeply interested in Freud and the power of the subconscious mind. He wrote in 1939, "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."

Although a realist painter, Hopper's "soft" realism simplified shapes and details. He used saturated colour to heighten contrast and create mood."

https://www.sartle.com/artwork/morning-sun-edward-hopper

"Edward Hopper is on record as saying that the only thing that he ever wanted to do was “paint sunshine on the side of a house.” And I mean, that’s kind of all the dude did. That’s not a bad thing, either. Of course it wasn’t always on the side of a house, but like a moth to a flame, Hopper always gravitated toward the presence of light. Morning Sun is no exception.

The prominent use of light in the painting connects it to most of Hopper’s other work as opposed to isolating it to one specific time in his life. Hopper has a lot of recurring themes, but two stand out amongst the rest: isolation & light.

The sad looking woman on the bed is actually Hopper’s wife, Jo. But she isn’t supposed to be Jo in the painting. It isn’t supposed to be anyone, really. That’s why there isn’t that much detail attributed to her face. Part of what makes Hopper’s paintings so powerful is their ability to make people resonate with them. So much of that is rooted in the everyman/woman aspect of the individuals that he portrays. If it’s supposed to be anyone, it’s supposed to be you.

Hopper’s paintings, and Morning Sun in particular, could be looked at as though Hopper was trying to highlight our isolation in the world. Light breaking through a window to illuminate a scene is definitely enough to fan that flame. But just like so many things in life, there are other ways to look at it.  Just as though Morning Sun can represent loneliness, it can also represent optimism. And it’s all about the combination of light and isolation. If you take the light away, there’s simply a single woman looking out of the window. The solitude is front and centre.

Suddenly, things might feel a bit bleak. More bleak than they felt originally. But when you add that beam of light, suddenly there’s a glimmer of hope, a tinge of promise. Hopper may like to highlight our urban loneliness, but he does so by literally bringing light to a dark place, reminding us that we’re all in this together."