The American Realist

(Rocky Pedestal, 1927, via Bowdoin College Museum of Art)

If by chance you have plans to be in Maine this summer, be sure to make a trip to Brunswick to see, Edward Hopper's Maine, at Bowdoin College Museum of Art. In the early to mid 1900s, Hopper spent many summers in Maine, which inspired many of his landscape paintings in years to come. A number of these works have never been on view before now. There will be ninety works, including watercolors, paintings, drawings, and prints on view in the exhibition, which opens July 15.

An American realist painter born in Nyack, New York, Hopper worked mainly in oil and in watercolor, and experienced a very successful career that spanned the first four decades of the 20th century. He sold his first painting at the Armory Show in 1913, at the age of 31! Influential to him were French artists Manet and Degas, among others. His contemporaries included Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and Georgia O'Keeffe, and later many Abstract Expressionists would cite Hopper as an influence on their work, including de Kooning and Rothko.

Upon their deaths, Hopper and his wife Josephine, bequeathed their collection to the Whitney Museum. The upcoming exhibit in Maine is in conjunction with an exhibit that recently closed at the Whitney, Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, which focused on Hopper's use of modern life as subject matter in his paintings of the human experience. Many of the works in the Bowdoin exhibition are on loan from the Met, the Whitney, and private collections. A favorite author/actor/comedian of ours, Steve Martin, is a contributing essay writer for the catalogue that is being produced for the exhibition. Sounds like a must-see!

(New York Interior, 1921, www.whitney.org)

(Soir Bleu, 1941, via www.whitney.org)