New York Pavements

This is an oil on canvas painting depicting a modern apartment house with a low stoop. In the lower left corner, a nanny walks with a baby carriage on a street in New York City . The nanny wears a bright blue uniform; the building exterior is mostly grey.		Edward Hopper
American (1882-1967)
New York Pavements, 1924 or 1925
Oil on canvas
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Modern Art
Location:  Exhibit, Gallery 202
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Dimensions:  H: 24 3/4 in, W: 29 3/4 in, FH: 33 1/4 in, FW: 38 1/4 in
Object ID: 83.591

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Edward Hopper
Nyack, N.Y. 1882-1967 New York, N.Y.
New York Pavements, 1924 or 1925
Oil on canvas, 24 3/4 × 29 3/4 in. (62.9 × 75.6 cm)
Signed lower right: Edward Hopper
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 83.591

References: Sokolowski, 1983, pp. 27-28; Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, exhib. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1981, pp. 39, 58; idem, Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1995, I, pp. 7, 66, III, p. 159; Sheena Wagstaff et al., Edward Hopper, exhib. cat., Tate Modern, London, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2004-05, pp. 40, 42, 126.

Isolation, separateness, silence-such words are often used to describe the elusive mood evoked by Edward Hopper's works. Widely recognized today as "the major realist painter of mid-twentieth-century America" (Gail Levin), Hopper has long been famous for his hauntingly empty New York cityscapes and rural New England views, and his bleak interior scenes inhabited by solitary, introspective figures.
Hopper was born and raised in Nyack, New York, a riverside village not far north of New York City, where his father ran a dry-goods establishment. He exhibited an early proclivity for drawing and in 1900-1906 studied illustration and painting at the New York School of Art, where one of his teachers, the Ashcan painter Robert Henri (see object 71.501), made a particularly strong impression on him. There followed three brief visits to Paris-in 1906-07, 1909, and 1910-where he abandoned Henri's dark tonalities for the lighter palette and plein-air technique of Impressionism and endorsed the Impressionists' interest in urban architectural themes. When Hopper returned to New York City, his frankly realist paintings were at first unpopular, and, to make a living, he reluctantly turned to commercial illustration. "I was a rotten illustrator-or mediocre, anyway," he later contended. "What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." Finally, in 1924, a successful exhibition of his watercolors at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in New York City freed him financially from his commercial work and allowed him to concentrate exclusively on painting.
New York Pavementsof c. 1924-25 is an important work from this early period of renewed oil painting. In it a child's nurse, wearing the uniform of an English-trained nanny, briskly wheels a pram past a New York apartment house. The painting is among the first in which Hopper used boldly cropped forms and strong diagonal accents-the oblique placement of the building and an elevated, "bird's-eye" prospect-to capture the viewer's attention and force him to confront the eerie reality of an otherwise unremarkable stretch of urban landscape. The stark simplicity of the composition and the virtual absence of narrative content are typical of Hopper's art, as are the hard light and shadow that play across the building's facade. "Hopper saw the city as a metaphor for the human condition," Thomas Sokolowski has written. "His view is that of a detached voyeur-like the dead observers in Thornton Wilder's Our Town-who sees only potential and absence in a world frozen at the edge of tragedy."
JCH
 

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