@import url(/external/styles/global/0,14250,,00.css); Sign in Register Go to: Guardian Unlimited home UK news World news Archive search Arts Books Business EducationGuardian.co.uk Film Football Jobs Life MediaGuardian.co.uk Money The Observer Online Politics Shopping SocietyGuardian.co.uk Sport Talk Travel Audio Email services Special reports The Guardian The weblog The informer The northerner The wrap Advertising guide Crossword Dating Headline service Syndication services Events / offers Help / contacts Information Living our values Newsroom Reader Offers Style guide Travel offers TV listings Weather Web guides Working at GNL Guardian Weekly Money Observer Home News Friday Review Regulars ... Help Search this site All stories Reviews only Recent features Up in smoke Burned into the memory Is this Britart's ground zero? 'We sang to 1.5bn people' ... More visual arts features Only the lonely At 40, Edward Hopper was a failure who couldn't sell a painting. How did that change? Annie Proulx on the making of a great American artist Saturday May 8, 2004 The Guardian Detail from Office at Night, by Edward Hopper, 1940. Courtesy: Collection Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis Torrents of words and phrases fall on Edward Hopper's paintings. Deadly silence, erotic despair, haunting ambiguity, irony, symbolic decoding, metaphysical, mysterious. Almost every critic, artist, writer (especially writers), art savant, book-jacket designer or media hack sees in his mature paintings solitude, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension. The general critical observation that Hopper's paintings depicted loneliness - and that this loneliness was an integral part of the American character - is a bit puzzling. Hopper himself didn't see it and once commented: "The loneliness thing is overdone." More likely than "loneliness" is the sense of self as different and apart, feelings not limited to Americans. | |
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