Edward Hopper. The painter who inspired cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Kenneth Lonergan and Martin Scorsese are examples of some of the film directors to whom Hopper left a great mark that would later be reflected in their films.

A New Yorker by birth (1882) and an artist by vocation, after training as an illustrator, Hopper studied until 1906 at the New York School of Art, where he joined the American figurative tradition, the predecessor of pop art, Hopper first painted in New York, where he grew up and worked as an advertising artist (like Andy Warhol). The works of Velázquez, Francisco de Goya and Édouard Manet were great points of reference for the young artist. He soon traveled to Paris where he was able to imbibe the impressionist language of the time. But “I missed the light of New York, its ramshackle spaces, used, destroyed by woodworm. The beauty of Paris can amaze, but in my case, it could not inspire me,” he would say. He traveled part of a Europe whose lights and shadows inspired him to forge his style.

Hopper abandoned the nostalgia of the old continent to settle in the United States, where he began to capture urban environments always with his characteristic halo of loneliness. Melancholy also accompanied him in his landscape canvases in which he favored the sea and cliffs as a backdrop.
Voyeurism is another of the traits of a painter who loved the observation of everyday circumstances, which he then portrayed, managing to capture the loneliness that gave life to the universe of his characters. All of them endowed with a realism in which pause and silence are appreciated, as if it were a scene.

He was able to give color to solitude and paint silence. Hopper was a man of few words. He spoke little but observed much. This was the basis of his philosophy, as he once said: “Great art is the external expression of an inner life in the artist and this inner life will produce his personal vision of the world. The essential element is imagination and there is no level of artificial invention that can replace it.”

He was over 40 years old when he held his first solo exhibition in a gallery. Ten years later, in 1933, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded four years earlier and then housed in an office building, organized an exhibition that gave him the decisive push to national recognition.

In six decades Hopper created a total of 335 paintings, along with other works on paper. The painter worked slowly and scrupulously. He took a long time to choose a motif and decide whether it was worth portraying.

This artist and great film buff was also inspired by the Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. Many of his paintings had a strong influence on a multitude of frames and scenes of renowned directors of the seventh art, who found in Hopper an artist with a gift for composition on a cinematographic level.

To this day Edward Hopper continues to be one of the most recognized painters in the history of 20th century art. A great portraitist of mid-century America and a virtuoso of modern expression, he was able to capture urban environments and landscapes, imbuing them with the sense of solitude that makes them unique.