Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Edward Hopper
American; 20th-century
Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Hartley | Hopper: Drawings from Two New England Collections)
60%
Study of Two Sailboats. no date. Graphite on paper
Hopper drew suggestively with a wayward line. This differs from the surety and stillness of his finished paintings. In fact, this drawing, despite its depiction of moving vessels, is characterized by a stillness in its shapes (look at the broad face of that mandorla that signifies the main boat's hull) that conflicts with the quavering nature of the marks that make them up (look at that line sloping down into nothing off of the hull's right edge). This tension manifests too in the way the broad swaths of sea and sky are interrupted by the slapdash horizon line and interior frame. The dead flatness of the horizon, pierced and punctuated by the vertical masts, is reminiscent of Lane. (TFS, 2025)
Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Hartley | Hopper: Drawings from Two New England Collections)
40%
Study for High Noon. c1949. Graphite on paper
Given how important the geometrical precision of an arrangement is to Hopper's art, it's interesting to see how lax his studies can be. What's surprising isn't that there's a looseness to the rendering here, or that this drawing is full of stops and starts that indicate Hopper was figuring things out as he went (the figure at center and the mess of lines beside it; the windows' eaves and panes). Instead, it takes one aback that the focus here isn't on, say, massing or symmetry or the relations between planes — this is a fast sensory registration of a real event. As art, that's not worth that much on its own terms (this drawing retreads too many of its own steps to qualify as good draftsmanship). But as evidence of Hopper's aesthetic mind, it's rather valuable: it suggests that he worked towards the tautness of his paintings from a point of pure labile impression. (TFS, 2025)