Hopper: An American Love Story
Phil Grabsky, UK, 2022o
The nighthawks in a 1940s New York café, the petrol station in the middle of nowhere, the lonely country houses on hills... The American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has shaped our image of the American way of life more than almost any other 20th-century artist. This film uses key paintings to delve into the life and work of this great creator, who never wasted many words on his art but nevertheless made everything else subordinate to it.
This documentary about Edward Hopper (1882-1967) marks the beginning of a series of artist portraits that have made the English production company Seventh Art an international name under the label “Exhibition on Screen”. Based primarily on major exhibitions that bring together key works, each of the films explores the style and biography of a great artist with the help of curators, art historians and contemporary testimonies. But the focus is on the images themselves. The series' initiator and producer, Phil Grabsky, and his directing partners carefully stage them with an eye for telling details and embed them in their context. It is striking, for example, how central Europe was to the development of the quintessentially American painter Hopper, how difficult the transition to freelance painting was for the sought-after illustrator, and how uncompromisingly he subordinated everything to his work, including his marriage to the watercolourist Josephine Nivison, who severely restricted her own career for her husband. Particularly through the cinematic treatment, Hopper's mysterious scenic arrangements catch the eye, embedding their seemingly lost figures in enchanting color harmonies. Ambiguities such as these, as well as the subtle exploration of the dizzying masterpieces, make each of the films a visual delight – and do full justice to the title of the series: exhibitions for the screen, which creates real added value.
Andreas FurlerGalleryo
