A woman in the sun
| A woman in the sun |
|---|
| Edward Hopper , 1961 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 101.9 x 155.6 cm |
|
Whitney Museum of American Art , New York
Link to the picture |
A woman in the sun ( A Woman in the Sun ) is a painting by the American painter Edward Hopper . Like most of his works of art, it belongs to American realism . The picture is one of the most important and valuable exhibits in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York .
Description and interpretation
In the middle of the picture stands a naked woman with a cigarette in her right hand, her posture resembling a column; her face looks thoughtful, her body is illuminated from the front by incident sun rays, her back is in the dark. The window through which the glaring morning light falls into the room is not shown, only part of the curtain that is pushed aside is in the picture. A second window gives a view of two simple, inanimate dunes. The room is unfurnished except for one bed. Only two paintings, the motifs of which are not recognizable, adorn the otherwise bare and empty walls. The bedspread lies disorganized and across the mattress, under the edge lie two high-heeled shoes, one of which fell on its side inadvertently. As for all of his female characters, Hopper's wife Josephine Nivison was the model here.
In A Woman in the Sun, Hopper picks up a motif that he had already implemented in a very similar way in The Morning Sun of 1952. Overall, in Hopper's late work, female figures in sunlight are particularly often depicted, with the importance of the sun increasing until it finally completely displaces the human person in the painting Sun in an Empty Room from 1963. Hopper said he was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and figures than in any symbolism.
Interpreters saw and see in Hopper's portraits above all "loneliness", "isolation" or "melancholy", which are reflected in the barren emptiness of the outside world. Hopper himself did not want the "thing with loneliness" to be overemphasized, but at the same time expressed the assumption that the concept of loneliness ultimately expresses the whole human condition. But in his pictures there is always a longing and hope for the unknown that lies outside of what is depicted and which the woman's gaze in the sun is also directed to. In contrast to the figures in Hopper's work Morgen in a Stadt from 1944 and The Morning Sun , the model in this painting also deliberately, deliberately and entirely exposes itself to the light of the sun and does not protect itself from it with a cloth or a covering posture .
There is a charcoal sketch for the painting with minor differences in composition. In particular, instead of the picture on the west wall, there is a chair in a corner, and the woman's legs are noticeably closer together than in the completed painting.
reception
In 2009, the Norwegian writer Frode Grytten was inspired by a series of pictures by Hopper to create ten stories; title decisive for the history collection is the painting Woman in the sun . In his meditations on paintings by Edward Hopper from 1994, the Canadian-American poet Mark Strand also expresses himself in detail about the picture, but refuses to speculate too much about the past and future of the woman depicted: “Her past remains like her back in the shadow. "
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ "I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than any symbolism." Sheena Wagstaff, David Anfam : Edward Hopper . Tate Publishing, 2004, p. 12, ISBN 978-1-85437-533-9 .
- ^ "The loneliness thing is overdone." Versus "It's probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I do not know. It could be the whole human condition. "Gale Levin: Hopper's Places. Second edition. University of California Press, 1998, p. 6, ISBN 0-520-21676-8 .
- ↑ A comparison of Tomorrow in a City and The Morning Sun is offered by Rolf G. Renner: Hopper . Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 56f, ISBN 3-8228-6597-4 .
- ^ Coal sketch for A Woman in the Sun , Fraenkel Gallery website, accessed on December 27, 2013.
- ↑ Review of Grytten's collection of stories A Woman in the Sun on Deutschlandradio Kultur , July 10, 2009, accessed on December 27, 2013.
- ↑ Review of Strand's book On Paintings by Edward Hopper in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 10, 2005, accessed December 27, 2013.
