ACCESS ART
GUIDED TOURS
MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS
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ACCESS ART
GUIDED TOURS
MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS
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Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967) American HIGH NOON, 1949 Oil on canvas Height 27 1/2 inches Width 39 1/2 inches Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Haswell, 1971.7 |
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If we were to pick out a painting or work of art as the most popular work in our collection,
and probably the most sought-after picture by museums around the world, it would be a
toss-up between High Noon by Edward Hopper and our Waterlilies painting
by Claude Monet. But this is classic Hopper. Hopper was quoted as saying that he
couldn't get the shadows right in High Noon so he built a little cardboard model and
then looked at it out in the sunlight at 11:50 in the morning, and because of it he was able
to get the shadows and that striking line which covers the roofline down to her very feet on
the steps of the house just exactly right. You look at this picture, which is hauntingly
vacant, and you find a stillness of time which is so classically Hopper. The isolation, this
eternal act of waiting, yet you also find the promise and hope of sunlight. Interestingly
enough, Hopper who painted this on Cape Cod, later referred to this setting, which is
somewhat nebulous, as "Hopper-Land". He was clearly in a very different place and time
from those people who were painting in an abstracted fashion. But he was not alone, but
it was clearly not as popular in the sense of what the critics were looking for: cutting-edge
originality. They were looking at Franz Kline, they were looking at Jackson Pollock, they
were looking at others of the New York school that were painting in an abstracted fashion.
But there were two really divergent styles of great importance: American realism, which is
in this essence in Hopper's work, quintessentially American. You can place yourself in
this picture because it's, as Hopper-Land, that makes it essentially an American painting
by virtue of its commonality.
Alexander Lee Nyerges
