Edward Hopper: The Eternal Instant

In the years of the Great Depression and the New Deal in America, the master realist painter Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967) looked at everyday life in America with disenchantment and melancholy, yet searching for the existence of a meaning in it. This artist is open to the possibility of the infinite, and he looks for its signs, not in a transcendent dimension, but in the reality that surrounds him. It is a reality that doesn't consist so much of skyscrapers and Broadway lights but rather of the limited horizon of small town America. Realism, or being faithful to the real, for Hopper does not simply mean imitating what is in front of him. Rather, realism is evident, above all, in his fidelity to what his dialectic, and at times dramatic relationship with reality stirs up in him: "My aim in painting has always been to make the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature." When representing reality Hopper concentrates his attention particularly on light. "Mayb