This exhibition catalog offers an examination of the hotel and motel imagery—and the culture it represents—in Edward Hopper’s (American, 1882-1967) iconic paintings and watercolors. Using recreated itineraries, travel along with Edward Hopper on his various road trips and encounter hotels, staff, and guests as seen through the artist's eyes.
The painter, draftsman, and illustrator is one of America’s best-known and most frequently exhibited artists. Hotels, motels, and tourist homes are recurring motifs in his work, along with streets, lighthouses, and gas stations forming a visual vocabulary of transportation infrastructure. In ten essays, this fascinating volume explores Hopper’s lifelong investigation of such spaces, shedding light on both his professional practice and far-reaching changes in transportation and communications, which affected not only work and leisure but also dynamics of race, class, and gender.
As a unique feature, the book's backflap also holds two "TripTik"-like, removable maps that trace the journeys that Hopper and his wife, the artist Josephine “Jo” Nivison Hopper, took by car in the 1940s and 1950s; selected correspondence and quotations from Jo’s own diaries join reproductions of postcards and ephemera illuminating their—and fellow Americans’—shifting travel habits.
Softcover / 216 pages / 267 color illustrations, including 2 removable maps
9 1/2" x 11"
