Major exhibition at Fondation Beyeler brings Hopper's landscapes to German-speaking Switzerland for the first time

For the first time, the works of Edward Hopper (Nyack, 1882 - Manhattan, 1967) are coming to German-speaking Switzerland: from January 26 to May 17, 2020, the Fondation Bayeler in Basel will host a major exhibition dedicated to one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. In particular, the exhibition will focus extensively on Hopper’s vision of the American landscape in his paintings, a theme sparsely addressed by exhibitions, where his celebrated scenes of urban life executed between the 1920s and 1960s are usually the protagonists instead.

The artist inaugurated a modern approach to an artistic genre established by tradition: Hopperian landscapes show only subtly the action of man on nature; they present limitless spaces that nevertheless seem to depict only a tiny part of an immense whole.

They are compositions of clear geometry; typical elements are the houses that symbolize human settlement. Railroad lines structure the paintings horizontally and represent man’s aspiration to measure himself against the vastness of space. The expanse of the sky and a particular light let one perceive, even in a static landscape, the grandeur of nature in constant motion.

Moreover, Hopper’s landscapes give the impression that invisible events are happening outside the painting, as in the case of Cape Cod Morning, a 1950 painting: the woman is intent on looking out a window, but the viewer does not see what she is observing because it is outside the pictorial space. Visible landscapes are always contrasted with the invisible and subjective inner landscapes of the viewer.

All her paintings are imbued with melancholy and loneliness. In comparing rural and urban landscapes, Hopper also sometimes denounces the brutal intrusion of man into nature, as he provides the idea of amelancholy America, marked by the dark sides of progress; an enormous boundless space that has become popular especially in its film version, from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest to Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas to Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves. One room in the exhibition will screen the 3-D short film entitled Two or Three Things I Know about Edward Hopper, the director’s special and personal tribute to the painter. In search of theHopper Spirit, Wenders traveled America collecting impressions later brought together in the film conceived for this exhibition.

The exhibition features 65 works by Hopper completed from 1909 to 1965, and the idea for this one came from the permanent loan of Cape Ann Granite, a landscape the artist executed in 1928. The work had been part of the Rockefeller Collection for decades and dates from a period when there was a noticeable growing interest in Hopper’s work. The exhibition is organized by the Fondation Beyeler in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which brings together the largest collection of Hopper’s paintings in the world.

For info: www.fondationbeyeler.ch

Hours: Daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Wednesday until 8 p.m.

Image: Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning (1950; oil on canvas, 86.7 x 102.3 cm; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation) © Heirs of Josephine Hopper / 2019, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gene Young

Major exhibition at Fondation Beyeler brings Hopper's landscapes to German-speaking Switzerland for the first time

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