Edward Hopper and the American Hotel

Edward Hopper's work explores hotels,motels,and tourist homes, shedding light on his professional practice and the changes in transportation and communications. This book explores his lifelong investigation of such spaces, including covers for the trade journal Hotel Management, watercolors made from hotel windows and rooftops in Mexico, and the broader context of transportation history. It also includes two TripTik-like, removable maps that trace the journeys Hopper and his wife took by car in the 1940s and 1950s.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 216 pages
Publication date: 10 December 2019
Publisher: Yale University Press

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is a renowned American artist known for his paintings, sketches, and illustrations. His work often features hotels, motels, and tourist homes, along with streets, lighthouses, and gas stations, creating a visual language of transportation infrastructure. In this captivating book, ten essays delve into Hopper's lifelong exploration of these spaces, shedding light on his professional practice and the significant changes in transportation and communications that impacted work, leisure, race, class, and gender.

Hopper's cover art for the trade journal Hotel Management, as well as other famous works, provoke thought on the complex roles of the emerging New Woman; the erasure of hotel work and workers; the contemporary associations of the color white with cleanliness and purity; the watercolors Hopper created from hotel windows and rooftops in Mexico; and the broader context of transportation history.

A final chapter situates Hopper's contribution to the fascinating role that the hotel has played in the broader development of American art in the 20th century. As a unique feature, the book's backflap holds two TripTik-like, removable maps that trace the journeys Hopper and his wife, the artist Josephine "Jo" Nivison Hopper, took by car in the 1940s and 1950s. Selected correspondence and quotations from Jos's diaries join reproductions of postcards and ephemera illuminating their—and fellow Americans—shifting travel habits.

Distributed for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, this exhibition schedule includes stops in Virginia.

Weight: 1250g
Dimension: 280 x 244 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780300246889