Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Traces the life and career of this modern American artist, looks at a variety of his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings, and discusses themes in his work.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Many Hopper paintings are familiar icons of America, but the literature on this self-contained painter is slim. Nor does Hobbs's book add significantly. Excluding technique, artistic context, and intellectual environment, Hobbs concentrates on content and its interpretation. He sees Hopper's work as a response to largely economic stressthe isolation of people in a world of cars, trains, motels, and their loss of a sense of belonging. Some interpretations are intriguing, some strained, and the term alienation is overworked. Lots of illustrations; some in color seem overly bright. For large collections. Margot Karp, Pratt Inst. Lib., Brooklyn, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Hobbs focuses on the meaning of the inner world that Hopper conveyed in his realistic but often enigmatic paintings. Hobbs's premise, similar to that stated earlier by Lloyd Goodrich in Edward Hopper (1971), is that Hopper's works ``are seen from the outside looking in, as by a detached spectator observing the unconscious actors and their settings.'' Hobbs therefore probes Hopper's works from the observer's point of view. Tied to a chronology of the artist's career, Hobbs's discussions are thought-provoking and perceptive. Hopper's works are seen as convening a world made impersonal by the automobile and the movies, a world whose cohesion is disturbed by the problems of industrialization, the Great Depression, and WW II. There is no doubt that Hopper's works provoke speculation and that he recognized the ``pscyhologic'' content that a viewer might bring. Goodrich and Gail Levin-in Edward Hopper; The Art and the Artist (CH, Jan '81)-give tentative and tempered interpretations. However, Hobbs sometimes goes beyond intelligent hypotheses to bald statements of assumed content; an unsophisticated reader may forget that these are hypotheses. The aforementioned volumes are better documented, but this is, nonetheless, a beautifully produced introductory study with fine reproductions, a chronology of the artist's career, and a good short bibliography.-J.J. Poesch, Tulane University

Booklist Review

The third and fourth volumes in this series uphold the high standards of printing, paper, layout, and binding of their predecessors, McLanathan's Gilbert Stuart (Booklist 83:181 O 1 86) and Mathews' Mary Cassatt (83:1639 Jl 87). Hobbs' treatment of the arguably most popular twentieth-century U.S. artist is almost exclusively critical, wisely so since Hopper's life was calm and since Hobbs has some new ideas about the great realist. It is a commonplace that Hopper is the visual poet of alienation. Hobbs lets this perception stand and pursues a complementary argument that Hopper was a critic of progress whose concern was to make viewers of his art think about the costs in lost graciousness and sociability consequent upon the huge modern-day population shift from country to city. To effect this critique, Hopper adopted the viewpoint of the tourist speeding through the landscape in a car, of the city walker hurrying past apartment and business windows, glimpsing bits of human dramas whose meanings are ambiguous or properly discernible only through the kind of scrutiny merely passing by disallows. These are exciting theses brilliantly advanced. Walker's study of Whistler is basically biographical, and with excellent reason, for few artists have lived more colorfully than the American expatriate in England who abetted the artistic revolution of French impressionism. Gifted with wit and a fine writing style as well as artistic talent, Whistler shook up the English art world as had no one since Turner. Walker energetically recounts Whistler's career in frankly partisan tones, averring, for instance, that some sentences from his hero's great lecture establishing the modern doctrine of art for art's sake are ``more beautiful than anything written by Ruskin.'' Nor does he slight Whistler's absolutely individual style in paintings, which, he says, anticipated abstract expressionism. Both sterling additions to what is becoming an epochal series have biochronologies, selected bibliographies, and indexes appended. RO.