Interview with Chief Curator, Martha Oaks.
There’s a good chance you’ve seen Edward Hopper’s quietly dramatic landscapes and scenes of ordinary life. “Nighthawks,” his painting of a luminescent, late-night diner is iconic. But it took time for the now legendary 20th-century artist to find his visual voice. A new exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum, “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape,” transports visitors back to a pivotal summer, 100 years ago, when Hopper met the woman who catalyzed his creativity and his career.
Curator Elliot Bostwick Davis unfolded the tale as dozens of canvases, drawings and prints were being installed in the museum’s gallery. In the early 1900s, New York artists flocked to Gloucester’s coast hoping to capture its picturesque geography, seaswept structures and coveted clarity of light.
It was 1923 when the then little-known Edward Hopper returned to the Massachusetts coast by train. At 41 years old, he was hungry for recognition and felt rather desperate. “He’s only sold one painting over a decade earlier,” Davis said. “He knows he’s really gotta make or break it. He’s been persevering, but he hasn’t managed to break through.”
Another artist was also in town with her brushes. Forty-year-old Josephine Nivison had crossed paths with Hopper on previous New England painting trips. While they shared the same influential teacher, Robert Henri, the two artists studied apart in classes separated by gender. But they finally got to “meet cute” formally, thanks to Nivison’s feline traveling companion.
Turns out Nivison’s suggestion was pivotal. Now a trove of the duo’s watercolors are among 66 works in the new exhibition, “Edward Hopper & Cape Anne: Illuminating an American Landscape.”
How Cape Ann, a lost cat and a meet-cute catalyzed artist Edward Hopper’s career | WBUR News
GLOUCESTER — The pervasive reek of fish, and a sky filled with gulls are signature elements of summer here in the heart of Cape Ann; I firmly believe those not beguiled by its rough charms and desolate beauty just haven’t been here yet. (Full disclosure: I live just a few miles down the road.) Gloucester’s easy sense of self makes it unpretentiously authentic down to its bones — a “real” place, as someone I know once called it, an unvarnished anomaly, resolutely true to itself..
Was it that grounded unfussiness that struck Edward Hopper as he stepped off the train here in the summer of 1923? He had been once before, in 1912, on the urging of his friend the artist Leon Kroll, and returned home to New York to a decade of futility. By the time his train pulled into Gloucester in 1923, he had only ever sold a single oil painting, a 1911 picture of a heeling sailboat at the 1913 New York Armory Show, where European radicals like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse would make their American debuts. For Hopper, that first modest success must have felt like his last — suddenly, instantly outdated and parochial-seeming amid the shock of the new. Hopper, 41, unmarried, and scratching out a living in commercial illustration, had come to Gloucester in 1923 in search of something that must have felt like a last chance.
That’s just one of the rich stories to be found in “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating a Landscape,” a new exhibition that opened at Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum this week. In the handsome catalog that accompanies it, curator Elliot Bostwick Davis tracks the arc of one of the most significant careers in American art — one that came close to never-was. With its 60-plus works, about half of them on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Davis positions that Gloucester summer as a pivot point where Hopper, finally, started to become Hopper. Gloucester, bustling, gruff, and workaday, its weatherbeaten clapboard houses piled into a rocky nook of coast, gave him what he had been looking for at last.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/20/arts/edward-hopper-gloucester-was-last-chance-fresh-start/
Dawn Dexter was surprised to learn that an outdoor lunch meant for a new class of docents, museum volunteers and existing docents at the James Center at Cape Ann Museum Green on Friday was really meant as a way to honor her for founding the docent program in 2008.
Docents act as volunteer guides in the museum. Since Dexter helped inaugurate the first class of docents 15 years ago, they have provided more than 3,500 tours and engaged more than 21,000 people on what makes Cape Ann unique and inspiring, said the museum’s director, Oliver Barker.
The lunch also marked the addition of the 2023 class of 30 new docents who had gone through a 10-week training, bringing the number of those actively giving tours to more than 80 people.
Also honoring Dexter and the volunteers was the museum’s Head Librarian and Archivist Trenton Carls and Head of Education and Engagement Miranda Aisling, as well as Mayor Greg Verga who presented a special citation thanking Dexter from his office.
GLOUCESTER — “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape” is the summer’s big show up here; the Cape Ann Museum will open the exhibition next week, produced in partnership with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, on Hopper’s brief time spent perched on this rocky outcrop of Atlantic coastline.
“Edward Hopper’s New York,” the Whitney’s showcase last fall of Hopper’s calculated, chilly visions of his hometown every which way — its bridges and tunnels, high-rises and tenements, apartments and lunch counters — set a standard for dispassionate observation of urban life as the city transformed into a modern megalopolis at midcentury. When he traveled, it was neither far nor wide; but Gloucester was an early candidate for him and his wife, the painter Jo Nivison Hopper, to call home away from home. Lured north from the city by Leon Kroll, an important peer, Hopper and Nivision hemmed and hawed and eventually settled on Cape Cod, where they spent summers painting for more than 30 years.
With or without them, Gloucester’s role in American art history is legendary; Hopper and Nivison traveled a well-worn path to Cape Ann, where a near superhighway of American Modernism had been established between Manhattan and Gloucester’s craggy shores. But the town’s role in American art history was seeded centuries before, making it fertile ground for a pair of young painters to seek inspiration and community. In brief, here’s a look at some of the town’s most notable creatives, and what drew them north.
One hundred years ago, in Gloucester’s 300th anniversay year, a New York artist best known for his etchings and illustrations and who had not sold a painting in 10 years arrived on his second trip to Gloucester.
Instead of creating oil paintings of the waterfront, Edward Hopper painted watercolors of the seaport’s modest homes, immigrant neighborhoods and trawlers.
It was his 1923 watercolor with loose brushwork of an ornate Victorian house with a mansard roof on Rocky Neck that led Hopper to become of the best known American painters of the 20th century. […]
On Friday, June 30, about 100 years after it was painted, “The Mansard Roof” returned to Gloucester, to the Cape Ann Museum, in the city’s 400+ anniversay year.
‘The Mansard Roof’ at home at Cape Ann Museum | | gloucestertimes.com
In Gloucester, 9 photographers look at the remains of a once-thriving Cape Ann industry.
GLOUCESTER – “QuarryArt” is a double-edged title. The show consists of, yes, art about quarries: 37 photographs by nine photographers, with various Cape Ann stone quarries as their subject. That’s the more obvious meaning of quarry art. The other is that, as so many of the images show, the quarries themselves are a kind of art.
What we see is a violation of the land, the residue of literal gouging for profits. Yet what remains behind has a stark and unmistakable beauty. The quarries are a version of Earth art, land art, environmental art — take your pick — long before the terms existed.
“QuarryArt” is at the Cape Ann Museum Green. It runs through July 30. Note that CAM Green is slightly more than a mile away from the museum’s main site, in downtown Gloucester. It’s a five-minute drive or not-unpleasant 20-minute walk. Speaking of not-unpleasant, admission is free. It’s open Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays.
The exhibition is in the Janet & William Ellery James Center, one of four buildings on the CAM Green campus. The gallery space is airy and unfussy: high ceiling, exposed ducts and pipes, everything painted white. The spareness suits the photographic subject matter.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/06/27/arts/when-quarries-are-photographic-quarry/
By Elliot Bostwick Davis.
When Edward Hopper (1882-1967) arrived in Gloucester in the summer of 1923, he would be celebrating his forty-first birthday on July 22nd. This year, July 22nd marks the opening of the Cape Ann Museum exhibition, Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape, the first show devoted to works in all media produced during his five summers in Gloucester and marking the 100th anniversary of Hopper’s transformation as an artist during the summer of 1923.
GLOUCESTER, MA. It may surprise some that it took over 40 years for Edward Hopper (1882-1967) to sell more than one painting. Throughout the early 1900s he experienced constant frustration and uncertainty, wandering between Europe, New York and New England in an attempt to cultivate a distinct voice. Driven by a staunch individualist ethos, Hopper refused affiliation with existing art movements and became somewhat of a outlier, languishing in obscurity and surviving on commercial illustration while his former art school colleagues achieved the sales and recognition that he longed for. Then, in the summer of 1923 he made for the coastal village of Gloucester, Massachusetts – a popular haven for artists – and everything changed.
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