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Home / Is an Art Movement That Reduced Art to the Bare Essentials

Is an Art Movement That Reduced Art to the Bare Essentials

On view
Floor 7

Date
1930

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on sheet

Dimensions
Overall: 35 three/sixteen × 60 1/4in. (89.4 × 153 cm)

Accession number
31.426

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Rights and reproductions
© Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Gild (ARS), New York

Early Lord's day Morning is 1 of Edward Hopper'southward nigh iconic paintings. Although he described this work as "almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue," Hopper reduced the New York City street to bare essentials. The lettering in the window signs is illegible, architectural ornament is loosely sketched, and human being presence is merely suggested past the diverse curtains differentiating discrete apartments. The long, early on morning shadows in the painting would never appear on a north-south street such as Seventh Avenue. However these very contrasts of light and shadow, and the succession of verticals and horizontals, create the charged, almost theatrical, atmosphere of empty buildings on an unpopulated street at the offset of the day. Although Hopper is known equally a quintessential twentieth-century American realist, and his paintings are fundamentally representational, this piece of work demonstrates his emphasis on simplified forms, painterly surfaces, and studiously synthetic compositions.

Visual Description

Early Sunday Morning time is a horizontal oil painting on canvas. It is 3 feet tall and 6 feet wide, so it is twice as wide every bit it is tall. It shows a block of three fastened buildings, all two stories tall, with shops on the street level and apartments to a higher place them. The buildings extend horizontally across the painting from the left edge to the correct edge. You see them as if you're standing across the street from them.

Above all the buildings is a strip of blueish sky, darker blueish on the left, condign lighter and tinged with yellow toward the right side of the painting. Below the buildings is a sidewalk, a curb, and a thin slice of the street. The sidewalk, curb, and street too run from one edge of the painting to the other.

The buildings are in New York City, but Hopper leaves out details similar street signs. So information technology could exist any Chief Street, in whatever small boondocks in the Usa, during the eye decades of the twentieth century. There's nothing living or natural in this painting. No people, pets, birds, flowers or trees, though in that location are hints of human being activity in the apartment windows above the stores. And the sunlight is potent.

Near a 3rd of the fashion in from the left there is a fire hydrant on the sidewalk. And slightly right of eye on the sidewalk there is a barber'southward pole with red, white, and blue diagonal stripes. Except for the barber's pole, there is no way to know the business organization of the stores. The storefront windows have lettering on them, but y'all tin can't make out the words. The storefronts on the left and in the center are painted green and have rolled up awnings to a higher place their windows. The store on the right is painted blood-red.

The 2nd floor above all the stores is painted deep brick red. There are x apartment windows, all the aforementioned size, stretching beyond the stores beneath. Some windows are open up, some have yellowish shades pulled down to differing lengths. Some windows take dark window coverings. A few have white defunction. In this small particular, Hopper makes usa acutely aware that people are missing from the moving picture.

The sunlight on the buildings is very brilliant, and it is shining into the painting from the correct. You can tell by the shadows. Both the barber's pole and the fire hydrant cast long, night shadows to the left, as they block the sunlight coming from the right. The length of these shadows shows that the sun is nevertheless rising and low on the horizon. It's the sunlight and the absence of people that suggest the time is early on forenoon and that the day of the calendar week is Sunday, when few people are outside working or shopping.

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Source: https://whitney.org/collection/works/46345