I have always been intrigued by the process
in creating a work of art. It is this that drew me to an article on an
exhibition currently held at the Whitney Museum, “Hopper Drawing,” which shows
an expansive collection of drawings Hopper made for his large oil paintings. His
well-known canvases including Soir Bleu (1914),
Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928), From Williamsburg Bridge (1928), Early Sunday Morning (1930), and Nighthawks (1942) among others are shown alongside the many drawings
and sketches that evolved into what we know today of his canvas works.
In the article, “How Edward Hopper
Storyboarded Nighthawks,” as it
appears in ArtNEWS, Cemblast pays close attention to the development of the
characters and setting for what would become his most renowned painting, Nighthawks, bringing to mind, the
writings of James Cuno. For Hopper, a
show focusing on his drawings would have been quite perplexing. As Cemblast
states, “Hopper didn’t consider his drawings as art objects that should be
exhibited or sold. To him, they were simply studio materials – documents of the
process he used to conceive and to plot, in minute detail, the stories he told
on canvas.” Although Hopper did not consider his drawings as art objects, his
studies for the Nighthawk and others are
finally given the attention needed for the public to fully appreciate and understand
the artist and his creative process. Compositional studies of the diner and the
surrounding streetscapes, of the four figures, and the effect of lighting and
contrast reveal the artists thought process, the development of his composition
and style, and the idea that paintings are much more than what the artist had
intended for public display.
The beauty of a fragment, states Cuno, “is
that it is at once part of something else, something larger, and is complete in
itself, even in its partial form.” The sketches of Hopper’s Nighthawk, the fragments of a Brygos
drinking cup, or the literary fragment of the German Romantics, for example, is
an intensely intimate look into a “condensed, intensified pattern, whose
intensity is necessarily accompanied by the pleasure of release from the condensed
to the expansive.” By providing the audience an experience of the condensed,
fragmented parts of drawings and studies, to the expansive image of the final
work on canvas, it comes as no surprise that the exhibit was received with much
acclaim and popularity.
And as Cuno continues further, in an
examination of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien, the compositional and figurative
studies not only provides pleasure in witnessing the condensed as an
evolutionary process in achieving its ultimate expansive state, but is an accumulation
of these very fragments, a collection of parts of painted or drawn studies of
individual figures or groups of figures, put together as if to make of each
canvas a finished painting in and of itself. The evolutionary process to
painting, therefore, of compositional studies and preliminary sketches, are
equally important in understanding, appreciating, and connecting to a work of
art. And even better, a glimpse into the inner workings of a great artist and
his work.
“Paintings ARE made of PARTS…They ARE
visual contraptions…And ALWAYS MORE.”
~ Cuno
Cuno, James. Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust.
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