Editing Edward Hopper (section)

=== Personality and vision ===
Always reluctant to discuss himself and his art, Hopper simply said, "The whole answer is there on the canvas."<ref name="Maker 1990, p. 17" /> Hopper was stoic and fatalistic—a quiet introverted man with a gentle sense of humor and a frank manner. Hopper was someone drawn to an emblematic, anti-narrative [[Symbolism (arts)|symbolism]],<ref>{{cite journal |last=Anfam |first=David |title=Review of 'A Catalogue Raisonné by Gail Levin' |journal=The Burlington Magazine |year=1999}}</ref> who "painted short isolated moments of configuration, saturated with suggestion".<ref>{{cite book |last=Strand |first=Mark |title=Hopper |publisher=Knopf |year=1994 |isbn=9780307701244}}</ref> His silent spaces and uneasy encounters "touch us where we are most vulnerable",<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Berman |first=Avis |title=Hopper the Supreme American Realist of the 20th Century |magazine=Smithsonian Magazine |date=June 2007}}</ref> and have "a suggestion of melancholy, that melancholy being enacted".<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Strand |first=Mark |title=Review of 'Hopper Drawing' Whitney Museum 2013 |magazine=The New York Review of Books |date=June 2015}}</ref> His sense of color revealed him as a pure painter,<ref>{{cite magazine |title=Carnegie Traces Hopper's Rise to Fame |magazine=Art Digest |date=April 1937}}</ref> as he "turned the [[Puritan]] into the purist, in his quiet canvasses where blemishes and blessings balance".<ref>{{cite magazine |title=The Silent Witness |magazine=[[Time (magazine)|Time]] |date=December 24, 1956}}</ref> According to critic [[Lloyd Goodrich]], he was "an eminently native painter, who more than any other was getting more of the quality of America into his canvases".<ref>Maker, Sherry, ''Edward Hopper'', Brompton Books, New York, 1990, p. 6, {{ISBN|0-517-01518-8}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Goodrich |first=Lloyd |title=The Paintings of Edward Hopper |journal=The Arts |date=March 1927}}</ref>

Conservative in politics and social matters (Hopper asserted for example that "artists' lives should be written by people very close to them"),<ref>{{cite book |last=Kuh |first=Katharine |title=The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists |location=New York |publisher=Harper and Row |year=1960}}</ref> he accepted things as they were and displayed a lack of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was well-read, and many of his paintings show figures reading.<ref>{{harvnb|Wagstaff|2004|p=88}}</ref> He was generally good company and unperturbed by silences, though sometimes taciturn, grumpy, or detached. He was always serious about his art and the art of others, and when asked would return frank opinions.<ref>{{harvnb|Wagstaff|2004|pp=84–86}}</ref>

Hopper's most systematic declaration of his philosophy as an artist was given in a handwritten note, titled "Statement", submitted in 1953 to the journal ''Reality'':

{{quote|text=Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.

The term life used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.|author=Edward Hopper|source=Published as part of "Statements by Four Artists" in ''Reality'', vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1953). Hopper's handwritten draft is reproduced in Levin, ''Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography'', p. 461.}}

Though Hopper claimed that he didn't consciously embed psychological meaning in his paintings, he was deeply interested in [[Freud]] and the power of the subconscious mind. He wrote in 1939: "So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect."<ref>{{harvnb|Wagstaff|2004|p=71}}</ref>