Many of the 18 known Hopper HM front covers were done in the mid-1920s. Allowing no air in from the outside, a revolving door was, in the words of an early promoter, “always closed.” This helps explain how Hotel Lobby, a painting finished in January of 1943, and featuring a couple in winter clothing, could also depict a coatless woman in a short-sleeve dress. Variations of the revolving door had existed since at least the mid-nineteenth century with the quest to regulate ventilation and keep temperatures constant in public settings. For all Hopper’s urban architectural imagery, revolving doors appear in just two of the studies for this work and in only one other painting ( Sunlight in a Cafeteria, 1958, in the Yale University Art Gallery). Even more important for crowd and climate control is the revolving door-cropped at left in Hotel Lobby. The lines formed on the floor reflect period design principles treating carpet as a means to guide crowds and determine the placement of furniture. On the back wall, a view through dark drapes in an open doorway reveals a restaurant with linen-covered tables. Seated in an upholstered chair, a young woman in a blue dress reads her book, reclining at angles that mirror those of her more mature counterpart across the foyer. The result of at least nine study drawings, Hotel Lobby is probably Hopper’s most comprehensive treatment of the hospitality services theme. These middle-class hybrid spaces contained multiple units with shared bathrooms and frequently contained sitting rooms with pianos and offered a restaurant, a doorman, and daily maid service. Popular, urban lodging houses offering short-term leases, these were essentially apartments but with the amenities of a hotel. The three-story, burnt orange structure at far left in the painted version is the House of Genius boardinghouse, at 61 Washington Square South, which, at various times from the 1910s through the 1930s, housed artists, authors, poets, and musicians, including Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill, and Alan Seeger.Īpartment hotels are among the structures figuring in the architectural types Hopper synthesized in selected compositions such as House at Dusk. The Hoppers’ friend, artist John Sloan, lived at the Hotel Judson for eight years, until he was evicted by New York University (which had earlier annexed the property). Hopper captured this view in the painting November, Washington Square, which he commenced in 1932 and to which he added sky components in 1959. Designed by McKim, Mead & White and built in 1893, this was actually part of the Hotel Judson, the proceeds from which benefitted the colonnaded Judson Memorial Church next door. Looking out from the vantage point of their home at 3 Washington Square North in New York, the Hoppers would have encountered several hybrid rental structures, including a ten-story campanile at 53 Washington Square South. For the most part, the covers depict elegant couples dancing, dining and boating in a hotel environment. Hotel-generated revenue fell by more than 25 percent in the Depression years of 1929 through 1935, which was hardly a deterrent to Hopper.īetween the World Wars, Hopper produced at least two etchings and five paintings synthesizing architectural components of various urban hotels-some of which he knew from living in New York, while others harked back to images suggested in the pages of Hotel Management during the years he produced its covers. Edward and Jo lived much of their lives in Manhattan, which, like other regions across the country, experienced a massive hotel-building boom in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In the early 1920s, Hopper produced illustrations and covers for Tavern Topics, published and distributed by the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, and in 19, he drew eighteen brilliantly illuminated covers for the trade magazine Hotel Management. More than half are composites of sites, with no small amount of invention and artistic license. Sometimes he titled these works as “hotel” or “motel,” but just as often he did not. Beginning in the mid-1920s and through the early 1960s, Hopper explored hospitality services subjects in paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints. He augmented his knowledge of hospitality services as a frequent guest in several lodgings on the long-distance automobile trips he took with his wife, the artist Josephine Hopper. From 1920 through 1925 he worked as a commercial illustrator for Hotel Management and Tavern Topics from the Great Depression through the Cold War. The American artist Edward Hopper was known for interest in hotels, motels, tourist homes, and the wide scope of hospitality services.
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