Western Motel

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Western Motel
Western Motel Hopper 1957.jpg
Year1957
Medium oil paint, canvas
Dimensions76.8 cm (30.2 in) × 127.3 cm (50.1 in)
Location Yale University Art Gallery
Accession no.1961.18.32  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
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Western Motel is a 1957 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper. The work depicts a sunlit motel room with a woman sitting on a bed, staring towards the viewer, but looking to her right. It is a composite interior scene, synthesized from motels in El Paso, Texas, that Hopper visited, and the Rustic Canyon art colony in Los Angeles, where he held a six-month artists' residency. Both the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the United States have hosted artistic 3D reconstructions of the painting. The work is currently held by the Yale University Art Gallery.

Contents

Background

Edward Hopper worked as a commercial artist in the 1920s for the hospitality industry illustrating hotel magazines. From the 1930s until the 1960s, Hopper and his wife Josephine Hopper (Jo) enjoyed traveling on long road trips to Mexico and across the United States by car, making great use of motels and hotels along the way. Hopper used these themes in his work, with many paintings making use of artistic and interpretive renderings and idealized depictions of the original places where they stayed. [1] Two notable works from this time on this theme include Room in New York (1932) and Hotel Lobby (1943). [2]

In July 1956, the Huntington Hartford Foundation awarded Hopper $1000 ($11,565 in 2024) and a six-month residence at their Rustic Canyon art colony near Pacific Palisades in California. Hopper was not a fan of California nor of art colonies, but after Jo discovered that people had nothing but good things to say about Rustic Canyon, she convinced Edward to go. They left their summer home on Cape Cod in October, with plans to drive a southwesterly route, presumably at some time in November. [3] A Time magazine cover story on Hopper from December 1956, indicated that they drove a 1954 green and white Buick Century sedan to California, [4] arriving in Los Angeles on December 9. [3] Finding the lodgings comfortable and the food beyond reproach, they remained for the full six months. During their visit, they stayed in accommodations designed by Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. [5]

Development

Hopper began two works during this time, an oil painting titled Western Motel and a watercolor titled California Hills. [5] He initially made a charcoal and graphite study for Western Motel, [6] informally referred to as a Sketch of Hotel, that originally featured two windows and two figures seated in a hotel lobby-like environment. The initial sketch changed in the painting, with the window on the left becoming a wall, the two figures reduced to one, a woman sitting on a bed, with the hotel lobby transformed into a bedroom. [7]

Hopper completed the painting in either February or March 1957. [5] In her notes for the work, Jo recalls that the large window depicted in the painting was similar to the Wright-designed window in their room that looked out over Rustic Canyon. She described the scene as "Deluxe green motel room, mahogany bed, pink cover, dark red chair with blue robe", with the woman as a "haughty blond in dark red, her Buick outside window green." [5] The Hoppers left Rustic Canyon for Cape Cod on June 6, with Edward, now 74 years old, driving the 3,000 mile journey. They arrived at home in South Truro, Massachusetts, on June 19. Hopper finished California Hills in South Truro that summer. [3]

Description

A blonde woman in a red dress sits on the bed of a motel room whose bay windows show the hood of an automobile and the hilly landscape of the American West.

Analysis

Art historian Leo G. Mazow of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts believes that the original hotel stay depicted in the painting may derive from the Hopper's 1952 trip to El Paso, Texas, at the Weseman Motor Court from December 15–22. Mazow matched a partial description of the painting from Jo's 1952 diary entry about accommodations in the area. Weseman was then located near U.S. Route 80 in Texas before the Interstate Highway System replaced it. This area contained several motor courts, one of which was named "Western Motel", which originally opened in 1950. A newspaper account of the construction of the motel describes the interior room with a bed made from limed oak, an easy chair, and other furnishings, with pastel color mixed directly into the plaster walls. [1]

The positioning of the scene has been compared to several of Hopper's other paintings, including Compartment C and New York Movie . [8] Yale curator Mark D. Mitchell describes the work as if it were a scene from a film storyboard. [9] Art critic Mark Strand argues that this is the only Hopper painting where the subject stares directly at the viewer. [10] Mazow disputes this idea, noting that a close examination of the painting shows that the eyes of the woman are turned to her right, looking to the left of the viewer, not straight at them. [11]

Provenance

Art collector Stephen Carlton Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine company through his grandfather Edward Cabot Clark, and a Hopper collector throughout the 1950s, purchased Western Motel in 1957 from the Rehn Gallery in New York. [12] Upon his death, it was bequeathed to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1961. [13] Yale later obtained Hopper's original study for the painting in 2009. [6]

Exhibitions

View through the glass window at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Recreation of Hopper's Western Motel room VMFA.jpg
View through the glass window at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The painting was first featured in an Edward Hopper retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art from September to November 1964. [15] Western Motel first received widespread media attention when it appeared at the New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 centennial exhibition sponsored by Xerox at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 1969 to February 1970. The exhibition was said to have been "the largest showing of contemporary United States art ever brought together" up to that point. [16]

Hopper's Western Motel was reconstructed in three-dimensional form in at least two exhibitions: by Austrian artist Gustav Deutsch in 2008 at the Kunsthalle Wien as a set-based spatial reconstruction, and in 2019 by designer S. Ryan Schmidt as a functional, habitable environment at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Under director Gerald Matt, the Kunsthalle held the Western Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art exhibition in Vienna, Austria. [17] It hosted American and European artists who were influenced by Hopper. [7] Deutsch recreated Hopper's work as a film set installation titled "Wednesday, 28th of August, 1957, 6 p.m., Pacific Palisades". Visitors could enter the set and interact with it, with a video camera showing them sitting on the bed in place of Hopper's female figure. [18] Deutsch later incorporated this installation into his film Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013), a live-action tableau that recreates 13 paintings by Hopper in a unified narrative, including Western Motel. [19]

The 2019 exhibition of Edward Hopper and the American Hotel at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, curated by Leo G. Mazow and Sarah G. Powers, [20] also recreated the painting, this time as a functional hotel room that guests could rent and use on an overnight basis. [21] Designer S. Ryan Schmidt used framing projectors adjusted for color temperature to mimic the natural sunlight as it appears in Hopper's painting, while lighting the background with RGB wash fixtures. A glass window allowed visitors to the exhibition to view the room. [14] Hotel rates ranged from $150-500 per night and were sold as part of a package called "The Hopper Hotel Experience". [22]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Mazow, Leo G. (December 2019) [November 8, 2019]. "Checking in with Edward Hopper". The Magazine Antiques. 186 (6): 68–77.Retrieved January 22, 2026.
  2. ↑ Alspaugh, Leann Davis (February 2020). "Exhibition note". The New Criterion. 38 (6): 56-57. ISSN   0734-0222.
  3. 1 2 3 Levin, Gail. (1995). Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 501-511. ISBN   0394546644. OCLC   716046833.
  4. ↑ Eliot, Alexander; Johnson, Bill (December 24, 1956). "The Silent Witness". Time. LXVIII (26): 28-39. Retrieved January 26, 2026. Note: this article originally appeared with no author credited. More recent sources indicate that it was authored by Time art editor Alexander Eliot with interviews of Hopper conducted by Time researcher Bill Johnson.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Levin, Gail (1998) [1986]. Hopper's Places. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 120-121. ISBN   9780520217379. OCLC   38732334.
  6. 1 2 "Acquisitions". State of the Art: Contemporary Sculpture. Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin. Yale University. p. 174.
  7. 1 2 Mamunes, Lenora (2011). Edward Hopper Encyclopedia. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. pp. 141-142. ISBN   9780786486434. OCLC   728111198.
  8. ↑ ​Renner, Rolf Günter. (2007). Edward Hopper, 1882-1967: Transformation of the Real. Taschen. pp. 46-52. ISBN   9783822859858. OCLC   426470980.
  9. ↑ Mitchell, Mark D. (2023). "Modernism · 1900–1960". American Art: Selections from the Yale University Art Gallery. Yale University Art Gallery. 2023. p. 231. ISBN   9780300269710. OCLC   1346947977.
  10. ↑ Strand, Mark. (2011) (1994). Hopper. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 56-58, 61. ISBN   9780307701244. OCLC   727326007.
  11. ↑ Mazow, Leo G. (2019). "Later Hopper: Western Motel, People in the Sun, and the El Paso Interlude". In Mazow, Leo G.; Powers, Sarah G. (eds). Edward Hopper and the American Hotel. Edited by Sarah G. Powers, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. pp. 145-155. ISBN   9780300246889. OCLC   1143807860.
  12. ↑ Vincent, Gilbert T.; Sarah Lees (2006). "A Life with Art: Stephen Carlton Clark as Collector and Philanthropist". The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. pp. 186, 332. ISBN   0300116195. OCLC   1110377214.
  13. ↑ Hopper, Edward (1957). "Western Motel". Yale University Art Gallery. Retrieved January 22, 2026.
  14. 1 2 "How They Did It: 'The Hopper Hotel Experience' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Lighting Design + Application. Illuminating Engineering Society. 51 (5): 17. September 3, 2021 [May 2021]. doi:10.1177/036063252105100506. Retrieved January 26, 2026.
  15. ↑ Goodrich, Lloyd (1964). Edward Hopper, Exhibition and Catalogue. Whitney Museum of American Art. OCLC   1181004. Lock-green.svg
  16. ↑ Geldzahler, Henry New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970. 1st ed. New York: Dutton. pp. 47, 82. ISBN   9780269025525. OCLC   45703.
  17. ↑ "Western Motel Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art – Kunsthalle Wien". Kunsthalle Wien. An exhibition held at Kunsthalle Wien from 3 October 2008 to 15 February 2009, featuring works by Edward Hopper and contemporary artists. Retrieved January 26, 2026.
  18. ↑ Kipke, Željko (2009). "Painter Who Relaxed in the Dark of the Cinema". (PDF) Oris . 55. pp. 164-173.
  19. ↑ Deutsch, Gustav (2008). "Visions of Reality - Wednesday, 28. August 1957, 6.pm., Pacific Palisades". gustavdeutsch.net. Retrieved January 26, 2026.
  20. ↑ Smee, Sebastian (November 27, 2019). "Worthy of an extended stay". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 26, 2026.
  21. ↑ Custer, Lee Ann (Spring 2020). "Edward Hopper and the American Hotel". Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. 6 (1). Retrieved January 22, 2026.
  22. ↑ Schuster, Clayton (August 16, 2019). "Stay Overnight in Edward Hopper's 'Western Motel' Painting Recreated at a Museum". Observer . Retrieved January 26, 2026.
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