Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lipinski, Filip

Titel

The Virtual Hopper: Painting Between Dissemination and Desire

Ist Teil von

• Oxford art journal, 2014-06, Vol.37 (2), p.157-171

Ort / Verlag

Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The article offers a new theoretical and analytical perspective on the phenomenon of Edward Hopper's popularity, contemporary reception and interpretation of his painting, with special focus on the iconic Nighthawks. It looks at selected exhibitions, critical statements and the pictorial structure of the paintings, confirming Hopper's images' importance in today's visual culture and points to their 'desire' to dialogize with other images and media, uncovers the 'differential specificity' of this painting. The title phrase 'The virtual Hopper' relates to the potential of these paintings to activate visual memory and generate numerous images quoting Hopper's works. Thus Hopper's rich, disseminated afterlife in the age of the 'pictorial turn' is rooted both in technological change causing the virtual life of images and the paintings' properties, which is demonstrated by the close reading of Nighthawks in dialogue with its later visual transformations. Nighthawks turns out to be a meta-painting: 'a painting about the circulation of images'.