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Hopper's Places, Second edition

Gail Levin (Author)

Available worldwide

Paperback, 145 pages
ISBN: 9780520216761
December 1998
$29.95, £19.95

In the acclaimed first edition of Hopper's Places, Gail Levin paired paintings by Edward Hopper with her photographs of the subjects of paintings done in New York and environs, Maine, Gloucester, and Cape Cod to demonstrate how Hopper made art of everyday scenes and how he sometimes made intentional changes from what he observed. For this new edition, Levin has added documentary photographs and Hopper's paintings of sites in Paris, where he painted for several years as a young man, Charleston, Mexico, and the western U.S. to give a broader view of the range of his work and the power with which he transformed his subjects while still remaining faithful to their essential features.

Gail Levin is Professor of Art History at the City University of New York. Among her books are Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (1996, available in paperback from California) Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné (1995), and Marsden Hartley in Bavaria (1989).

"A rare opportunity to ponder how Hopper made the ordinary extraordinary. . . . To compare photographs of unmemorable structures with the saturate, intensely lighted paintings (most from private collections) is to see how realism is much more than mere depiction. Gail Levin, the former curator of the Edward Hopper collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has done an invaluable service in this book."—Renée Gernand, New York Times Book Review

"The photos contrast with the paintings to show that Hopper, habitually a most faithful realist, altered spatial dimensions, foreshortened, and offered multiple perspectives to the viewer so that details of buildings near the ones dominantly placed appear more forcibly. . . . A beautiful, intriguing portfolio."—Booklist

"This comparative view illustrates Hopper's compositional approach, his use of cropping, his exaggeration of the vertical or horizontal elements, and his simplifications, which Levin details. . . . The photographs themselves, taken in most cases several decades after the paintings were made, are equally illustrative of America's changing landscape."—Library Journal


"Gail Levin's insightful, stimulating, and readable book has proven an invaluable reference for students taking studio art classes. It has key use as an exploration into the question of the sources from which artists derive their ideas."—Walter Hattke, Baker Professor of Fine Arts, Union College

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