August Issue 2001
Important Edward Hopper Painting Returns to Charleston, SC, Showing at the Gibbes Museum of Art
Through an amazing twist of fate a painting by Edward Hopper (1882-1967), one of America's best-known artists of the 20th century, has resurfaced and returned to Charleston, SC, where it was created over 70 years ago at the height of the Depression. Entitled Charleston, signed and dated 1929, the painting was purchased recently by a private collector at the internationally renowned auction house Christie's, in the firm's May 2001 sale of Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture at Rockefeller Center in New York.
"This beautiful watercolor was a fantastic rediscovery when it came to market at Christie's in May," said Paul Provost, Senior Vice President and Director of American Paintings at Christie's. "It was gratifying to see this important painting go to such a distinguished private collection and now, appropriately, it has returned to the city of Charleston where it can be viewed and enjoyed by many people at the Gibbes Museum of Art."
Hopper is recognized as America's quintessential realist painter. A student of Robert Henri at the Art Students' League in New York, Hopper first achieved success in the medium of watercolor when he painted a group of several notable works in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1923. In her recently published catalogue raisonne on the artist, noted art historian and Hopper expert Gail Levin writes: "Hopper used watercolor with a sense of confidence, improvising as he went along. He would apply the pigments with only a faint pencil sketch outlining the structures. What interested him was not the creation of textures of the manipulation of the medium, but the transcription of light. Light was the language through which Hopper expressed the forms and views before him. His watercolors were simply recordings of his observations, painted almost entirely out-of-doors, directly before his subject matter."
Hopper painted Charleston while he and his wife Josephine Nivison, also a painter, were visiting the city in April 1929. During their three-week stay Hopper produced eleven watercolors of mostly outdoors scenes, including rural cabins and trees at Folly Beach. According to Martha Severens, author of the book entitled The Charleston Renaissance, the Hoppers stayed with the Wulbern family who ran a boarding house at 158 Tradd Street in the historic district.
Approximately 40 years later the painting returned to Charleston, when it was discovered to be in the collection of a Brooklyn, New York doctor, as part of the major exhibition entitled Art in South Carolina, 1670 - 1970 organized to commemorate the state's tricentennial year. After its return from exhibition its whereabouts were unknown until the recent sale at Christie's. "Those of us who are familiar with the Charleston Renaissance and with Hopper's watercolors have been looking for this painting for a number of years. It is astounding that this very important work has resurfaced and has returned to the city that inspired its creation. We are thrilled to have been given the opportunity to share with the community this extremely important painting," says Angela D. Mack, Curator of Collections.
Hopper's works hang in prestigious museums throughout the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City. The Gibbes is proud to have this valuable architectural portrait Charleston on loan from a private collection.
Charleston is on temporary display during the exhibition Twentieth Century in Review, a survey of art movements over the last hundred years in America organized from the Museum's collection. Other artists on view in the Gibbes exhibition Twentieth Century in Review include Birge Harrison, Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, Edwin Harleston, George Biddle, William Halsey, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg, Sigmund Abeles, Roy Lichtenstein, Manning Williams, West Fraser and Jonathan Green, to name a few.
For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at 843/722-2706 or on the web at (http://www.gibbes.com).
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