NY movie by Edward Hopper 1939 Courtesy of Prestel
Excerpt from ‘The Guardian’ From Nighthawks to the shadows of film noir by Philip French:
German expressionism impinged on Hopper early on, during his sojourn in Paris. His 1921 etching Night Shadows looks like a storyboard sketch for a high-angle shot in a Fritz Lang movie. But what really influenced him were the movies shot on the backlots of Hollywood’s great studios in the Thirties and Forties. Like the films of Hollywood’s Golden Era, his paintings are about ‘the city’, a heightened abstract notion rather than any particular metropolis. Voyeurism has been an unavoidable condition of urban living and moviegoing, and Hopper’s pictures spy on people in uncurtained rooms. They are epiphanic moments in someone else’s life, stills from a movie we can’t quite remember.
Read the entire article here.