CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/24/2020

Social distancing in the landscapes of Edward Hopper

"Cape Cod Morning" (1950) is reproduced from Edward Hopper: A New Perspective on Landscape, the beautifully produced new release from Hatje Cantz and Fondation Beyeler, and a fitting book for this time of unusual social distancing and global isolation. "Hopper's silence was famous; recalcitrance was his method," Ulf Küster writes. "Throughout his life, Hopper, who took German in school, carried around a piece of paper with a quotation from a letter by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Aside from indicating his profound knowledge of Goethe's works, it also documents his subjective approach to art… 'See, dear friend, what is the beginning and end of all writing, the reproduction of the world around me, through the inner world in which everything is held, bound up, remade, kneaded, and in peculiar form and manner again set forth; which remains eternally secret, God be thanked, and neither will I reveal it to gapers and chatterers.'"