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Example research essay topic: Twentieth Century Great Depression - 994 words

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Edward Hopper is one of the major Realist painters of the twentieth century. He is often considered an American Scene painter as well. American Scene Painting is simply a term for a popular style of painting that existed in the United States during the Great Depression. This style was a reaction against modern European style.

These artists tried to create a style of art that was uniquely American. Hopper did not want his art put into a category like that though. He felt that the American quality is in a painter and he or she does not have to force it in there. Much of Hoppers works remind us that in urban and rural America, there was a sense of personal loneliness and isolation that he felt was left over from our Pioneer years. He also felt that the rapid growth and change denied new Americans a deep physical attachment to the land and gave a kind of temporary look to everything that was built and rebuilt on it. Hoppers paintings appeal to me because of their simplicity of design and a strong sense of light.

It is amazing how well he uses these elements with ease to capture a strong feeling of early twentieth century America and communicates autobiographical components. The isolation stemming from a difficult youth and his subsequent difficulty with relationships are read in his works. The people, the environments, and the architecture depict loneliness in a simple yet dignified way. In a sense, I feel Hopper is giving us permission to find a quiet dignity within ones self - perhaps coming to terms with personal difficulties through his paintings much like van Gogh had done. I believe he has found beauty in solitude. Some people feel that Hoppers works appear depressed because of the Great Depression that the country was going through.

If he had painted during another period in time, do you think his work would look the same? Focusing in on the visual arts of this questioning time, standards are thrown out of the proverbial window. The theme of isolation remains consistent throughout many works. New York artist Edward Hopper presented a scheme of meaningless relationships and quiet desperation in regards to urban America; he exacts this feeling in his 1942 painting Nighthawks, where a sallow light is cast from an all-night diner onto an empty street in a big city while four individuals sit in the seeming silence of the sterile surroundings. Paintings such as Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1942) convey a mood of loneliness and desolation by their emptiness or by the presence of anonymous, non-communicating figures. But of this picture Hopper said: I didnt see it as particularly lonely...

Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city. A late night diner or coffee shop is peopled by a random collection. Inside there is a couple, fresh from a date or getting ready for one, stopping for a bite or a cup. We see a businessman hunched over some something of his own, his back to us in that accidental kind of a way that says take any seat any seat at all, and white-capped employee working at some unseen task under the counter, waiting for his customers to need him.

Four people in the same room, and a tiny room at that, hardly big enough for twenty seats, lighting up a city corner with fluorescent life. We see the painting with the initial eye of familiarity we have seen it all before. Surely, we think, searching for the meaning hidden behind such a mundane scene, theres a connection generated amongst these four in such close proximity and common purpose. However, with a second glance comes the shock of recognition and shows us the folly of such easy assumptions. For there is no connection, and no conversation, among any of them, and perhaps no means to start any. Backs are turned towards us on purpose, for apparently no cheery light can open up our diners.

The couple, initially filled with such hope, stares blankly ahead in that way we all know, that tells us theres no intimacy there, or two much, or that theres waiting, of time, of change, or the chance to leave. All four of our characters - the largest grouping in any of Hoppers major works acknowledge no one, not us, not each other, not themselves. We, as viewers, are left with the memory of those moments in our own lives, and forced to examine our assumptions about who we are and how we related to the world around us in the way only true great art can make us do. Deliberately so or not, in Hoppers still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings the artist often exerts a powerful psychological impact distantly akin to that made by the Metaphysical painter de Chirico; but while de Chiricos effect was obtained by making the unreal seem real, Hoppers was rooted in the presentation of the familiar and concrete. This is not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have (perhaps overwhelmingly in late adolescence) of being on our own in the human condition. When we look at that dark New York street, we would expect the fluorescent-lit cafe to be welcoming, but it is not.

There is no way to enter it, no door. The extreme brightness means that the people inside are held, exposed and vulnerable. They hunch their shoulders defensively. Hopper did not actually observe them, because he used himself as a model for both the seated men, as if he perceived men in this situation as clones. He modeled the woman, as he did all of his female characters, on his wife Jo. He was a difficult man, and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her was; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model.


Free research essays on topics related to: big city, great depression, hopper, loneliness, twentieth century

Research essay sample on Twentieth Century Great Depression

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