Edward Hopper and the American Hotel

The painter, draftsman and illustrator Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is one of America’s best-known and most frequently exhibited artists. Hotels, motels and tourist homes are recurring motifs in his work, along with streets, lighthouses and petrol stations forming a visual vocabulary of transportation infrastructure. In ten essays, this fascinating volume explores Hopper’s lifelong investigation of such spaces, shedding light on both his professional practice and far-reaching changes in transportation and communications, which affected not only work and leisure but also dynamics of race, class and gender. Hopper’s covers for the trade journal Hotel Management, in addition to other well-known works, invite reflection on the complicated roles of the nascent New Woman; the erasure of hotel work and workers; contemporary associations of the colour white with cleanliness and purity; the watercolours Hopper made from hotel windows and rooftops in Mexico; and the broader context of transportation history. A final section traces journeys that Hopper and his wife, the artist Josephine ‘Jo’ Nivison Hopper, took by car in the 1940s and 1950s; selected correspondence and quotations from Jo’s diaries join reproductions of postcards and ephemera illuminating their – and fellow Americans’ – shifting travel habits