20th Century Art History's Response to New Term Paper

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20th Century Art History's Response To New Technology

While Norman Rockwell's 1949 magazine cover "The New Television Set" suggests both delight and humor to the viewer, in portraying the confusion of middle-class Americans faced with new technological innovations, Edward Hopper's 1940 oil on canvas work "The Office at Night" and "The Family-Industry and Agriculture" oil of printmaker Harry Sternberg (1939) suggest a much darker version of human beings' collective response to the impersonal nature of modern industrialization and technology.

This contrast is due to three major reasons -- firstly, Rockwell's painting deals with human's use of technology in their leisure time, in contrast to the mechanization of the modern office and of modern farming. Secondly, Rockwell painted his work after the end of World War II, and the advent of much greater American prosperity than had been enjoyed during the time when "The Family-Industry and Agriculture" by Harry Sternberg were created, during the Great Depression and the uncertainty of the early times of America's entry into World War II, when Hopper created his work of art. Thirdly, Rockwell's magazine cover was created for commercial purposes. Hopper, although he worked as a commercial illustrator, created his work for private purposes, for his own personal expression as an artist, and Sternberg unapologetically identified himself as a social activist as well as a teacher an a painter. ("A Tribute to Harry Sternberg," The San Diego Museum of Art, 2001)

Edward Hopper's large oil on canvas "The Office at Night" (its impressive 22 1/8 x 25 inches, now displayed, rather ironically given the painting's urban focus at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota) portrays a sterile while office space, filled with a narrow desk, illuminated by overhead light rather than the light from the virtually nonexistent window in the room. The male executive in the "Office at Night" seems to be staring at the muscular calves of his bored female employee -- evidently they are or will be 'working late' -- enjoying an office romance. The drama is mundane, even trite, yet Edward Hopper, by elevating this ordinary space and these ordinary people to a realistic level of art makes their banal affair seem tragically lonely.

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This is why Hopper remains "the best-known American realist of the inter-war period." Hopper once said: "The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing." ("Edward Hopper," Art Archive, 2005)

In other words, humanity was still the appropriate subject of art, even while technology rendered human life increasingly regimented and materialistic -- even farm work, in Sternberg's painting of modern life threatened by technology on a Depression-era farm. But in contrast to the strident social critique of Sternberg, and the enthusiastic affirmation of technology of Rockwell, critics describe Hopper's work of art is as "intensely private." Hopper himself is described as a man and an artist who made the "solitude and introspection" of modern life "important themes in his painting." When asked in later life if he met Picasso in Paris, as Hopper he went to study in France as a young man, Hopper shrugged and said, "Whom did I meet? Nobody. ("Edward Hopper," Art Archive, 2005)

In contrast to the sunny, sublimely social portraits of Middle American small-town life, Hopper's visions are desolate, urban, yet still, like Rockwell and Sternberg, focused on humanity -- but in contrast to Rockwell, humanity in isolation rather than in sense of social connection. Hopper was based in Greenwich Village, where he lived most of his life, unlike Rockwell, although like Rockwell, he did work as a commercial illustrator. "The Office at Night" is of two people whose work have ended but have nowhere else to go afterwards -- except to turn to one another's arms, perhaps. Even if the male executive has a home, clearly he is more interested in the female charms of his colleague than his family or his employment, in contrast to the delighted fascination with the television set in Rockwell, or even the common social bleakness of the united family in the Sternberg. Sternberg, like Hopper and unlike Rockwell, was an urban dweller -- but painted a wider range of human experience in….....

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