Edward Hopper. The painter who inspired cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Kenneth Lonergan, and Martin Scorsese are examples of some of the film directors on whom Hopper left a great mark, which would later be reflected in his films.

A New Yorker by birth (1882) and an artist by vocation, after training as an illustrator, Hopper studied until 1906 at the New York School of Art, where he incorporated himself into the American figurative tradition, the predecessor of Pop Art. Hopper first painted in New York, where he grew up and worked as an advertising artist (like Andy Warhol). The works of Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, and Édouard Manet were major references for the young artist. He soon traveled to Paris, where he was able to absorb the Impressionist language of the time. But "I missed the light of New York, its dilapidated, worn-out, woodworm-destroyed spaces. The beauty of Paris can astonish, but in my case, it couldn't inspire me," he said. He traveled through parts of Europe, whose lights and shadows inspired him to forge his style.

Hopper abandoned his nostalgia for the old continent to settle in the United States, where he began capturing urban environments, always with his characteristic aura of solitude. Melancholy also accompanied him in his landscape paintings, in which he favored the sea and cliffs as backdrops.

Voyeurism is another characteristic of a painter who loved observing everyday circumstances, which he then portrayed, capturing the solitude that gave life to the universe of his subjects. All of them possess a realism that reveals pause and silence, as if they were a scene.

He was able to give color to solitude and paint silence. Hopper was a man of few words. He spoke little but observed a lot. This was the basis of his philosophy, as he once said: “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will produce his personal vision of the world. The essential element is imagination, and no level of artificial invention can replace it.”

He was over 40 when he held his first solo gallery exhibition. Ten years later, in 1933, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded four years earlier and then housed in an office building, organized an exhibition that gave him the decisive boost toward national recognition.

This artist and avid film buff was also inspired by Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. Many of his paintings influenced countless stills and scenes from renowned film directors, who found in Hopper an artist with a gift for cinematic composition.

To this day, Edward Hopper remains one of the most renowned painters in 20th-century art history. A great portraitist of mid-century America and a virtuoso of modern expression, he captured urban environments and landscapes, imbuing them with the sense of solitude that makes them unique.