| Western Motel | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Year | 1957 |
| Medium | oil paint, canvas |
| Dimensions | 76.8 cm (30.2 in) × 127.3 cm (50.1 in) |
| Location | Yale University Art Gallery |
| Accession no. | 1961.18.32  |
Western Motel is a 1957 oil on canvas painting by the American artistEdward Hopper. The work depicts a sunlit motel room with a woman sitting on a bed, looking to her right. It is a composite interior scene, synthesized from motels inEl Paso, Texas, that Hopper visited, and theRustic Canyon art colony in Los Angeles, where he held a six-month artist's residency. Both theKunsthalle Wien in Austria and theVirginia Museum of Fine Arts in the United States have hosted artistic3D reconstructions of the painting. The work is currently held by theYale University Art Gallery.
Edward Hopper worked as acommercial artist in the 1920s for the hospitality industry illustrating hotel magazines. From the 1930s until the 1960s, Hopper and his wifeJosephine Hopper (Jo) enjoyed traveling on long road trips to Mexico and across the United States by car, making great use of motels and hotels along the way. Hopper used these themes in his work, with many paintings making use of artistic and interpretive renderings and idealized depictions of the original places where they stayed.[1] Two notable works from this time on this theme includeRoom in New York (1932) andHotel Lobby (1943).[2]
In July 1956, theHuntington Hartford Foundation awarded Hopper $1000 ($11,565 in2024) and a six-month residence at theirRustic Canyon art colony nearPacific Palisades in California. Hopper was not a fan of California nor of art colonies, but after Jo discovered that people had nothing but good things to say about Rustic Canyon, she convinced Edward to go. They left their summer home on Cape Cod in October, with plans to drive a southwesterly route, presumably at some time in November.[3] ATime magazine cover story on Hopper from December 1956, indicated that they drove a 1954 green and whiteBuick Century sedan to California,[4] arriving in Los Angeles on December 9.[3] Finding the lodgings comfortable and the food beyond reproach, they remained for the full six months. During their visit, they stayed in accommodations designed byLloyd Wright, the son ofFrank Lloyd Wright.[5]
Hopper began two works during this time, an oil painting titledWestern Motel and a watercolor titledCalifornia Hills.[5] He initially made a charcoal and graphite study forWestern Motel,[6] informally referred to as aSketch of Hotel, that originally featured two windows and two figures seated in a hotel lobby-like environment. The initial sketch changed in the painting, with the window on the left becoming a wall, the two figures reduced to one, a woman sitting on a bed, with the hotel lobby transformed into a bedroom.[7]
Hopper completed the painting in either February or March 1957.[5] In her notes for the work, Jo recalls that the large window depicted in the painting was similar to the Wright-designed window in their room that looked out over Rustic Canyon. She described the scene as "Deluxe green motel room, mahogany bed, pink cover, dark red chair with blue robe", with the woman as a "haughty blond in dark red, her Buick outside window green."[5] The Hoppers left Rustic Canyon for Cape Cod on June 6, with Edward, now 74 years old, driving the 3,000 mile journey. They arrived at home inSouth Truro, Massachusetts, on June 19. Hopper finishedCalifornia Hills in South Truro that summer.[3]
A blonde woman wearing a sleeveless, V-neck burgundy dress sits on the edge of a fully made bed with a mahogany-colored frame in a sparsely furnished green motel room. She looks toward the viewer, but her eyes are turned to her right. Near the end of her gaze, two fully packed suitcases sit in the lower left-hand corner. Behind the woman, to her left, next to the bed, is a nightstand with a gooseneck lamp and a small clock. Directly across from the bed on the right is a red chair with a blue sweater draped across it near the front door of the room. The chair, the bed, the bedspread, and the woman's dress are all in matching red tones. Daylight enters the room through large plate-glass windows. The hood of a green Buick is visible through the window, with the low, rounded hills of a Southwestern mesa in shadow on the horizon. The painting is signed "Edward Hopper" in the lower right corner.
Art historian Leo G. Mazow of theVirginia Museum of Fine Arts believes that the original hotel stay depicted in the painting may derive from the Hopper's 1952 trip toEl Paso, Texas, at the Weseman Motor Court from December 15–22. Mazow matched a partial description of the painting from Jo's 1952 diary entry about accommodations in the area. Weseman was then located nearU.S. Route 80 in Texas before theInterstate Highway System replaced it. This area contained severalmotor courts, one of which was named "Western Motel", which originally opened in 1950. A newspaper account of the construction of the motel describes the interior room with a bed made from limed oak, an easy chair, and other furnishings, with pastel color mixed directly into the plaster walls.[1]
The positioning of the scene has been compared to several of Hopper's other paintings, includingCompartment C andNew York Movie.[8] Yale curator Mark D. Mitchell describes the work as if it were a scene from a filmstoryboard.[9] Art criticMark Strand argues that this is the only Hopper painting where the subject stares directly at the viewer.[10] Mazow disputes this idea, noting that a close examination of the painting shows that the eyes of the woman are turned to her right, looking to the left of the viewer, not straight at them.[11]
Art collectorStephen Carlton Clark, heir to theSinger sewing machine company through his grandfatherEdward Cabot Clark, and a Hopper collector throughout the 1950s, purchasedWestern Motel in 1957 from the Rehn Gallery in New York.[12] Upon his death, it was bequeathed to theYale University Art Gallery in 1961.[13] Yale later obtained Hopper's original study for the painting in 2009.[6]
The painting was first featured in an Edward Hopper retrospective exhibition at theWhitney Museum of American Art from September to November 1964.[15]Western Motel first received widespread media attention when it appeared at theNew York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 centennial exhibition sponsored byXerox at theMetropolitan Museum of Art from October 1969 to February 1970. The exhibition was said to have been "the largest showing of contemporary United States art ever brought together" up to that point.[16]
Hopper'sWestern Motel was reconstructed in three-dimensional form in at least two exhibitions: by Austrian artistGustav Deutsch in 2008 at theKunsthalle Wien as a set-based spatial reconstruction, and in 2019 by designer S. Ryan Schmidt as a functional, habitable environment at theVirginia Museum of Fine Arts. Under director Gerald Matt, the Kunsthalle held theWestern Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art exhibition in Vienna, Austria.[17] It hosted American and European artists who were influenced by Hopper.[7] Deutsch recreated Hopper's work as a film set installation titled "Wednesday, 28th of August, 1957, 6 p.m., Pacific Palisades". Visitors could enter the set and interact with it, with a video camera showing them sitting on the bed in place of Hopper's female figure.[18] Deutsch later incorporated this installation into his filmShirley: Visions of Reality (2013), a live-actiontableau that recreates 13 paintings by Hopper in a unified narrative, includingWestern Motel.[19]
The 2019 exhibition ofEdward Hopper and the American Hotel at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, curated by Leo G. Mazow and Sarah G. Powers,[20] also recreated the painting, this time as a functional hotel room that guests could rent and sleep in on an overnight basis.[21] Designer S. Ryan Schmidt usedframing projectors adjusted for color temperature to mimic the natural sunlight as it appears in Hopper's painting, while lighting the background with RGB wash fixtures. A glass window allowed visitors to the exhibition to view the room.[14] Hotel rates ranged from $150–500 per night and were sold as part of a package called "The Hopper Hotel Experience".[22]
