amandacore  ᥫ᭡

Dr. Rick Brettell is a professor of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas and has written extensively about Edward Hopper in Paris. He considers Soir Bleu the single most ambitious painting of Hopper’s career.

Dr. Brettell: Soir Bleu is an odd painting for Hopper, because Hopper’s oil paintings of any sort of decent scale up until Soir Bleu were generally landscapes or cityscapes that were space positive and had tiny or nonexistent human figures. Soir Bleu is a figure painting. And it’s a figure painting that shows that Hopper had wanted to actually take on the big canvases of Matisse and Picasso. Even the title of Soir Bleu, which was, it is today, and when it was shown for the first time in 1915 in French. So he wants to make you think French and think of France. He doesn’t call it Blue Evening. He calls it Soir Bleu.

Hopper depicts an odd assortment of people gathered under a tent at the end of a party. Among them: on the far left, a working-class man smoking a cigarette; in the center, a sex worker and a clown, and on the far right, a bourgeois or upper middle class couple.

Dr. Brettell: No one is like anybody else. Everybody is separated from everybody else. Hopper kind of translates it into an everyman setting, in which most of the people in it, are part of a kind of world of alienated urban entertainment, in which one is always searching for a meaning somewhere else, in a costume or in a prostitute or in a drink or in a cigarette or in a party. And those sorts of worlds is the world that Hopper of course represents so importantly when he comes back to New York in 1910 and remains there until the end of his life.

– James Baldwin

The film brings the paintings of Vincent van Gogh to life to tell his remarkable story. Every one of the 65,000 frames of the film is an oil-painting hand-painted by 125 professional oil-painters who travelled from all across the world to the Loving Vincent studios in Poland and Greece to be a part of the production.

︎My forever favorites

The theme of self-imprisonment was one Gertrude Abercrombie treated a number of times. In this painting, a figure, her back to the viewer, is facing the barred door of the single intact wall of a three-sided structure, a prison of her own making, a powerful statement of how one's internal deficiencies can limit external actions. The artist, who said, "It is always myself that I paint," depicts herself as trapped by her own inability to act. Abercrombie was charismatic, witty, and popular, and also deeply insecure, self-doubting, and unable to feel real connection, a dichotomy beautifully expressed in Self-Imprisonment. Along with another recurrent theme, which she termed "snared" or "snagged," in which she is attached by the long train of her dress, a blindfold, or her long hair to a wall or a door, she poignantly conveys the self-imposed dimension of her lack of freedom. It is important to note that, although the self-imprisonment theme always contains some of these same major elements, each of the paintings is unique and meaningful in its own way.

– Dr. Susan Weininger, professor emerita of art history at Roosevelt University