Car Painting in America: Edward Hopper's Vision of the Road
Abstract
The article presents an analysis of three paintings by one of the greatest American realist painters, Edward Hopper. The three selected works share a common denominator: they all address the concept of a car and the influence it has on the nation’s life—it has altered the way people traveled and expressed their identity. A car in Hopper’s works serves a twofold function, it allows its drivers and passengers to experience the land more as they can travel wherever they desire but, on the other hand, it contributes to a separation from their environment as the journey involves fragmentariness and rootlessness.
Keywords
Edward Hopper; modernism; paiting; American Studies; car culture
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University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6949-7161
Ewa Wylężek-Targosz, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the Institute of Literary Studies in the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. Her main academic interests are carnival, modernism, art history, and movie studies. In 2019 she was a guest lecturer at University of Eastern Finland. Currently, she teaches Introduction to American Film, North American Art History and Creative Writing, as well as Writing for the Media. She has recently published a book titled Tropes of Tauromachy: Representations of Bullfighting in Selected Texts of Anglophone Literature. She is also a certified brewer (postgraduate course at University of Agriculture, Cracow).
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