"'We are all Edward Hopper paintings now': is he the artist of the coronavirus age... With his deserted cityscapes and isolated figures, the US painter captured the loneliness and alienation of modern life. But the pandemic has given his work a terrifying new significance... We choose modern loneliness because we want to be free. But now the art of Hopper poses a tough question: when the freedoms of modern life are removed, what’s left but loneliness?"
He was aware of James MacNeil Whistler, whose pictures were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1910, and chose an approach to the island that reflected Whistler’s “Aestheticism.”
Gerry Souter writes in his book 'Edward Hopper: Light and Dark':
"... Whistler’s moody tonalism was in direct opposition to the Impressionists. In fact, Whistler’s apparent move to the past, the Nocturnes, are closer in spirit to modern art than is Impressionism. The concentration in the Nocturnes on purely formal values of colour and line traces a direct descent to the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century. His use of thinned oil paints applied spontaneously to create images from his memory must have especially appealed to Hopper..."
James Abbott Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold-Old Battersea Bridge, c.1872-1875
“…In Hopper’s Blackwell’s Island, the scene is moonlit and composed in the manner of Le Bistrot with the bridge span occupying the left side of the canvas. A tug boat chugs in midstream beneath the Queensborough Bridge and lights wink on in houses scattered along both banks. A few stabs of zinc white create a single reflection of moonlight, grabbing the painting’s almost geographic centre. It was with paintings such as Blackwell’s Island as well as many of Hopper’s later works that abstract painters acknowledged a kinship in use of colour, line and planes…”
Edward Hopper,, Blackwell’s Island
