LITMIR.BIZ

      World War I arrived in Europe and soon the United States was giving lip service to victory for the French and England as British war propaganda films were shown in big city movie palaces and nickelodeons. Hopper found variety from the magazine fiction he illustrated after having to read some of the mediocre text. The U. S. Printing and Litho Company churned out movie posters and each one paid Hopper $10 (equivalent to $230 in 2012). He was also paid to sit through the silent melodramas, which he preferred to the pulp fiction of the time. Movies became a fascination for him that lasted the rest of his life. Even the free movies did not calm his irritation over the theatre marketing people who demanded changes in his drawings when his realistic renderings did not conform to the stereotypes the film moguls thought the public would accept.

      After building up his relative wealth into the black, Hopper needed to blow off steam. An artist acquaintance, Bernard Karfiol, recommended the Maine seaport village of Ogunquit, a popular nesting place for New York artists who descended on it each summer like a flock of seagulls. For eight dollars a week, Hopper became a guest at the Shore Road boarding house favoured by the artist population and sat down with them to a communal supper table where he met a fellow resident, a short redhead named Josephine Nivison whom he had seen in Henri’s classes. The instructor had, in fact, painted a full-length portrait of her costumed in paint smock gripping her palette and brushes entitled Art Student. The village became a gathering place for many of Hopper’s schoolmates and all the old stories blossomed to life around the dinner table and afterwards.

      He plunged into a series of paintings in his usual 29 × 24 inch canvases that again demonstrated his ability to make so much out of so little apparent effort. The coastal coves are revealed under a bright sun that bathes the bays creating deep shadows and flat blue seas beneath the anchored brush-swipe dories. Two paintings distinguish themselves from the sea-washed cliffs and coves.