On View
Not on viewObject number1990/1.14
East Side Interior
Artist
Edward Hopper
(American, 1882-1967)
Date1922
Mediumetching
Dimensionsimage: 7 3/4 × 9 7/8 in. (19.7 × 25.1 cm)
sheet: 13 3/8 × 9 7/8 in. (34 × 25.1 cm)
frame: 7/8 in. × 17 in. × 20 in. (2.2 × 43.2 × 50.8 cm)
mat: 14 3/4 × 9 7/8 in. (37.5 × 25.1 cm)
sheet: 13 3/8 × 9 7/8 in. (34 × 25.1 cm)
frame: 7/8 in. × 17 in. × 20 in. (2.2 × 43.2 × 50.8 cm)
mat: 14 3/4 × 9 7/8 in. (37.5 × 25.1 cm)
Credit LineBequest of Genevieve U. Gilmore
Exhibition History"A Century of Caring: One Hunderd Years of American Realism," KIA (May 18 - Aug. 3, 1986).
"A Gift to Kalamazoo: Selections from the Genevieve U. Gilmore Collection," KIA (Apr. 2 - May 5, 1991).
"70 Years, 70 Works from the KIA Permanent Collection," KIA (Nov. 19, 1994 - Feb. 10, 1995)
On loan to Muskegon Museum of Art (May 27, 1997 - Aug. 4, 1998).
"The American Experience: Prints and Drawings, 1900-1946", KIA (dates unknown).
"Highlights from the Permanent Collection: Prints and Drawings," KIA (Sept. 15 - Nov. 25, 2001).
"The Woman as Subject: Selections from the Permanent Collection," KIA Long Gallery (June 13 - Sept. 8, 2003).
"Masterworks on Paper," KIA Long Gallery (Sept. 2005- Jan. 2006).
"Familiar Surroundings," KIA Long Gallery (Dec. 18, 2010 - Apr. 10, 2011).
"Lasting Legacy: A Collection for Kalamazoo," Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (Sep. 6, 2014 - Jan. 4, 2015).
"Pressed for Time: The History of Printmaking," Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan (Sep. 10, 2016 - Dec. 30, 2016).
"American Realism: Visions of America 1900-1950," Muskegon Museum of Art (May 11 - August 27, 2023); Flint Institute of Arts (September 9 - December 30, 2023); KIA (January 21 - April 14, 2024).Label TextHopper made East Side Interior at a moment when his career was struggling, and he had begun to focus on printmaking as a more reliable avenue for commercial success than oil painting. However, in prints like this one, he developed some of the themes characteristic of the paintings that would later make him famous. While the Ashcan artists and others captured the crowded busyness, desperation, and violence of early twentieth-century Manhattan, Hopper represented the modern urban experience differently. Instead, he channeled the frequent loneliness and anonymity of city life. The woman sitting at a sewing machine in East Side Interior looks out her window, but what, exactly, has captured her attention remains a mystery. Indeed, the details of this woman’s life, and what we, as viewers, ought to make of her, remain similarly enigmatic – shrouded, perhaps, by the genericness of Hopper’s renderings of objects like chairs, blouses, baby carriages, and light fixtures. As was often the case with Hopper’s work, the answers to such questions linger somewhere beyond the edge of the composition’s frame. Hopper later wrote that East Side Interior “was entirely improvised from memories of glimpses of rooms seen from the streets in the eastside in my walks in that part of the city… The interior itself was my main interest—simply a piece of New York, the city that interests me so much…” ["American Realism" Exhibition Label, 2023]
