Western Motel

Edward Hopper worked as a commercial artist in the 1920s for the hospitality industry illustrating hotel magazines. From the 1930s until the 1960s, Hopper and his wife Josephine Hopper (Jo) enjoyed traveling on long road trips to Mexico and across the United States by car, making great use of motels and hotels along the way. Hopper used these themes in his work, with many paintings making use of artistic and interpretive renderings and idealized depictions of the original places where they stayed.^[1] Two notable works from this time on this theme include Room in New York (1932) and Hotel Lobby (1943).^[2]

In July 1956, the Huntington Hartford Foundation awarded Hopper $1000 ($11,565 in 2024) and a six-month residence at their Rustic Canyon art colony near Pacific Palisades in California. Hopper was not a fan of California nor of art colonies, but after Jo discovered that people had nothing but good things to say about Rustic Canyon, she convinced Edward to go. They left their summer home on Cape Cod in October, with plans to drive a southwesterly route, presumably at some time in November.^[3] A Time magazine cover story on Hopper from December 1956, indicated that they drove a 1954 green and white Buick Century sedan to California,^[4] arriving in Los Angeles on December 9.^[3] Finding the lodgings comfortable and the food beyond reproach, they remained for the full six months. During their visit, they stayed in accommodations designed by Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright.^[5]

Hopper began two works during this time, an oil painting titled Western Motel and a watercolor titled California Hills.^[5] He initially made a charcoal and graphite study for Western Motel,^[6] informally referred to as a Sketch of Hotel, that originally featured two windows and two figures seated in a hotel lobby-like environment. The initial sketch changed in the painting, with the window on the left becoming a wall, the two figures reduced to one, a woman sitting on a bed, with the hotel lobby transformed into a bedroom.^[7]

Hopper completed the painting in either February or March 1957.^[5] In her notes for the work, Jo recalls that the large window depicted in the painting was similar to the Wright-designed window in their room that looked out over Rustic Canyon. She described the scene as "Deluxe green motel room, mahogany bed, pink cover, dark red chair with blue robe", with the woman as a "haughty blond in dark red, her Buick outside window green."^[5] The Hoppers left Rustic Canyon for Cape Cod on June 6, with Edward, now 74 years old, driving the 3,000 mile journey. They arrived at home in South Truro, Massachusetts, on June 19. Hopper finished California Hills in South Truro that summer.^[3]

A blonde woman wearing a sleeveless, V-neck burgundy dress sits on the edge of a fully made bed with a mahogany-colored frame in a sparsely furnished green motel room. She looks toward the viewer, but her eyes are turned to her right. Near the end of her gaze, two fully packed suitcases sit in the lower left-hand corner. Behind the woman, to her left, next to the bed, is a nightstand with a gooseneck lamp and a small clock. Directly across from the bed on the right is a red chair with a blue sweater draped across it near the front door of the room. The chair, the bed, the bedspread, and the woman's dress are all in matching red tones. Daylight enters the room through large plate-glass windows. The hood of a green Buick is visible through the window, with the low, rounded hills of a Southwestern mesa in shadow on the horizon. The painting is signed "Edward Hopper" in the lower right corner.

Art historian Leo G. Mazow of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts believes that the original hotel stay depicted in the painting may derive from the Hopper's 1952 trip to El Paso, Texas, at the Weseman Motor Court from December 15–22. Mazow matched a partial description of the painting from Jo's 1952 diary entry about accommodations in the area. Weseman was then located near U.S. Route 80 in Texas before the Interstate Highway System replaced it. This area contained several motor courts, one of which was named "Western Motel", which originally opened in 1950. A newspaper account of the construction of the motel describes the interior room with a bed made from limed oak, an easy chair, and other furnishings, with pastel color mixed directly into the plaster walls.^[1]

The positioning of the scene has been compared to several of Hopper's other paintings, including Compartment C and New York Movie.^[8] Yale curator Mark D. Mitchell describes the work as if it were a scene from a film storyboard.^[9] Art critic Mark Strand argues that this is the only Hopper painting where the subject stares directly at the viewer.^[10] Mazow disputes this idea, noting that a close examination of the painting shows that the eyes of the woman are turned to her right, looking to the left of the viewer, not straight at them.^[11]

Art collector Stephen Carlton Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine company through his grandfather Edward Cabot Clark, and a Hopper collector throughout the 1950s, purchased Western Motel in 1957 from the Rehn Gallery in New York.^[12] Upon his death, it was bequeathed to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1961.^[13] Yale later obtained Hopper's original study for the painting in 2009.^[6]