Wyeth Lecture in American Art
Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939
Alexander Nemerov
October 25, 2007
Watch the video podcast of the lecture.
Held in conjunction with the exhibition Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper's paintings often show people and places in states of enigmatic isolation, loneliness, and contemplation. These are among the fabled Hopper themes—so fabled it would hardly seem possible to go beyond them to give another account of his art. Focusing on one Hopper painting, Ground Swell of 1939, this lecture tries to provide a thicker, denser, more surprising story of what it meant for Hopper to make a painting, especially in the year 1939.
Alexander Nemerov is a professor of the history of art at Yale University. He received his BA (1985) from the University of Vermont; he completed his MA (1987) and PhD (1992) at Yale University. He has taught at Stanford University (1992–2000) and at Yale University, where he has been member of the faculty since 2001. His awards include a Material Culture Fellowship, Smithsonian Institution / University Consortium for Studies in Material Culture, National Museum of American Art (1988–1991), and a Dean's Award from Stanford University (1998–1999).
Dr. Nemerov has published a number of acclaimed books, including of Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures (2005); The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (2001), which received a Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant; Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (1995), which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award (1996). He has also organized several exhibitions, such as Mammoth Scale: The Anatomical Sculptures of William Rush (2002–2003) and Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story (2006). In addition, he has published catalogue essays such as "Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era," in Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (2006), and "Burning Daylight: Remington, Electricity, and Flash Photography," in Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (2003). In 2006 he was invited to contribute an essay to the Art Bulletin's Interventions series: "The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N.C. Wyeth's Wreck of the 'Covenant.'"