FAYETTEVILLE - What Leo Mazow knows about American painter Edward Hopper could fill a hotel room.
The University of Arkansas associate art history professor and musician has been researching Hopper’s interest in hotels and motels for a book project he’s tentatively calling Hopper’s Hotels: Edward Hopper and the Promise of American Mobility. Mazow will talk about his findings and perform a series of hotel-themed cover tuneswith his band The Coverlets at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.
“Hopper was obsessed, from the beginning to the end of his life, with transportation imagery,” Mazow said. “And the hotel has to be considered as among those emblems of transportation.”
Wednesday’s event will also celebrate Crystal Bridges’own Hopper gem, Blackwell’s Island (1928), on display in the museum’s Early Twentieth-Century Art Gallery through April 21 with four of the artist’s preliminary drawings on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art. The cityscape is among the largest of Hopper’s oil paintings and features the north end of what is now Roosevelt Island, a small sliver of land in New York City’s East River. Preliminary sketches are drawings an artist does in advance of the finished painting.
The small focus exhibition also includes two watercolors and an etching by Hopper that are part of Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection.
The works Mazow will be discussing this week are not part of the exhibition or in the museum’s collection but will help give patrons a better understanding of his art, Crystal Bridges Assistant Curator Manuela Well-Off-Man said.
“I think he reaches audiences that aren’t always interested in art or an artist but may be more interested in folk music, or in the case of Hopper, travel and transportation,” she said.
Mazow’s book project focuses on, among other works, four paintings of hotels, one of a motel and one of a boarding house: Rooms For Tourists (1945); Western Motel (1957); Hotel Lobby (1943); Hotel Window (1955), which was once owned by actor/musician Steve Martin; Hotel by a Railroad (1952); and Hotel Room (1931), which was Hopper’s first in the hotel series.
“[Hotels] may not be as literally a matter of transportation as say a road, a car, a train - and he paints all those things - but it facilitates transportation and you can’t have transportation without them,” he said.
Travelers are depicted in hotel lobbies and rooms, clothed and unclothed (within the rooms) but mostly in a state of inactivity.
“Hotels are places we come and go,” he continued. “Hopper’s America is going somewhere. It’s not that it isn’t happy where it is, but ithas its next move on its mind. And that produces a kind of anxiety.”
Erika Doss, Mazow’s adviser when he was a graduate student in art history at the University of Colorado-Boulder, said he believes Mazow has tapped into good material with Hopper’s hotel series. What’s been published about Hopper is largely biographical.
“Scholars like Leo are looking again at Hopper and asking some serious questions - questions that are historically, socially, sort of intellectually engaged,” said Doss, now a professor in the department of American studies at Notre Dame.
“Hotels are places where people go to all the time,” she said. “Salesmen stay in hotels, people have affairs in hotels. Hopper is attentive to the popular culture of the modern times that he lived in. Leo’s project tells us why he painted the subjects that he painted.”
Hopper studied art at the New York Institute of Art and Design (George Bellows was a classmate), but while he was waiting for his career as an artist to take off, he worked the better part of 15 years as a commercial illustrator creating covers for trade magazines, including the two most popular hotel trade journals of the time - Hotel Management and Tavern Topics. Between the two publications,he produced about 30 covers.
Mazow has studied these covers, in addition to postcards and letters Hopper sent his dealer and others from the hotels where he stayed. Correspondence featuring the hotels’ and motels’ letterheads depicted the places he visited.
“It tells us a little bit about his storehouse of visual data,” he said.
Mazow also wrote an award-winning book on Thomas Hart Benton and continues to perform music from and about the era during which Benton lived. The UA professor has been working on and off on Hopper’s Hotels for about a year and a half.
“My study looks at these occasionally shady spaces that are at once reassuring and disconcerting - the denizens of these spaces ‘vrooming’ along American highways or city streets yet going nowhere in a hurry,” he said.
To gain an understanding of Hopper’s hotel paintings, Mazow has been watching movies and reading novels about hotels and consultingwith colleagues around the country who’ve written about the same era of art. Mazow said he’s intrigued “about the weirdness of a hotel, how this icon is capable of simultaneous denoting so many things: love and unrequited love, happiness and mirth, murder, prostitution.”
At the end of the presentation Mazow and vocalist Brittany Stephenson, will give their renditions of “Small Hotel” from the musical On Your Toes, “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley, “Hotel Yorba” by the White Stripes, The Eagles’ “Hotel California” and a Coverlet original, “Peach and Bare.”
The lecture and performance are free, but reservations are required at crystalbridges.org or at the museum’s guest services counter.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 19 on 03/30/2014