Painters and Paintings of Rockland County, NY: The Hopper Years opens Feb. 22, 2014

Edward Hopper House Art Center presents an exhibition of artists who lived at worked in Rockland County, NY during Edward Hopper's years, on view Feb. 22-April 13, 2014. 

Rockland County has long been a hotbed of creativity.   Its natural beauty and close proximity to Manhattan havedrawn artists and writers to the area for centuries.  While Edward Hopper is arguably one of the county’s most renowned and influential cultural figures, many other artists of his time who were active in the area contributed important ideas and new methods to the arts.  

South Mountain Road in New City became a well-known artist colony in the early part of the 20th century, attracting major figures, such as playwright Maxwell Anderson, actor/producer John Houseman, artist/architect Henry Varnum Poor, composer Kurt Weill, and singer Lotte Lenya, among others.

Other renowned artists were active in the county as well, including Robert Henri, a leading figure of the Ashcan School (and teacher of Edward Hopper),and Arthur Bowen (A.B.) Davies.  They were particularly influential in the modernist movement that was taking hold in New York in the early part of the 20th century.  Davies was a principal organizer of the pivotal International Exhibition of Modern Art (commonly known as the Armory Show) in 1913.  The exhibition, which includedMarcel Duchamp, Vasily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso (and more than 300 other American and European artists, including Edward Hopper),was the first to bring European modernism to America. 

That Rockland County can be viewed as a cradle of modernism is not an overstatement.   In the context of such a rich cultural history, this exhibition attempts to document the work and lives of some of the most influential and gifted artists who lived in, and frequented, Rockland during Edward Hopper’s lifetime.