Audio Tour Stop 7

Ground Swell, Edward Hopper

NGA, West Building, G-006, N
Part of East Building: Featured Selections (français)

Le ciel bleu, les personnages exposés au soleil et la houle de Ground Swell donnent une impression immédiate de calme, mais certains détails de la peinture remettent en question ce sentiment initial de sérénité. Le bateau se trouve face à une bouée au milieu d'un paysage marin qui est par ailleurs vide. Son usage – l'avertissement d'un danger invisible ou imminent – rend la scène inquiétante. Les nuages cirrus dans le ciel bleu, souvent annonciateurs d'orage, renforcent cette impression de perturbation.

Ground Swell (French)
A buoy and a sailboat with three men and a woman tip at an angle on rolling aquamarine and azure-blue waves in this horizontal painting. The white wooden boat sails away from us toward the right side of the composition. Its unfurled sail is tinged with taupe and pale blue and attached to a pale wooden mast. The boat has a low cabin with round portholes on the side we can see. Two of the men are shirtless, tanned, and have their backs to us. One sits in the cockpit wearing a white hat with a short brim as he holds the tiller. The other man stands on the deck with his arms crossed. Beyond the standing man, the woman lies along the roof of the cabin, her head at about the height of the man’s chest. She is barefoot and lies on her stomach wearing long, blue pants and a watermelon-pink halter top and matching kerchief covering her hair. The third man stands to her right, his slender body angled toward us while holding onto the mast with one hand and rigging with the other. The woman and third man have noticeably pale skin. A buoy near the boat is battleship-gray with streaks of rust along its base and a copper-green bell inside. It floats just to the left of and tips toward the boat on a rising swell. The scene is lit by bright sunlight coming from the left side of the baby-blue sky with bands of feathery clouds, which takes up the top two-thirds of the composition. The artist signed the lower right, “EDWARD HOPPER.”
Edward Hopper, Ground Swell, 1939, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund), 2014.79.23

You may also like

Audio Tour Stop:  Fresh Widow, Marcel Duchamp

Audio Tour Stop:  Bird in Space, Constantin Brâncuși

Audio Tour Stop:  Untitled, Alexander Calder