LAKELAND, FLA.- 511 Projects opened the exhibition, Edward Hopper and Guy Pène Du Bois: Painting the Real at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida, this past December 17th, and will continue to have it on view through March 26th, 2023.

The exhibition of sixty artworks by the Hopper and Pène du Bois is the first to examine these two American modernist masters side by side, within the context of their close personal relationship as well as their shared commitment to painting the real life and lives that surrounded them in twentieth-century America.

Born in Brooklyn in 1884 to French parents, Guy Pène du Bois was a painter of people and their relationships. His French-American dualist identity gave him a unique perspective as both insider and outsider – at home but also abroad – towards Americans and American life in the twentieth century. His drawings and paintings are infused with a keen sense of observation, irony, and nuance not found in the portraits and social scene renderings of other realist artists of the period. Though his work is most well-known for its often-satirical representation, seen through the prism of the social lives of the upwardly mobile and affluent, his art and commentary extended to those of all economic, cultural, and social backgrounds and included opera singers, jockeys, soldiers, household workers, “working women” outdoor laborers and other artists as well.

Edward Hopper, on the other hand, was decidedly American and home-grown. Born in 1882 in the small town of Nyack, New York, only thirty minutes north of New York City and on the shoreline of the Hudson River, he remained there throughout his youth before moving to the city in 1910, finding a permanent home and studio in Greenwich Village in 1913, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. In his private paintings of the time, his subjects were found in the landscape and in the few people of his immediate physical environment. His wife, Jo Nivison Hopper was the model for all but two of his major paintings that included women figures. That position of solitary observer in sparsely peopled places, with limited social relationships, gave Hopper a unique perspective on America as well – though in his case, it was through the prism of landscapes and the physical structures in the landscape, that he saw and represented people’s working and social lives.

Hopper and Pène du Bois became fast friends while studying at the New York School of Art from 1900 to 1905 under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and there cemented their shared commitment to painting the Real. The two remained lifelong friends, with constant intersections of their careers and social lives .

Each artist took his own individual approach to painting real life, the differences in their personalities made manifest in their art. Hopper, much of a loner, with few friends outside his immediate circle and not often agile in social settings, despite his ability to draw and paint human figures, was an artist primarily of the landscape. He focused on the structures that filled it, and drew and painted people in relation to their surroundings. His houses are not only masterfully portrayed, but also are endowed with personalities: They are “lonely houses”, a house protected by a rain barrel or a tree, houses in danger from human-made intruders, and houses with shades drawn down, abandoned, with overgrown lawns. Pène du Bois, exceptionally socially adept, by contrast could draw and paint fluidly the French or Connecticut or New York City landscape with no people present, but, as he wrote in his 1940 memoir, “Wherever one lives, the people are certainly in the end more important than the setting.”

Despite their close relationship, previous exhibitions have rarely placed these two artists in other than solo shows and never in a two-person exhibition. Often, solo exhibitions for both Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois have little context beyond medium, time, or specific place. Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois: Painting the Real will be the first exhibition to pair and place in contextual dialogue the art of these two friends and colleagues.

Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois: Painting the Real on view since December 17, 2022 through March 26, 2023. Mara Miller, independent curator and Managing Director of 511 Projects in New York City, is Guest Curator of the exhibition.