 "East End Paintings" catalogue by: John Esten

Like so many other Artists, Curt Hoppe's first visit to the East End of Long Island was a visual revelation. The realist painter still remembers his first impressions from the trip out along Route 27 with its changing views of windswept fields and tree-lined villages; it was unfamiliar and yet familiar- it was all "picture-perfect," he said.

The artist's visual impressions of the East End have been lasting ones: "Every time I go out there I look forward to my favorite landmarks. When I see Grace's and stop for a hot dog,I know I'm halfway there. When I pass Schwenk's farm, I know it's only minutes to East Hampton; then I'll drive by Sam's, sometimes at midnight, and look through the window to see my painting in the back of the restaurant. I' m happy to be finally back"

The East End landscape with its luminous light has been the inspiration for two schools of American artists. In 1878, a group of New York sketchers and painters who called themselves The Tile Club traveled by train to the South Fork of Long Island on a sketching excursion. Founded the previous year, the Club met to paint decorative tiles (then a popular art form) and exchange gossip about the art world. Club members included Winslow Homer, Edwin Austin Abbey, John Twachtman, William Merritt Chase, and J. Alden Weir. The Club's first summer outing to the East End assured the future of the area as an artistic and cultural center in the United States.

During and after World War II, a second migration of artists arrived in the East End who altered the focus of American art. In 1945, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner bought a small farm house in the Springs of East Hampton, followed by Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, among others. This developing school of painting-Abstract Expressionism-reinterpreted the East End landscape in a completely innovative way.

Born on April 19, 1950 Curt Hoppe spent the summers of his childhood at his grandparents' home in northern Minnesota overlooking the shore of Lake Superior. The artist claims that he is a "Heinz 57 Variety American." Truman was his mother's maiden name, whose Midwestern cousin was the country's thirty-third President.

Growing up in Minneapolis, the artist graduated from the University of Minnesota High School; later he attended and left the university. As a teenager, when his contemporaries were making pocket money cutting lawns and raking leaves, Hoppe painted sign; among them was on for the local "The Scholar Coffee House" where Bob Dylan had played. The artist's early interest and involvement with sign painting and outdoor graphics is very much evident in some of his recent landscaper (pages 14,15,16). Hoppe who admittedlyis a self-taught artist, began painting seriously almost thirty years ago. He unassumingly points out that "art is the only thing I've ever really felt I've been cut out for-it's never been a choice for me."

The energy and mystique of the New York art scene motivated the young artist's relocation to Manhattan in 1975: he maintains that "Minneapolis is a great place to leave and take things along with you." The "things" Hoppe brought with him were considerable: vigor, optimism, youthful joie de vivre, and the determination to paint. After finding a fifth floor walk-up on the Bowery ( se still lives there with his wife, Ruth). Hoppe subsidized his painting career by doing magazine illustration, taking paparazzi photographs, or sometimes "cleaning a bar on Broome Street." During this time, he frequented galleries, studied art books and magazines, and kept up with what other painters were working on.

Hoppe began painting naturalistic female nudes, and then started working in a patient, meticulous was that he felt had more truthful results. These realistic painting were a serious alternative to the various postwar avant-garde movements: the Abstract Expressionism, POP, OP. and color-field abstraction that were prevalent at that time.

The artist didn't venture far from his Bowery studio to paint object and scenes of the everyday life of his neighborhood when he began a series of paintings of Little Italy. Hoppe was intrigued with the indigenous, familiar " old stuff" he found there: storefronts, fire engines, and signs were among his favorite subjects.

Although the East End landscape is completely different from the cityscape of the Lower East Side, the artist became equally intrigued with the region's mundane iconography of rural and suburban middle America. Soda fountains, a movie house, a golf range and Fourth of July fireworks are part of the "real" East End that Hoppe documented for nearly ten summers. All are pictures of familiar places-a captivating combination of straightforwardness and restraint. "I paint where I am" is how Hoppe puts it.

From an interview with the artist by John Esten on April 28th, 2000, New York City


Eye Opener 8x10 inches Acrylic on Canvas, Private Collection	Iacono 48x72 inches Oil on Canvas, Private Collection


Sip n' Soda Oil on Linen 14x21 inches, Private Collection	American Hotel Oil on Linen 24x36 inches, Private Collection

My paintings on an assortment of covers from Dan's Papers (click on the cover to enlarge)

Reproduction, including electronic download, is by permission of the artist only.


The Candy Kitchen 24x36 inches, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection	Train Station Oil on Linen 24x40inches, Private Collection


Hook Pond Acrylic on Linen 46x83inches, Private Collection	Estia Acrylic on Linen, Private Collection