As if a photographer had used a canvas and brushes, Edward Hopper spent his six decades in New York imagining, exploring and painting the megalopolis like no one had ever done before.
Some of this prolific work on the city that hosted him from 1908 to 1967 is part of the “Edward Hopper’s New York” exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which brings together the largest collection of the artist, on his 3,100 works. listed and its special relationship with New York.
Works such as Automatic (1927), Early Sunday Morning (1930), Room in New York (1932), New York Movie (1939) et Morning Sun (1952) are at the heart of this exhibition, along with watercolors of roofs and bridges, sketches for his works and documents that shed light on the life of the American artist. In total, more than 200 works from the Whitney Fund and loans from public and private collections make up this exhibition, open until March 2023 in Manhattan.
Some of the pieces in the exhibit come from a collection of works that once belonged to a Baptist minister, Arthayer Sanborn, who lived in the 1960s near Hopper’s childhood home. In a survey in October, the New York Times wondered how a pastor could have amassed up to 300 works by the painter. Before his death in 2007, Sanborn had claimed, without evidence, that they were gifts from the Hopper couple or pieces recovered from the artist’s apartment after his death.
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Snapshots of New York
Far from the clichés about the city-world, forest of skyscrapers, incredible cultural mosaic and world financial lung, Hopper’s New York is on a human scale. “Hopper spent most of his life here, a few blocks from the Whitney Museum”notes Kim Conaty, the curator of the exhibition.
“He knew the same streets and witnessed the permanent cycle of demolitions and reconstructions, like today, where New York is constantly reinventing itself”says the expert in a press release from the museum. “As few have done so poignantly, Hopper has captured a city that is both ever-changing and unchanging, a special place frozen in time and clearly shaped by his imagination,” concludes Ms. Conaty.
Hopper preferred unsung, even ignored places, those off the beaten path, to the Manhattan skyline and iconic landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building. “I have never been interested in the vertical”, he once joked. The man liked to isolate himself from the fury of the outside world.
Solitude
From 1913 until his death in 1967, Hopper lived with artist Josephine Nivison Hopper – whom he married and who was also a model for his paintings – in an apartment in Washington Square, Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan. From freelance illustrator, he became one of the most famous artists in the country.
A sort of “voyeur”, the painter, born in 1882 in Nyack, a small town on the banks of the Hudson River in northern New York, has never ceased to explore the porous borders between public and private life: windows, constant element in his work, make it possible to show both the exterior and the interior of a building.
Hopper described this experience as a “common visual sensation”. He paints chimneys, empty buildings, shops, bridges and everyday scenes of loneliness. The particular light of the painter can cause a sensation “scary, very dark” and even a feeling “empty”explains Jennifer Tipton, specialist in lighting for the theater, quoted by the Whitney Museum.
