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.
Part of the exhibition is part of this prolific work on the city that hosted it from 1908 to 1967 Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney Museum, which brings together the artist’s largest collection, of his 3,100 listed works, and his special relationship with New York.
Works like Automatic (1927), Early Sunday morning (1930), Room in New York (1932), New York film (1939) et Morning sun (1952) are at the center of this exhibition, in addition to watercolors of roofs and bridges, sketches for his works and documents that shed light on the life of the American artist.
Far from the clichés on the “city of the world”forest of skyscrapers, incredible cultural mosaic and global financial lung, Hopper’s New York is on a human scale.
“Hopper has spent most of his life here, just a few blocks from the Whitney Museum“, Observes 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 constantly reinvents itself”, estimates the expert in a press release from the museum. “Because few have done so touchingly, Hopper has captured a city that is both mutable and immutable, a special place frozen in time and clearly shaped by his imagination.”concludes Mrs. Conaty.
Hopper preferred places unknown, even ignored, those off the beaten track, to the famous “skyline” of Manhattan and emblematic monuments such as the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building. “I’ve never been interested in the vertical,” he once joked. Man liked to isolate himself from the fury of the outside world.
From 1913 until his death in 1967, Hopper lived with his wife, also an artist and model for his paintings, Josephine Nivison Hopper in the same Washington Square apartment in Greenwich Village, in lower Manhattan.
From a freelance illustrator, he has become one of the most famous artists in the country. Guy “voyeur”, the painter born in 1882 in Nyack, a town on the banks of the Hudson River north of New York, has never stopped exploring the porous boundaries between public and private life: the windows, a constant element of his work, show both the exterior and the interior of a building. He described this experience as a “common visual sensation”. Hopper paints fireplaces, empty buildings, shops, bridges and lonely everyday scenes. The painter’s particular light can cause a stir “scary, very dark” and also a sensation “empty”, explains Jennifer Tipton, specialist in lighting for the theater, cited by the Whitney Museum.
Some of the pieces on display are 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 Nyack. In an October survey, the New York Times wondered how a pastor could have amassed up to 300 works by the painter. Prior to his death in 2007, Sanborn had claimed, without proof, that these were gifts from the Hopper couple or pieces recovered from the artist’s apartment after his death.
