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 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 artist’s largest collection of his 3,100 listed works. , and its special relationship with New York.
Works such as “Automat” (1927), “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), “Room in New York” (1932), “New York Movie” (1939) and “Morning Sun” (1952) are the focus of this exhibition , as well as 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.
– Snapshots of New York –
Far from the clichés of the “city of the world”, a forest of skyscrapers, an incredible cultural mosaic and a 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,” said Kim Conaty, 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,” the expert said in a press release from the museum.
“As 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 Ms. 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.
– Solitude –
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.
A sort of “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: windows, a constant element in his work , allow you to 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 feeling “frightening, very dark” and even a feeling of “emptiness,” explains Jennifer Tipton, lighting specialist 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 had amassed up to 300 works by the painter.
Prior to his death in 2007, Sanborn had claimed, without evidence, that these were gifts from the Hopper couple or pieces recovered from the artist’s apartment after his death.
