Nora Quintanilla
New York, October 12 (EFE) .- “New York is the American city I know and like best,” said the painter Edward Hopper in 1966, whose charm was reflected in numerous works that have been collected in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum, the artist’s world temple.
“Edward Hopper’s New York” is a journey back in time when the Big Apple was home and inspiration for the painter, born in 1882 in Nyack (Upstate New York) and who moved to the city at the age of 26, where he spent the rest of a shared life with his wife, Josephine, in a Greenwich Village home studio.
A week before inviting the public, the museum opens its doors to the press for a tour of the scenes that Hopper has observed and painted over and over again: the facades and buildings that still populate New York and, most importantly, the windows through the gaze. women who are alone and reveal the life of other people inside.
This is the case of great works such as “Morning Sun” (1952), in which a young version of his wife hugs her legs sitting on the bed and bathed in light from outside, or “Automat” (1962), in which a woman thoughtfully drinks a coffee in a self-service restaurant with a dark shop window behind her.
THE GREATEST TREASURE IN THE WORLD
The exhibition of 200 works – including paintings, watercolors, drawings, engravings, illustrations and personal documents – draws largely from the Whitney’s collection, the largest in the world with over 3,100 works, and from a hitherto unknown historical archive that was preserved from the Sanborn family, friends of the Hoppers.
That hoard of nearly 5,000 objects, called Sanborn-Hopper, was amassed by the descendants of its neighbor, the Protestant Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn, who distributed it five years ago between the museum and Nyack’s Edward Hopper House with an applauded distribution. but with doubts about how they got hold of so many pieces.
Many of these objects are capsules that capture moments in his life, such as the theater tickets where Hopper wrote the show he had seen, or the letters he and his wife wrote to the leaders of the time to combat the gentrification that threatened the Square. of Washington Square, where they lived.
It also includes illustrations and magazine covers by Hopper, who he denounced for considering them only commercial, and oddities such as an article in which he claims humanism in painting versus abstract expressionism or photographs of the couple in their studio.
A NOSTALGIC VISION
For curator Kim Conaty, Hopper expert who spent four years preparing the exhibition, the works offer a “very personal vision of the city” in which she spent almost six decades and connect the past, marked by horizontal landscapes, with the present. , populated by vertical skyscrapers that he hated.
Hopper, who led a frugal life and loved to spend time on the balcony or stroll the streets with Josephine, loved to reflect the “clash” between public and private, Conaty said, with theatrical compositions, without people or with silent figures in an attitude of contemplation or observation.
The painter portrays from the rooftops of his neighborhood and from the bridges of the city to the waters of the East River bathing what is now Roosevelt Island, crossing offices with an atmosphere in danger of extinction due to local technology and businesses, such as bars with “ladies’ tables” or grocery stores now extinct.
Conaty highlighted this “nostalgic vision of New York” and humorously pointed to one of the paintings, “Drug Store” (1927), with a carefully decorated pharmacy window as a “jewelry box” to attract people, encouraging the chains that dominate today. the Big Apple to “take note”. EFE
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