Hopper's New York on display at the Whitney Museum

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents through March 5, 2023 the exhibition Edward Hopper’s New York, curated by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames with Melinda Lang.

For Edward Hopper, New York was a city that existed in the mind as well as on the map, a place that took shape through lived experience, memory, and the collective imagination. “The American city I know best and like best,” he declared late in life.

He lived in New York for nearly six decades (1908 to 1967), a period spanning almost his entire career. Hopper’s New York was not an accurate portrait of the 20th-century metropolis. During his lifetime, the city underwent tremendous development: skyscrapers reached record heights and the increasingly diverse population exploded; nevertheless, his depictions of the city remained human-scale and largely uninhabited. Eschewing the city’s iconic skyline and picturesque landmarks, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, Hopper turned his attention to the unfamiliar and out-of-the-way corners, fascinated by the link between old and new, civic and residential, public and private, which captured the paradoxes of a city in rapid change.

Edward Hopper’s New York offers a comprehensive look at the artist’s own life and work-from his earliest impressions of New York in sketches, prints, and illustrations to his last paintings, in which the city served as a backdrop.

With works from the Whitney’s collections and major loans, the exhibition brings together many of Hopper’s iconic images of New York, as well as several lesser-known but critically important examples. Documents such as letters, photographs, and diaries are on loan from the Sanborn Hopper Archive, recently acquired by the museum.

For info: https://whitney.org/

Image: Edward Hopper, Room in New York (1932; Lincoln, Sheldon Museum of Art)

Hopper's New York on display at the Whitney Museum

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