Edward Hopper’s New York, which opens next week at the Whitney Museum of American Art, presents more than 200 paintings, watercolors, prints and drawings Hopper made of the city during the six decades he made his home here. Iconic images such as Early Sunday Morning, 1930 (above), from the Whitney’s collection, are joined by loans from public and private collections across the country. The power of his influence on contemporaneous taste can be seen in a work from a private collection in Wichita, Kansas, Sunlight on Brownstones, 1956 (below).

For all the majesty in the starkly rendered light and shadow of Early Sunday Morning, the subject—a row of low-rise brick buildings—is not generalized. Instead, Hopper has brought three decades of observation, rumination, and thought to his process, distilling these structures down to their essence. By blurring salient details, such as shop names and displays, he has fashioned from his memory the sensation of having studied all of that information to create a kind of monument to a particular type of New York architecture. And it is not nostalgic in any way. If you just stand in the gallery and look closely and slowly, with a quiet mind, you might begin to sense what it is to be a silent bystander, as was Hopper, in a city where buildings such as these were being demolished—blocks of them at a time—to make way for skyscrapers that would take over places where people used to live. 

The show can be considered a demonstration of what it took for Hopper to become what LIFE called the “major artist of the century.” And this did not happen overnight. Although Hopper went to art school, he also educated himself through his three brief visits to Paris between 1906 and 1910, as well as through his work as noted illustrator and printmaker. For a time between 1915 and the mid-1920s, he continually made etchings, often drawing directly onto his copper plates, on location, rather than in a sketchbook. And he purchased his own press to have access to the finished sheets in his own time. This practice, a form of self-education on abstractly rendering light and shadow, informs his mature paintings as much as the sumptuous handling of the paint itself. A small gallery, off to the side, presents etchings and on-site drawings in which he tried out compositional variations for the figures, rocks and trees that populate his sparsely delineated scenes, and the light that falls upon them.  

There is a lot of storytelling in these paintings, which are based on realism but for the most part cannot be considered narrative art, in the way that the iconic Tables for Ladies, 1930, (above) can. Oftentimes the subjects are so abstracted that they become symbols of, almost monuments to, this city in a race with time and the people caught up in the race. In one of his rare interviews, Hopper said that his intentions were, were to “project upon canvas my most intimate reaction to the subject as it appears when I like it most; when the facts are given unity by my interest and prejudices.” The ways in which he synthesized his observations from life into his paintings of commonplace people in commonplace surroundings becomes evident in many of his night scenes. 

The exhibition could justly be titled “The Interior World of Edward Hopper.” As a silent bystander, he took in the ways in which people are seen through windows, in both public and private spaces. In New York Office, 1962 (above), a woman wearing a revealing dress knifes open a letter as she stands at the front of the office before a window that sheds sharply raked night time light onto the dark space behind her. The figure of another woman, to the right, is cut off by the edge of the canvas. The faceless figure of a man sits further back. While we can tell that this building is probably located around Waverly Place and Greene Street, a couple of blocks east of Hopper’s studio, we have no idea what is going on inside. Hopper takes the mystery out of the place through his precise expression of architectural types, while layering in a new mystery from his imagination.

Even more eerie is Night Windows, 1928. Here the viewer becomes a voyeur looking into an apartment across the way. A sheer fluttering curtain at the left directs attention to the figure of a woman in the middle window, seen from behind, bending over, and partially cut off by the window frame. Again, the building type is exactly that of Hopper’s Washington Square neighborhood, with tall, simple bay windows. The scene is framed by cold bluish light on the left, and warm reddish light on the right, much in the way a stage set might be lit. Hopper and his wife Josephine (known as Jo and herself an actor) were avid theater goers, sometimes taking in three productions a week. That influence is often felt in Hopper’s night scenes, most emphatically here, where we can only wonder what is going on.

Among the rarities in this exhibition are seven of Hopper’s watercolors. In My Roof, 1928 (above), he painted the stiflingly close space to which he often repaired to escape the confines of his studio. There’s a sly sense of humor here that surely reflects his take on an artist’s life.

Edward Hopper’s New York runs from October 19, 2022 through March 5, 2023 Tickets, with member previews October13-17 Info 
The exhibition is accompanied by a splendid catalogue published by the Whitney and distributed by Yale University Press, featuring essays by curator Kim Conaty, writer and critic Kirsty Bell, scholar Darby English, and artist David Hartt. Info
A series of free virtual and in-person programs are offered in conjunction with Edward Hopper’s New York. More information about these programs and how to register will be available on the Museum’s website as details are confirmed.

The Whitney Museum is located at 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info

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Credits, top to bottom:
Early Sunday Morning, 1930. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.426 © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 
Sunlight on Brownstones, 1956. Wichita Art Museum, KS, Roland P. Murdock Collection. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York New York Office, 1962. Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL; The Blount Collection
Night Shadows, 1921. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1047. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York  
Tables for Ladies, 1930. The Metropolitan Museum of Art; George A. Hearn Fund. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Art Resource, New York 
Night Windows, 1928. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of John Hay Whitney 
My Roof, © 1928. N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York