Edward Hopper's New York doesn't look like anybody else's. To begin with, there are far fewer residents. Even at the height of the pandemic, Manhattan's streets must have had more people. Nor did Hopper shoot for accuracy; his urban landscapes aren't always immediately identifiable and not just because the city has changed significantly since he painted them. Like Washington Square, glimpsed here.
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| "The City" (1927) |
Hopper and his wife, Jo, an artist in her own right, lived in Washington Square for many years. A U.S. government-produced documentary showed Hopper and his wife Jo, an artist herself, working there in the mid-60s, shortly before he died.
If Hopper had had a camera phone, he would have used the landscape mode far more often than the portrait. He saw the city horizontally. Few skyscrapers appear in his work. Robert Moses, who nearly destroyed Washington Square Park, added a highway to the view below shortly after Hopper painted the view below. The Whitney exhibit includes correspondence between the two men. Unsurprisingly, they were antagonists.
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| "Apartment Houses, East River" (ca 1930) |
Who knew that Hopper was so prolific? Or that he used color so masterfully?
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| "Drug Store" (1927) |
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| "Table for Ladies" (1930) |
Women, typically alone, appear far more often than men in Hopper's work.
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| "Intermission" (1963) |
Jo often served as a model.
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| "Morning in a City" (1944) |
The Hoppers were avid theatergoers. Jo saved all the ticket stubs for the shows they saw (Death of a Salesman among them), annotating each with the name of the production. Hopper followed the careers of theatrical designers including Jo Mielziner, whose name Dave had always uttered only with awed regard.
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| "Two on the Aisle" (1927) |
Hopper painted this scene just east of the Dakota in Central Park very accurately. It resonated because Stuart identified the by-then mostly disused tunnel as the site of impromptu gay orgies. I was scandalized!
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| "Bridle Path"(1939) |
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