Quiet City
For Edward Hopper, New York was a fount of sights that he never tired of seeing or, indeed, painting.
Edward Hopper, Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928. Oil on canvas, 35 × 60 in. (88.9 × 152.4 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Art Resource, NY
Edward Hopper’s New York, curated by Kim Conaty with Melinda Lang, was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 19, 2022, to March 5, 2023.
Edward Hopper is remembered as the great painter of New York’s classic era in the first half of the twentieth century, and so he is. But despite his reputation for the moody, noirish introspection of Nighthawks, the human figures on display in Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney Museum do little to suggest any actual interiority. On the contrary, the atmosphere of his paintings comes from the resolute impenetrability of his subjects; they may be dreaming, but we know only that we do not know their dreams. When you look back at it, Nighthawks isn’t as atmospheric as we recall: our memories of a melodramatic haze of smoke and fog are upset by a starkly lit and oddly antiseptic greasy spoon that seems more drained of ambience than suffused with it. Popular culture has pinned Hopper with a nostalgic association that is mostly missing from the paintings themselves, romanticizing a sense …
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