NYRA at the Museum

Approaching a City (1946) is the first painting you see when you enter Edward Hopper’s New York at The Whitney. Curator’s notes reveal that Hopper, who originally hailed from Nyack and as a boy made trips to the city by train, took inspiration from a similar point of entry he was undoubtedly familiar with. Yet the canvas eliminates any identifying details. Spend enough time looking and you begin to see Hopper’s vision for “realistic art from which fantasy can grow.”

Hopper lived and worked in New York for nearly his whole life (1908–1967) and his paintings and sketches don’t shy away from the city’s landmarks. But with a similar frequency his work invoked “a city” — an unlabeled stand-in that communicated the sort of metropolitan anonymity Hopper observed and enjoyed in Manhattan. Many of the works throughout the exhibition bear this moniker. And of course, this choice plays well with his literal anonymizing via abstraction of facial features found in later scenes. (Nighthawks, though, where are you?)

Solitary figures or nondescript groups are set in generic urban …