Drawing from the Whitney’s extensive holdings and amplified by key loans, the exhibition brings together many of Hopper’s iconic city pictures as well as several lesser-known yet critically important examples. Edward Hopper’s New York charts the artist’s enduring fascination with the city, revealing a vision of New York that is as much a manifestation of Hopper himself as it is a record of the city around him.Įdward Hopper’s New York takes a comprehensive look at Hopper’s life and work, from his early impressions of New York in sketches, prints, and illustrations, to his late paintings, in which the city served as a backdrop for his evocative distillations of urban experience. Eschewing the city’s iconic skyline and picturesque landmarks, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, Hopper instead turned his attention to its unsung utilitarian structures and out-of-the-way corners, drawn to the awkward collisions of new and old, civic and residential, public and private that captured the paradoxes of the changing city.

During his lifetime, the city underwent tremendous development-skyscrapers reached record-breaking heights, construction sites roared across the five boroughs, and an increasingly diverse population boomed-yet his depictions of New York remained human-scale and largely unpopulated. Hopper’s New York was not an exacting portrait of the twentieth-century metropolis. The city of New York was Hopper’s home for nearly six decades (1908–67), a period that spans his entire mature career.

It was, he reflected late in life, “the American city that I know best and like most.” 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.

City of Brass instal the new