A New York-Centric Edward Hopper Exhibition Opens At The Whitney This Fall

An unprecedented retrospective of Edward Hopper’s work will focus on his life in New York City.

Edward Hopper’s New York will open on October 19, 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and run through March 5, 2023. The new curation offers an unprecedented examination of Hopper’s life and work in the city he lived in for nearly six decades (1908–1967).

The exhibition is designed to chart the artist’s enduring fascination with New York City through more than 200 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings from the Whitney’s collection of Hopper’s work, supplemented with loans from public and private collections, and archival materials including printed ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and notebooks. Currently, The Whitney’s collection holds over 3,100 works by Hopper, more than any other museum in the world.

Instantly recognizable paintings will be featured in the exhibition such as Automat (1927), Early Sunday Morning (1930), Room in New York (1932), New York Movie (1939), and Morning Sun (1952), are joined by lesser-known yet critically important compositions including a series of watercolors of New York rooftops and bridges and the painting City Roofs (1932). Early sketches and more will also illustrate Hopper’s record of the city changing at the turn of the century, and the exhibit will be organized in thematic chapters spanning the artist’s career.

“Edward Hopper’s New York offers a remarkable opportunity to celebrate an ever-changing yet timeless city through the work of an American icon,” says Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum. “As New York bounces back after two challenging years of global pandemic, this exhibition reconsiders the life and work of Edward Hopper, serves as a barometer of our times, and introduces a new generation of audiences to Hopper’s work by a new generation of scholars. This exhibition offers fresh perspectives and radical new insights.”

Hopper spent the majority of his life, from 1913 until his death in 1967, living and working in a top-floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village. His wife, the artist Josephine (Jo) Verstille Nivison, joined him in 1924 and played a crucial supportive and collaborative role in Hopper’s practice, serving as his longstanding model and chief record-keeper. A selection of her watercolors, capturing their Washington Square home, are included in Edward Hopper’s New York.

“Hopper lived most of his life right here, only blocks from where the Whitney stands today,” says Kim Conaty, the exhibit curator. “He experienced the same streets and witnessed the incessant cycles of demolition and construction that continue today, as New York reinvents itself again and again. Yet, as few others have done so poignantly, Hopper captured a city that was both changing and changeless, a particular place in time and one distinctly shaped by his imagination. Seeing his work through this lens opens new pathways for exploring even Hopper’s most iconic works.”