You get to know the city by walking around it, but you really get to know it only when you have stood for many hours in one place, watching its life outside the window. If there were an archetypal creator who had an almost obsessive relationship with these two, he would no doubt be identified with the name of Edward Hopper. The great American artist highlighted the city he lived in from 1913 until his death in 1967 in a unique, unforgettable, iconic style.

Most of his best-known works, such as Nighthawks (1942), are set in New York City, which has been an inspiration as well as a constant subject of his imagery. No one else loved the metropolis in their own way, no one else painted it with such intensity. That is why many rightly rank him in their minds among the symbolic artists of New York.

After his first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1950, Life magazine immediately named him “the premier American artist of the century”. Dedicated to him today, the Whitney Museum exhibition titled “Edward Hopper’s New York”, which runs until March 3, aims to reintroduce the artist to a younger generation and raise some questions about coexistence in the planet’s metropolitan areas in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. .

Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York. He became familiar with Manhattan on family day trips, and in 1908 began to visit more frequently as a student at the School of Fine Arts. His deep connection with the city began when he now settled there permanently. He began his career as an illustrator for magazines and advertisements, and in the 1920s began to establish himself as an artist, first with his sketches and later with oil paintings.

“His indifference to skyscrapers is remarkable for an artist of New York architecture,” wrote Alfred Barr in 1933.

A short stay in Paris had a catalytic effect on him. In the French capital, he admired the dynamics of the city, saying that “here it seems that everything is designed with the aim of forming a more harmonious whole.”

In 1924 he married Josephine Nivison, with whom he lived his entire life. They will stay with Joe for the rest of their lives, in the same area of ​​Greenwich Village, in Washington Square. From here Hopper will begin his nightly walks, from here he will survey the city, glorify its rooftops, observe avidly and almost voyeuristically the life of the apartments and offices of opposite houses, and reflect on it. The city, which he will capture first in his sketches, and then on canvas, will become the place of his imagination, which will captivate us all with its power. “I create realistic art from which the imagination can grow,” he said.

Manhattan, New York is often referred to as a “vertical place”. Wandering through the gorges formed by towering buildings is awe, horror and admiration. Staying in one of these skyscrapers, you experience the same feelings, and even more. The windows of opposite buildings, these boxed presences and absences, create a feeling of eerie loneliness and isolation. These double characteristics of the city, up and down, inside and outside, secluded and bustling, this unnatural vertigo of opposites can attract and repel. “When you arrive in a big city, there is a kind of fear and anxiety, but also a lot of visual interest,” the artist said.

Edward and Joe strongly resisted, through written protests, the demolition of buildings and the construction of skyscrapers. Hopper, although he paints Manhattan, paints only a few skyscrapers. “His indifference to skyscrapers is remarkable for a painter of New York architecture,” wrote Alfred Barr in 1933. Hopper’s gaze travels over the low buildings that rise above the railroad tracks. His art deifies the “horizontal city”. “I was never interested in the vertical,” he later said.

Paintings with an uncanny sense of loneliness and serenity

The main exhibition at Whitney brings together more than 200 paintings, as well as drawings, prints, scraps of correspondence and photographs. “The hopper tested these same roads [κοντά στο μουσείο] and witnessed the endless cycles of demolition and construction that continue to this day as New York constantly reinvents itself,” writes Kim Konati, curator of the exhibition, “and yet Hopper was able, like few others, to so touchingly convey the city that at the same time it changes and remains the same, a place at a certain point in time, which is clearly a product of his imagination. Approaching his work in this light opens up new possibilities for exploring even Hopper’s most iconic images.”

Hopper did not make a portrait of the metropolis. His cityscapes are empty, the people who inhabit his paintings are minimal, and there is an eerie sense of loneliness and tranquility in his paintings. You have to make a great effort to imagine the crowd, the noise, the movement. The silence in his paintings is deathly. The frozen time in his paintings talks with the city, which does not allow you to think, but rather to feel. This is why “its interiors,” Konati writes, “demonstrate the vulnerability of privacy in an overcrowded metropolis.”

“He was particularly interested in the fluid boundaries between public and private spaces in the city, where every aspect of everyday life, from shop windows to spontaneous cafe scenes, is equally on display,” adds the curator. Space in Hopper’s work is decisive in every respect. As if his hand leads through the architecture of the city. But this painter looks more at unseemly angles, boring and ordinary places, a railway tunnel, any glass, a window. “The window has become one of Hopper’s most enduring symbols,” Konati writes. “He used window dynamics to show both the exterior and interior of the building at the same time, a visual experience he described as ‘an overall visual feel’.” Hopper captured the paradoxes, contradictions and contrasts of a city that is constantly transforming. For him, New York was a palimpsest.

Apart from his obsession with the city, buildings and windows, his work also reflected his love of theater and cinema. Hopper viewed his environment as material that could be transformed and spoken about with care. He doesn’t complain, he doesn’t scream, he doesn’t complain. Creates. He is transforming. He is the poet of the imaginary city in which we all live primarily in our minds. The American metropolis is awe-inspiring because of this dichotomy between horizontal and vertical, noisy and lonely, luxurious and cheap. Steam on the streets, sirens, wet asphalt, chain restaurants and cafes evoke light associations.

Hopper’s painting does not resort to this kind of convenience. His anatomy made deeper diagnoses. The meaning is hidden in the wilderness and lonely figures. The mystery of his work is universal. In the organized chaos of the city, we are alone, and sometimes together. This unique view of the city goes beyond New York. After almost three years of the pandemic, Hopper’s urban poetry seems more relevant than ever.