The whitneymuseum is staging an exhibition dedicated to the artist through March 5.
’s Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames curator of drawings and prints, who curated the show with senior curatorial assistant Melinda Lang, says, “With an artist as iconic as Hopper, it can be hard to remember that he was also a human being and that he was living and working in a place that was actually this place over the course of decades.”
Handwritten letters, illustrations, etchings, typed correspondence and other archival material is interspersed in some of the eight sections to magnify Hopper and his art. The “Washington Square” gallery, for example, features a letter penned by the artist to urban planner Robert Moses asking that his apartment building — a popular one for artists’ studios — be preserved, to illustrate how Hopper was an advocate for safeguarding downtown New York, especially Washington Square.
Rather laconic and not interested in dissecting his work, Hopper’s dry humor and contrarian tendencies can be found in “Early Sunday Morning,” a painting of a “two-story, very ordinary stretched-out building in 1930, at the moment that every New York newspaper was writing about the race to the sky between the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building,” she says.
The statement continued, “The museum is aware of claims made by a former curator. Those claims were considered when first made and were again researched more recently. The museum has found no basis to pursue the matter and is satisfied with what it received. The Whitney’s focus is on preserving the legacy and furthering the scholarship around the life and work of Edward Hopper, as it has done for over a century.
“We are very proud to be stewards of the Sanborn Hopper Family Archives. It’s an important body of work. It’s an asset and we have no basis or evidence to support any of the claims that have been made. We basically stand in the same light as The Whitney does on that point.” she says.