Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're wrapping up our shows during this week long membership drive with some public service messages, of a sort.  We're gonna let you know about some great art exhibitions that are about to close. A few of them, like today's topic, The Hopper exhibit at the Whitney as soon as Sunday. Before it's too late, head to the Meat Packing District where the Whitney Museum is to see Edward Hoppers New York.

The show incorporates works across the span of his career, works featuring the city where he lived and worked for most of his life. No Edward Hopper lighthouses or Rolling Hills in this show. To give us some inspiration for getting to the Whitney this week before it closes, I'm joined by Kim Conaty curator of drawings and prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and we're also letting you see a couple of the works included in the show on our webpage. If you want to go there, wnyc.org, click on Brian Lehrer show, and many more images, plus all sorts of background information that you can see at whitney.org. Kim, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Kim Conaty: Thanks very much, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: You want to do a minute for the totally uninitiated, tell people a little bit about Edward Hopper and why he still draws crowds to the Whitney to see the paintings he made in the first half of the 20th century?

Kim Conaty: Sure. I think that Edward Hopper is a familiar name for many people, whether they're avid museum goers or not, he's really an iconic artist, but he was also such a keen observer of the world around him. I think what's been really exciting thinking about how people have viewed this show about Edward Hopper's New York, is that it also maybe prompts us to think about what cities mean to us now, what the city meant to him then, what it means to have a city that's changing around you. The ways that he was maybe uncomfortable with some of those changes and we may be too.

We organized the show before we had a pandemic. [crosstalk] It's been interesting too to see how New Yorkers and visitors from all over are responding to a city and again, what a city means now that we've actually seen empty cities the way that Hopper showed them to us.

Brian Lehrer: Indeed. The show is called Edward Hoppers New York, and that phrasing is meaningful because he didn't just paint places he liked or found visually interesting. He did make changes to the scenes to make them more to his liking. It's the New York of his visual imagination.

Kim Conaty: Exactly. In a way we all have our private New York. I think that if you imagine all the millions of people in this city and everyone carves their own paths and you're drawn to certain aspects of the city. For Hopper, he could pull from all of the things that he saw on a daily basis and then bring them together in a composition that created something that captured, let's say maybe more the experience of the city for him rather than a document of the city specifically.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned that eeriness of seeing the city so empty at the beginning of the pandemic. That's a Hopper thing too, right? He includes paintings that leave people out of the scenes. These are New York City scenes in some cases that seem very quiet with empty streets. Why did he do that? Do you know what he was trying to evoke?

Kim Conaty: Well, I think in a way he's certainly getting at the sense that cities are filled with people, but they're also filled with buildings. That's something that sometimes we forget. He was someone who was certainly drawn to architecture, drawn to the way that cities are shaped and are formed. I also like to think that he may have understood that we, the viewers, are helping to populate these spaces so that even if a painting may have one figure, two figures or none, that we are there, we are observing the scene and that he is maybe welcoming us into this place.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. One section of the show is labeled The Window, his paintings of scenes viewed from outside a window looking in as you walk by. In its way, it's very urban, evocative as a visual phenomenon, these glimpses at other lives, right?

Kim Conaty: That's right. In that way that we're all sort of incidental spectators of other people's lives when you're living in a densely populated environment, and you can imagine something that I think many city dwellers experience, of walking through the city at night as the sun goes down and the city becomes dark, that all of those illuminated interiors become almost like theater spaces to be able to witness these lives that are taking place, that are happening just inches from us. We live so close together and we're separated by panes of glass in many cases.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, though a lot of New Yorkers would say, "Ah, I don't see my neighbors very much, but I hear them." I don't know that Edward Hopper could get at that. I see where you've pointed out that he doesn't paint the Brooklyn Bridge with its soaring stone, gothic arches, but the Manhattan Bridge, which seems an unusual choice for a visual artist. What does that say to you about what interested him?

Kim Conaty: I think that Hopper was always intrigued by a New York and by a city that was maybe the less iconic version, the less picture postcard version of New York. Knowing that, of course the Brooklyn Bridge had been a muse for so many artists and writers really since its construction. It struck me as quite interesting and maybe even contrarian to think of an artist like Hopper who painted so many of New York's bridges, not just the Manhattan Bridge, but the Queensboro Bridge, the Macombs Dam Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, but he specifically left out the Brooklyn Bridge, that it's almost giving us the New York that is for those of us who live here, who experience life here and not giving the obvious iconic symbolic view of New York.

Brian Lehrer: The Whitney has had a connection with Hopper from its inception, hasn't it?

Kim Conaty: Yes, that's right. Some of the very first group exhibitions that Hopper took part in were at the Whitney Studio Club, which was our founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's proto Whitney Museum in the 1920s. Then he was part of the very first Whitney Biennial in 1932.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Kim Conaty: With the work room in New York that's currently in the exhibition. I like to think of this as a great reminder that what today feels historical was at one moment contemporary.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Many of the works in this show I see are on loan from other museums, so this is a unique opportunity to see them in one place. All right. We have 20 seconds left. Do you have a favorite work in the show or is that a question you can never ask a curator? It's like, do you have a favorite child?

Kim Conaty: It is a little bit the latter, but I would say what excites me is the work Approaching a City, which is really one of the first paintings you'll see upon entering the show. That's my favorite work today. I'll leave it at that.

Brian Lehrer: Edward Hopper's New York is on view through Sunday at the Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street in the Meat Packing District. You can find out more about admission prices, ticket reservations and pay as you wish night on their website at whitney.org. We thank Kim Conaty, curator of drawings and prints at the Whitney Museum. Thanks, Kim. This was great.

Kim Conaty: Thanks very much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Join us tomorrow at this time to find out about another show that you might be about to miss.

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