Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Selected works from the seventh-floor entry gallery appear in this section.

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Edward Hopper, Morning in a City, 1944, and A Woman in the Sun, 1961

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Carter Foster: These two paintings, A Woman in the Sun from 1961 and Morning in a City from 1944 were done decades apart, but they are similar in many ways. And when hung together, we see how they seem to function as pendants, or almost like a series, where one is answering the other.

Narrator: The young woman in Morning in a City gazes out of a window onto an urban landscape, in a pose that recalls classical sculpture. She seems innocent in comparison to the older figure we see in A Woman in the Sun, unflatteringly described by Hopper to his wife Jo as a “wise tramp.”

Carter Foster: It's very interesting because the curtain billowing in, in A Woman in the Sun, pushed in by the air, is almost a continuation of the curtain in the earlier painting, Morning in a City.

We hang them together here to show how carefully Hopper thought of his paintings in tandem and how drawings probably played a function as the connective tissue when he's working the same theme across decades because Hopper would not have had this painting to refer to, the earlier painting, Morning in the City, when he was painting, A Woman in the Sun. But he did have the drawings that he made for that painting.

Edward Hopper’s wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper, served as the model for the figure in A Woman in the Sun, as she did for many of the women depicted in his compositions. She was seventy-eight at the time this work was created; rather than faithfully adhering to realistic detail, Hopper transformed her appearance according to his own internal vision. Standing in the raking light that floods the room, her naked body meets the sun’s rays, yet her expression is enigmatic. The voyeuristic, almost cinematic scene invites the viewer to imagine a narrative—perhaps what happened the night before, and what the woman is thinking or feeling.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Entry Gallery, Floor 7

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A WOMAN IN THE SUN, 1961

Edward Hopper, Morning in a City, 1944, and A Woman in the Sun, 1961

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Explore works from this exhibition
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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Entry Gallery, Floor 7

1

A WOMAN IN THE SUN, 1961

Edward Hopper, Morning in a City, 1944, and A Woman in the Sun, 1961

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection