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Narrator: In this case, you’ll find Hopper’s proofs from several of the published advertisements he designed. Kim Conaty, the exhibition’s curator, talks about Hopper’s approach to these ads.

Kim Conaty: It appears that he was able to develop types that were not specific in the way that a particular scene might speak to many different people rather than to be a very specific place. And that kind of openness, that use of typologies is something that's so critical in the advertising industry in order to have campaigns that could be marketed to vast numbers of people.

Of course Hopper's types are very related to the specific populations that the magazines he was illustrating for were targeting at the time, namely white male businessmen. You'll see here an ad for suspenders. So, many of his ads were for a particular kind of white collar business attire. And this is the sort of attire that then you find in even later paintings of office scenes.