Entering a city like New York
can be a really powerful sensory experience
and that's something I think we feel today
as much as Hopper felt during his time.
New York City was always in Hopper's life.
First, he was a tourist when he was growing up
in the Hudson River town of Nyack, just north of the city.
Later, he became a commuter coming into the city via ferry
for art classes.
And finally, and also quite early in his career,
he moved here permanently in 1908
and this is not an uncommon New York trajectory
that people have visited New York, that they've come here
for school or that they've taken trips here
and then ultimately it's the place they want to be
and that was certainly the case for Hopper.
In 1899 after high school,
Hopper began commuting to New York to train
not as a painter, but as an illustrator.
As an illustrator,
Hopper often drew on the subjects that he saw
around him in New York City.
So this included urban architecture, restaurants, offices,
and city dwellers.
For Hopper, the early training
as an illustrator really allowed him to hone his eye
as a draftsperson and as a painter.
In his early years in New York,
Hopper had to hustle and grind away as an illustrator.
It was really a way for him
to support his practice as an artist
and it also became a way for him to sort of find himself.
And I think that experience of working hard, hustling,
struggling in your work is something that we all relate to
and it's certainly kind of part of an experience
that we associate often with New York City
and trying to make it in New York.
Hopper's studio and residence
at Three Washington Square North
really became a key site for him
as both a living and working space.
And of course by 1924 when he married
the artist Josephine Nivison,
it became a shared space as well.
The building itself
had a really interesting cultural history.
It was a building built in the 1830s,
but was later converted into artist studios
and had housed the likes
of John Dos Passos, William Glackens,
and at the time that Hopper moved in, Rockwell Kent.
One can easily imagine why in the 1940s when
there was the possibility that the building
might be taken over by New York University
that Edward and Josephine Hopper decided it was important
to fight for this building.
In one of Josephine's notebooks where she really told
the story of what she described
as "the Battle of Washington Square,"
she wrote a line that feels
as if it could have been written yesterday
and that is "real estate people are concerned with artists
only in that with the spread of reputations of the artists,
tourists arrive, rents go up, the old story.
Then the artists must go, make room
to accommodate expensive renovations."
And that was written in 1946.
I often think about a line
from a contemporary writer who said
that "you start building your own private New York
the first time you lay eyes on it."
And I think that for Hopper, it was those first moments.
It was being in a theater interior and recognizing
that he was perhaps more interested in the people
sitting in the theater than what was going on on stage
or his fascination with how a ferry approached the city,
what that experience was,
how the buildings rose up behind the structures.
Hopper's first impressions of the city
are really astonishing
in all the ways that they seem to prefigure
many of the interests and really motifs that would recur
in his work as he matured.
(light music)