NEW YORK MOVIE
EDWARD HOPPER, 1939
Okay. Hopper fact. When the paintings stopped coming, he went to the movies. And not just one movie. He'd go for a week at a time. Called it a movie binge. His words. So when the guy finally paints a movie theater, you'd figure it's gonna be a love letter to the screen. Nope. First he builds the theater. Fifty-something sketches, four different Broadway palaces. The Palace, the Globe, the Republic, the Strand. Bits from all of them, one movie palace that never existed. Then he shoves the screen to the edge of the canvas. A sliver. Some snowy mountains, half out of frame, playing to a nearly empty house. All that velvet and gold, and the picture's pointed at the usherette. The one person in the building who's paid not to watch. Chin in her hand, flashlight in the other, parked by the stairs with a fat column between her and the whole show. The screen doesn't even light her. She gets a little lamp on the wall, her own private lighting, a few feet from the main event. Everybody else disappears into the movie. She disappears somewhere else. Now. The model for her: Jo. Hopper's wife. A painter herself. 1923, the Brooklyn Museum invites her to show her watercolors, and she talks them into hanging six of Edward's next to hers. Museum buys one of his. First thing he'd sold in ten years. That sale starts everything. After that, she's the model for pretty much every woman he ever paints. Her career goes quiet. His goes huge. So that's who's standing there in the blue uniform, just outside somebody else's spotlight. She knew the pose.