Edward Hopper, Seven A.M., 1948. All images via the Whitney.

Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, which opened last month at the Whitney Museum, presents roughly 85 works by the artist and his most immediate American contemporaries. Tracing Hopper’s singular vision of American realism over more than six decades, the exhibition stages a selection of paintings from their permanent collection (with several exceptions) in the context of works by members of the Ashcan school, the Precisionists, Social Realists, and others who examined modern urban and rural life in the first half of the twentieth century. Through comparisons of Hopper’s formal approach and social interests with those of the artists working nearest to him, the show reveals both conceptual intersections and stylistic distinctions between it’s titular master and his diverse peer group.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930.

More story and images after the jump…

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Matthew Brannon opened his first solo museum show at the Whitney Museum Altria on Park Avenue and 42nd Street. At the intersection of this transportation hub, a predominantly suited populace come in and out of Grand Central en route to power lunches, the racquet club, and the confined dreams of cubicle days. Just a sheet of plate glass away from the bustle, Brannon’s prints sit neatly. They are evenly spaced on wooden trestles inside a calm and sparse interior.
His work references the neat tableau of the white collar worker. Brannon’s muse is the dark circled, fake tanned, coked up, business class, success story that we urbanites are all in touch with in our global capitalist system. His imagery pulls together the signifiers of our contemporary life “on the road”, or more aptly, on the plane, in the cab, at the bar, in the hotel. (more…)