New York Movie

A movie theater in New York, one of those elaborate mock palaces where Hollywood spirits us for a few hours into another world - in this case apparently the high mountains. Spirits us as audience, that is, but not the usher, who has probably seen the movie a thousand times and waits for the curtain, mulling over her own thoughts. Her stationary figure counterpoints the screen with its incessantly flickering illusions of places not here and not now. Like most of the female figures in Hopper's paintings, this one was based on his wife, Jo, who posed standing under a lamp in the hall of their apartment. Her efforts were perhaps rewarded by the many movie and theater visits the couple made together. As the many preliminary studies for the picture show, Hopper not only drew his wife in various different poses for New York Movie, but precisely designed the auditorium decor, down to the pattern of the carpet. Again and again he sketched the foyers, stairways, and auditoriums of his favorite movie houses, the Palace, Globe, Republic, and Strand.