New York Movie is an oil on canvas painting by American Painter Edward Hopper. The painting was begun in December of 1938 and finished in January of 1939. Measuring 32 1/4 x 40 1/8", New York Movie depicts a nearly empty
movie theater occupied with a few scattered moviegoers and a pensive usherette lost in her thoughts. Praised for its brilliant portrayal of multiple light sources, New York Movie is one of Hopper's well-regarded works. Despite the fact that the movie in the painting itself is not known, Hopper's wife and fellow painter Josephine Hopper wrote in her notes on New York Movie that the image represents fragments of snow-covered mountains.New York Movie is a composite painting, meaning that it combines several separate sources into a single work. As she did for many of his paintings, Josephine Hopper, a famous painter in her own right for years before her marriage to Hopper, served as a muse for New York Movie, having posed under a lamp in the hall of his apartment. As with many of his other works, Hopper did not attempt to paint her with any obvious sexual appeal, as he hoped with his work to paint women with complete honesty towards their situation, both exterior and interior. Some claim that New York Movie is a counterpart to Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, with the usherette a modern representation of the waitress.
While the theater depicted in New York Movie is entirely designed
by him, he took inspiration from the Palace Theatre (New York City), the
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (at the time known as the Globe Theatre), the Republic
Theater (now known as the New Victory Theater, and the Strand Theatre
(Manhattan) making over fifty sketches of the theaters before he began the
project. Hopper was fascinated by film, and it is said that, when experiencing
creative block, he would stay at the theater all day. Despite his fascination
with film, New York Movie itself depicts an isolation and melancholy, even
though theaters at the time sat up to thousands. Furthermore, some critics
argue that the usherette is lost in her imagination only as a result of her
separation from the movie currently playing, a sleight against movie going audiences
of the time period, and that her separation incurs sympathy within the viewer.
Others claim that New York Movie and other paintings of city life are Hopper's
ode to the warmth and endurance of the human spirit in the midst of the
dehumanizing existence that is mass living.
Hopper also drew inspiration
from Edgar Degas—specifically Interior—in terms of the composition of the
lighting as well as the overall nocturnal nature of the work.
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