The Delight of Edward Hopper’s Solitude

The nucleus of this moment of recovery might be located, however improbably, at the show of Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October and will persist until March 5th. The show fills an entire floor of the Whitney’s newish headquarters, down near the High Line—a thing whose existence is itself proof that things happen faster in New York than we can imagine. The High Line had been a barbed-wire wilderness, haloed by a forlorn pipe dream to save it, at the beginning of the century, and has now become so familiar an “amenity” that we almost forget about it, or sneer at its pretensions: “The High Line district, indeed!”