IN A WHITNEY SHOWUntil recently Edward Hopper’s “Hotel Window” (1955), a stark canvas showing a woman of a certain age sitting in an empty hotel lobby staring out the window, hung at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its Edward Hopper exhibition, on view until Dec. 3. “Hotel Window” was on loan from the actor Steve Martin.
On Monday the painting was replaced by “Nighthawks” (1942), Hopper’s well-known image of a diner at night, from the Art Institute of Chicago. It is shown alongside preliminary drawings for that painting from the Whitney’s permanent collection.
“We’d always planned this replacement,” said Barbara Haskell, a Whitney curator, who had also intended to make several other switches.
“The show has had an unusually long run,” she added. “And in many cases museums were unwilling to part with these key works for such a long period of time.” (The show opened on June 7.)
As a result three other works left the Whitney recently: “Morning in a City” (1944), from the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass.; “Office at Night” (1940), from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and “Hotel Lobby” (1943), from the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Along with “Nighthawks,” the museum added “Cape Cod Evening” (1939), on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and “Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses” (1930-33), a large painting from the Whitney’s collection. It has also hung a group of works on paper related to the show’s additions.
Meanwhile Mr. Martin’s “Hotel Window” will soon be on public view elsewhere in Manhattan, this time at Sotheby’s York Avenue headquarters, where it is to be auctioned at a sale of American paintings on Nov. 29.
Experts consider “Hotel Window,” one of Hopper’s late paintings, to be a prime example of his vision of solitude and human resilience. It is expected to sell for $10 million to $15 million.
While Sotheby’s lists many museums where the painting has been exhibited, it neglects to include the Bellagio Art Gallery in Las Vegas. “Hotel Window” and “Captain Upton’s House” — Hopper’s 1927 view of a white Victorian house perched on the rocky Maine coast with a lighthouse looming behind it — were part of a 2001 show there featuring 28 works by various artists in Mr. Martin’s collection The exhibition was accompanied by an audio tour narrated by Mr. Martin.
At the time Mr. Martin wrote that he was showing his art in Las Vegas because “it sounds like fun.” When asked this week why he was selling “Hotel Window” next month, his response was simply, “I needed the excitement.” He declined to be more specific.
The painting, which has been promised to a traveling Hopper exhibition next year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago, has an illustrious list of previous owners. In addition to having been in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, then in Lugano, Switzerland, it was owned by Andrew Crispo, the Manhattan dealer jailed in the 1980’s for tax evasion and, in a separate case, acquitted of charges that he had kidnapped and tortured a Norwegian art student.
Mr. Crispo sold the painting at Sotheby’s in 1987; Malcolm Forbes, the publishing magnate, bought it for $1.3 million. In 1999 the Forbes Collection sold it to Mr. Martin privately for around $10 million.
Carol Vogel from NYT 10.6.06
