Inside Edward Hopper’s Office at Night: A look back at the Andersen Window Gallery Installation
In 1996, the Walker Art Center began a program to engage museum patrons more deeply with artwork from the permanent collection. With support from the Andersen Corporation of Bayport, Minnesota, a gallery within a gallery was built with a floor-to-ceiling window wall in Gallery 4. For the next five years, the Andersen Window Gallery provided an in-depth space to explore an artist, artwork, or movement.
The first installation featured Edward Hopper‘s Office at Night (1940). It was an interesting choice, as the artist was trying to re-create the experience one has when passing a window and catching a glimpse of an interior.
In the artist’s case, the window was on a 1940 elevated train in Manhattan at night. From the train, Hopper could catch fleeting moments of people working in office buildings as the train rumbled by. For the viewer of Office at Night, one wonders what is happening in the painting; there is a sense of an action caught in mid-motion. The viewer can only speculate what happens next. But instead of moving on to the next artwork, visitors entered the Window Gallery for an immersive experience of the painting.
For Office at Night, the gallery became a replica 1940s office, complete with desk, lamp, and typewriter, to put the visitor in the setting of the painting. People could sit at the desk and even type on the typewriter.
Visitors were asked to type a response to the question: What do you think the painting is about? Many answers focused on traditional male and female roles, some noting how far women have come in society and the workplace, and how far women have yet to go. One respondent wrote: “I would have never made it in Edward Hopper’s era. I would have ended up in jail.” It was signed, “A women of the 1990’s!!”
In the 1990s, visitors were fascinated by the 1940s woman in the painting—from her figure, clothes, and hair to her job and implications in the workplace. To further explore these issues, the installation dived into the representation of women in art and the roles of women in society, supported by interpretive materials and other artworks in the gallery including Victor Burgin’s photographic work ‘Office at Night #1’ (1986).
‘In Burgin’s photograph, although the desk and the man are out of sight, the camera angle is from the vantage point of the desk looking up at the woman. Interestingly, just as Hopper used himself as the model for the man and his wife as the woman, Burgin’s wife is the model at the filing cabinet as he is the photographer at the desk. The label for the Burgin work alludes to a sexually charged power struggle, assuming the boss is male, and the secretary is female, as we assume it is in the painting.
Looking closer at the woman in Office at Night, notice her unusual pose. It would be unnatural to stand and open a filing drawer with your hips, shoulders, and head positioned in such a contorted posture. To further emphasize this awkward pose, Alexander Archipenko’s sculpture Turning Torso (1921/1959) was included in the space.
In Turning Torso, the hips, waist, and shoulders are positioned at different angles, in a style known as contrapposto. Archipenko was interested in the geometric shape of the body, and yet the sculpture also resembles a classical figure, much like the woman in Office at Night.
Augmenting the space was “Women at Work,” a timeline and video monitor, which provided a fascinating look at a century of women’s changing roles: from 1920, when the 19th amendment passed granting women the right to vote and 8.5 million women worked outside the home, to 1996, when women voters outpaced men during the presidential election (59.6% to 57%) (Center for American Women and Politics) and 56 million women made up the American labor force.
The video monitor showed clips from movies, mostly depicting how the Hollywood image of women at work differed from women’s actual experiences. For example, in the comedy Woman of the Year (1942), Katharine Hepburn plays a feminist/activist reporter for the New York Times named Woman of the Year.
In 1942, women did find more employment than in previous years, but mostly in defense plants and government offices because men were drafted to serve in World War II; few women were plucky intrepid reporters as seen in the movies. And as the timeline noted: “At war’s end, public opinion shifted dramatically away from admiration for women’s wartime contributions. Women were urged to return to their proper sphere—the home.” (Women at Work Timeline handout, 1996)
The Andersen Window Gallery installation of Office at Night offered multiple perspectives on the painting, from subject matter to social, economic, and political issues, many of which remain concerns today. But what did Hopper think about the painting? A letter from the artist to Norman Geske, the Walker curator and advocate for the purchase of the painting in 1948, reveals more about the relationships of light and atmosphere than of the human subjects.
Hopper writes:
"My aim was to try to give the sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air with the office furniture which has very definite meaning for me.
There are three sources of light in the picture: indirect lighting from above, the desk light and the light coming through the window. The light coming from outside and falling on the wall in back made a difficult problem, as it is almost painting white on white; it also made a strong accent of the edge of the filing cabinet which was difficult to subordinate to the figure of the girl.
I was also interested in the sombre richness of the furniture against the white walls. Any more than this, the picture will have to tell, but I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended."
Edward Hopper to Norman Geske, Walker Art Center, August 25, 1948
With these final words, Hopper leaves the interpretation to the viewer. His work is done.▪︎
Experience Office at Night in-person as part of the exhibition This Must be the Place: Inside the Walker's Collection on view Jun 20, 2024–Apr 29, 2029.
Learn more about Hopper as well as over 100 years of art found in the Walker's collections during normal gallery hours or 24/7 on the Walker website.
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