The Whitney Museum of American Art is about to put up a show of the drawings of Edward Hopper that it is billing as “the first in-depth study of the artist’s working process.” Hopper Drawing will pair some of the painter’s most iconic canvases, desolate scenes of American life, including “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), “New York Movie” (1939), and “Nighthawks” (1942), with multiple sheets of preparatory designs. The likely blockbuster will give museum-goers the opportunity to see the creator of famously enigmatic images think through compositional arrangements and light conditions.

Born in Nyack, NY, Hopper studied painting under American Impressionist William Merritt Chase and Ashcan painter Robert Henri and alongside classmates George Bellows, Guy Pène Du Bois and Rockwell Kent at what is today Parsons – The New School for Design. Trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 supplemented the young artist’s education, learning from old master canvases and impressionist alla prima innovations rather than the cubist experiments happening in Europe at the time. Upon his return to New York City, Hopper settled in Greenwich Village, where he remained for the rest of his life. Hopper Drawing will highlight select works done over the course of the artist’s life, including student designs and sketchbooks from travels.

The relationship between Edward Hopper and the Whitney predates the museum’s founding. In 1920, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offered the then struggling artist his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club. Hopper’s career took off soon after that debut and the Whitney’s continued support, giving Hopper two retrospectives during the painter’s lifetime, inclined the painter’s widow to bequeath the artist’s estate to the museum after Hopper’s death in 1967. Since then the Whitney has organized a number of crowd-pleasing Hopper shows, including Edward Hopper: The Paris Years; Edward Hopper; and Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time all in the last ten years alone.

Hopper rarely displayed his drawings publicly, viewing them as information for his finished canvases rather than stand-alone works. But as exhibition curator Carter E. Foster explains, “by comparing related studies to paintings, we can see the evolution of specific ideas as the artist combined, through drawing, his observations of the world with his imagination.”

Hopper Drawing will open to the public May 23 and run until October 6, 2013 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, New York, NY 10021, (212) 570-3600, www.whitney.org

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