DALLAS – The Dallas Museum of Art presents “Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process, “the first major museum exhibition to focus on the drawings and working process of American artist Edward Hopper.

“Hopper Drawing” features more than 200 works by the artist, including drawings, watercolors, prints and paintings. The exhibition, on view at the DMA Nov. 17 through Feb. 16, is drawn primarily from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s unparalleled holdings of the artist’s work and brings together paintings with suites of related drawings, in some cases for the first time.

The touring exhibition, organized by the Whitney Museum, premiered in May to critical acclaim. “The first show to focus on the artist’s drawings as keys to his process, it offers an intimate view of Hopper at work that makes us see this doyen of American painters freshly—no small achievement,” praised the Wall Street Journal. “One of the best Hopper shows ever…. See [him] in motion as never before,” maintained the New York Times.

“Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process” reveals a side of the celebrated American artist to audiences that may not be familiar with his draftsmanship,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Through this presentation, we are able to better understand the gestation of Hopper’s ideas and the transformations they underwent from paper to canvas.”

The exhibition highlights Hopper’s process and the way in which the artist transformed ordinary subjects, from an open road or a bedroom, into extraordinary images. Hopper Drawing is based on the research on more than 2,500 works on paper by Hopper in the Whitney collection. These pieces trace the artist’s process of observation, reflection, and invention that was central to the development of his poetic and famously uncanny paintings. The works on view will span the artist’s career, from early drawing exercises of his student days to his later paintings, and are concentrated on mid-century works on paper related to his best-known oil paintings. The exhibition is organized into sections to address specific themes, series, and pairs of works. Hopper developed themes in pairs or serially over decades, and understanding these continuities is crucial to enlightening us about Hopper’s approach to the problem of making art.

“This exhibition offers visitors the rare gift—the intimate experience, actually—of witnessing Hopper’s mind at work. It also pierces our assumptions about the seamlessness of his finished works,” said Sue Canterbury, associate curator of American Art. “The drawings reveal the intense process behind the evolution of key concepts between his initial impressions and the finished canvas.”

Hopper’s education as an artist was fairly traditional, with intensive early training in drawing, particularly drawing the nude human figure. This included life drawing classes at the New York School of Art, where he studied from 1900 to 1906 with artist Robert Henri. Early and formative travels to Paris and Europe between 1906 and 1910 produced an important body of work; the exhibition will include recently identified pages from his Paris sketchbooks, featuring lively and acute observations of street life and café culture. Later, in the 1920s, Hopper continued to hone his life-drawing skills at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art), near his Greenwich Village studio. These skills served Hopper throughout his career, especially after the early 1930s, when he shifted from painting directly from nature to improvised subjects, deepening his drawing practice as he imagined ideas for his oils.

“Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process” requires a special exhibition ticket of $16 for adults, with discounts for students, military personnel, and seniors; DMA Partners and children 11 and under are free.

Visitors will be able to explore the exhibition with a smartphone tour featuring an audio tour highlighting twenty works, led by the exhibition curator, Carter E. Foster, the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing at the Whitney. DMA Friends will be able to earn the Hopper Drawing Special Exhibition Badge while the show is on view. For more information on the DMA Friends program, visit DMA.org/friends.

For dates, prices and details of additional programs associated with the exhibition visit http://www.DMA.org.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 272-page full-color scholarly publication, written by Carter E. Foster, with contributions by Daniel S. Palmer, Nicholas Robbins, Kimia Shahi, and Mark W. Turner, and published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE

---

CAIRO (AP) – Egypt unveiled Friday a multimillion dollar renovation project for Cairo’s famed Egyptian Museum, including plans to demolish a scorched building that stands between it and the Nile, in a bid to draw tourists back and restore a sense of normalcy after more than two years of unrest.

Organizers said they want to return the dusty 111-year-old museum to its former glory by painting the walls and covering the floors in their original colors and patterns.

The lighting and security systems also will be upgraded to meet international standards, Minister of Antiquities Mohammed Ibrahim said, announcing the plan during a news conference in the museum’s leafy courtyard. The displays also will be rearranged, although he did not give details about how.

One of the museum’s most famous exhibits, King Tutankhamun’s treasures, will be moved to a new Grand Egyptian museum that is being built near the Giza pyramids. It is scheduled to be completed in 2015.

Along with the overall tourist industry, the museum has suffered in large part due to its location near Tahrir Square, the epicenter of protests and frequent clashes since the start of the 2011 revolution that ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Violence spiked again after the July 3 military coup that ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

But the interim government that has assumed power is struggling to regain control of the streets and bring back the visitors who long made Egypt a top tourist spot.

Ibrahim said the ministry’s revenues, including the entrance fees from tourist sites, fell from 111 million Egyptian pounds in October 2010 to 7 million Egyptian pounds ($1.14 million) in October 2013.

“From Tahrir, on a Friday, we are sending a positive message to the entire world: Egypt is doing well,” Ibrahim said on the anniversary of the museum’s inauguration in 1902.

Ibrahim also said his ministry planned to demolish the blackened former headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, which was burned during the anti-Mubarak uprising and stands between the museum and the River Nile, to create a botanical garden and an open-air museum. He said part of the new exposition area could be dedicated to the country’s popular uprisings.

The minister declined to give an exact figure for the cost of the project, but said it would likely be at least $4.3 million.

The renovation project is the result of Egyptian-German cooperation. The head of the Culture and Education department at the German Embassy in Cairo, Ramesh de Sliva, said the renovation master plan was financed by the German cultural preservation fund and the Center for International Migration and Development. De Silva said 12 international experts worked on the master plan.

Riots and killings have delivered a severe blow to Egypt’s tourism industry, which until recently accounted for more than 11 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and nearly 20 percent of its foreign currency revenues.

In August, as violent clashes roiled Egypt, looters made away with more than 1,000 artifacts from the Malawi Museum, in the southern River Nile city of Minya. It was the biggest theft to hit an Egyptian museum in living memory.

During the 2011 uprising, would-be looters managed to enter Cairo’s Egyptian museum, ripping the head of two mummies and damaging about 10 small artifacts before being caught and detained by army soldiers. Dozens of items were stolen from the Cairo museum, with some of them being recovered later.

Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-11-15-13 2255GMT

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---