Edward Hopper, The Sheridan Theater, 1937. Oil on canvas.
This painting shows the voluptuous shell of glowing, orange-tinted space that is "The Sheridan Theater,” which depicts one of the Art Deco movie palaces that Hopper so loved to paint. The scene is inhabited by a lone woman who watches the screen standing at the back of the house, her chunky figure contradicting the flowing architecture.
A mouthwatering curiosity is what the viewer takes away from Edward Hopper’s painting “The Sheridan Theatre” (1937), the subject of a splendid little exhibition at the Newark Museum. The painting depicts a disquieting scene of a woman alone at the back of a movie theater, watched by two figures, one of them an usher. Is she waiting for friends, or has she simply arrived late? We don’t know, for her behavior doesn’t fit with any typical pattern of moviegoing.
—Roberta Smith in the NY Times
The pleasures of this painting are numerous, from the ambiguity of the central figure to the stylized, evocative architecture and graceful shifts of lighting in the balcony. It is one of Hopper’s best movie-theater paintings. …
A cinéaste, Hopper once remarked to a friend: “When I don’t feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge!” His favorite movie theater was the Sheridan in the West Village of Manhattan, not far from a townhouse on Washington Square where he and his wife and model, the artist Josephine Nivison, lived on the top floor for most of their lives. Calm, silent and luminous, “The Sheridan Theatre” … oozes strangeness.
—Benjamin Genocchio in the NY Times
