Hopper Show Pulls Some All-Nighters

PARISâ€"Many of Edward Hopper’s paintings are set at night, so it seems appropriate for the museum to offer its visitors a chance to see “Edward Hopper,” on view in the Grand Palais, after dark. After midnight, even.

This weekend, Parisians will be able to see works including “Conference at Night,” “Office at Night” and “Soir Bleu” in the darkest hours of the night. The museum will be open for 62 hours straight, from 9 a.m. Friday through 11 p.m. Sunday.

This is the third time the Grand Palais has kept open its doors around the clock.

“The idea is to attract a more diverse crowd,†said Jean-Paul Cluzel, the president of both the Réunion des musées nationaux and the Grand Palais, in a telephone interview. “A younger crowd that probably wouldn’t have come to see the show otherwise.”

In 2009, the show “Picasso et les Maîtres” stayed open for 4 days and 3 nights, welcoming 30,000 night owls. Then, in 2011, the museum tried the experiment again with “Claude Monet,” one of the most visited exhibitions in 40 years in France. The doors were open to the public for 83 hours. “People come after dinner, after a show, and they come with a different frame of mind, they’re in a different atmosphere,” said Mr. Cluzel.

Since ! it opened in October 2012, the Hopper exhibition has attracted 580,000 visitors, with a goal of 700,000 by Sunday, the last day of the show. Those numbers are far lower than the attendance for the Monet exhibition, which set a record in 2011 with more than 900,000 visitors.

But Mr. Cluzel said the round-the-clock event isn’t about the number of visitors. “This isn’t a financial operation,” he said, noting that the exhibition cost around €4 million, and calculated that, with an average visitor paying about €12, the museum broke even after 300,000 visitors. “The extra 30,000 people a night who will come this weekend won’t make that much of a difference for us financially,” Mr Cluzel said.

The Hopper show had originally been scheduled to end on Tuesday. The extra days, Mr. Cluzel said, involved “a lot of organizing. We started planning this weekend two months ago.”

The owners of the art â€" museums and private collectors â€" had to be contacted to ask if the pieces couldremain at the Grand Palais for an extra week.

“Once we contacted everyone and they agreed to let us keep the paintings,” Mr. Cluzel explained, “we had to make sure we had a schedule for the staff, the security, the cleaning.” Overall, about 300 people will work over the whole weekend.

So far the Grand Palais seems to be the only museum in Paris to pull all-nighters, but it’s happened with some frequency in the United States. Last week, the Denver Art Museum held a 40-hour marathon for the last weekend of the exhibition “Becoming Van Gogh.” The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a 24-hour exhibition of Christian Marclay’s installation “The Clock” this month. In 2010, for ! the Whitn! ey Biennale, the artist Michael Asher kept the museum open overnight. A must for the city that never sleeps, he said, mentioning Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” as an inspiration.

This is the first time Edward Hopper has a retrospective in France, Mr. Cluzel has said. Though the artist’s name isn’t as well known in France as it is in the United States, Mr. Cluzel says some of his work has seeped into French culture: Many of his paintings have been used as book covers or have been seen in movies. He wasn’t surprised the exhibition was a success. “Hopper’s art is very representative of 1930s America, a period of crisis and depressio.. Our visitors recognize the atmosphere in Hopper’s work as it echoes that of today.”

Hopper won’t be the only American artist to have a retrospective in Paris this year: There’s a Keith Haring exhibition opening in April at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Centre Pompidou is hosting a Roy Lichtenstein show.