Smash-hit Hopper show on Paris home straight

A smash-hit Paris exhibition of works by US artist Edward Hopper was to close Sunday after being seen by three quarters of a million people in less than four months. The doors of the Grand Palais remained open throughout the nights of Friday and Saturday in order to allow 40,000 visitors to squeeze in a final viewing of one of the hottest exhibitions in town, museum officials said. The all-night opening was an honour accorded previously to blockbuster displays of the works of Pablo Picasso (in 2008-09) and Claude Monet (2010-11). The extraordinary success of the Hopper show, one of the largest retrospectives of works by him to be shown in Europe, suggests he has moved into the same league, in terms of popularity, as those giants of the art world. Officials estimate that around 750,000 people will have seen the show by the time the Grand Palais doors close Sunday at 2200 GMT. That will place it just behind the Picasso collection in terms of numbers, although it will not threaten the Monet retrospective, which with 913,000 visitors was the most visited exhibition of recent decades. Hopper (1882-1967) is celebrated for the mastery of light and atmosphere displayed in "Nighthawks", a melancholy late-night bar scene, "Morning Sun", which depicts a woman sitting on a bed by a window, and his many landscapes from the US East Coast.