SPOILER ALERT: This article includes major spoilers for the season finale of the Amazon series, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
The Whitney Museum, typically a space for contemplating standout works of American art, acts as the backdrop for an action sequence in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the new Amazon TV series that stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as spies in an arranged marriage and is based on the 2005 film of the same name.
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In the last episode of the season, Glover and Erskine, playing John and Jane Smith, respectively, are having a breakup of sorts. Jane has been ordered to kill her husband, and the two decide to meet up at the New York museum to hash out their undoing.
Walking amid recognizable paintings by Lee Krasner, Jay DeFeo, and Archibald Motley, the couple ends up before Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun (1961), featuring a nude woman holding a cigarette, standing alone in her bedroom. (The painting is one of the more than 3,000 works by Hopper that the Whitney owns.)
John finds Jane in front of the painting, which acts as a parallel for her own alienation. “I think it’s up to the observer whether she’s alone or just lonely,” John comments, noting that he likes the Hopper painting’s colors. “Fuck you,” Jane snipes back.
Having sparred before the Hopper and traveled down to the lobby in an elevator that doubles as Richard Artschwager installation, the two exit the museum, but as John does so, he gets trapped inside one of the Whitney’s revolving doors. (It turns out that Andrea Fraser isn’t the only one to have viewed this Renzo Piano–designed structure as something akin to a prison.) Jane, it turns out, has stuck a knife in the floor, jamming the door, and left her husband stuck inside with a bomb, which, sure enough, goes off. He ends up surviving, and the two chase each other down the High Line.
The Hopper painting isn’t the only artwork to appear on Mr. & Mrs. Smith. An earlier episode featured a version of an Andy Warhol “Death and Disaster” painting, while reproductions of works by Hilma af Klint and Masaccio are mysteriously hung in the Smiths’ home.
Source: artnews.com