Hopper’s paintings created a space in which the viewer’s own inner life could be examined. Hopper’s paintings invited the viewer to ask: When we look at someone, what exactly were we looking at? Reflections of ourselves, our desires, dreams and worries? Hopper’s work continued to mesmerise because it explored these fundamental questions.
Modern life was not sociable, Hopper said. Cold plate-glass windows, tall buildings where people lived in self-contained flats, isolated petrol stations – the fabric of modern cities created solitude. With his quiet cityscapes and isolated figures, this New Yorker made solitude his theme. In the 1920s, while the flappers danced and drank, Hopper painted people who probably had never been invited to a party. While weekday shops were busy, Sunday (1926) shops and streets were empty.
Modern life was not sociable, Hopper said. Cold plate-glass windows, tall buildings where people lived in self-contained flats, isolated petrol stations – the fabric of modern cities created solitude. With his quiet cityscapes and isolated figures, this New Yorker made solitude his theme. In the 1920s, while the flappers danced and drank, Hopper painted people who probably had never been invited to a party. While weekday shops were busy, Sunday (1926) shops and streets were empty.
Automat, 1927
Des Moines Art Center in Iowa
Girl at Sewing Machine, 1921
The Hotel Room, 1931
museothyssen
Sunday, 1926
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Now Jonathan Jones suggested that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has given Hopper’s work a new significance. I wish I had thought of this connection myself. In 2020 our TVs and news websites have presented views of mandated isolation at home, closed shops and largely empty streets. In a time of world pandemic, we now all exist “as if we were inside an Edward Hopper painting”. The current pandemic has carefully distanced each of us from each other, sitting at our lonely windows overlooking a very quiet city.
Unlike in the pre-modern world, inter-war images of solitude were rarely understood as “serene”. Hopper’s message was that life in the inter-war years could be very lonely, and not at all serene. In the early 1920s, Hopper painted his first so-called Window Paintings: Girl at Sewing Machine (1921), New York Interior (1921) and Moonlight Interior (1923). They showed a figure near a window, viewed as gazing out onto the street or from the outside looking in. Hopper's solitary figures were mostly women, semi-clad, reading, staring out a window, or keeping busy.
Everything in a Hopper’s interiors was full of meaning that pushed the narrative. Even small details, like a simple suitcase, book or bed, were really important. Hopper’s figures were often peering in windows or out to the landscape. So the window created the possibility of another existence outside, showing both alienation and hopefulness.
What was it about Hopper’s melancholy that seemed so familiar? Notice that none of the people in Hopper’s art seemed capable of smiling. The subject of the painting Automat (1927) depicted a lone woman staring into her coffee in an automat at night. Despite the vivid colours, the painting Automat re-emphasised her solitude.
A painting like Night Windows (1928), which put the viewer in a flat looking across at a woman bending over in the room opposite, might have been seen as naughty. But Hopper understood it as depicting the difficulty of connecting with others. It was as much a picture of our own sense of isolation (and Hopper’s) as it was a picture of a vulnerable lone woman.
The Hotel Room (1931) re-emphasised the solitude. The spare vertical and diagonal bands of colour and sharp electric shadows created a concise, intense drama at night.
Hopper
Nighthawks, 1942
Art Institute of Chicago
Canberra Times, 2020
Examine Nighthawks (1942), one of Hopper's group paintings that showed customers sitting at the counter of an all-night eatery in Greenwich Village. The images of lone individuals in impersonal spaces, with eyes gazing from windows or down at their drinks, reminded us that isolation was humanity’s default state. The viewpoint was from the footpath, as if the viewer was approaching the restaurant. The diner's harsh electric light set it apart from the dark night outside, enhancing the mood. Despite the longing that appeared in Hopper’s paintings, his relevance endured. Even in 2020.
Even an exciting city didn’t remedy isolation; rather it heightened it. The apparent simplicity of the paintings, the very lack of details, invited the spectator to complete the image by speculating on past and future, on the relationships between the characters and on the anxieties provoked. Perhaps this was why voyeurism was an overused term in Hopper criticism.
As in many Hopper paintings, the interaction between models in Nighthawks was minimal. I have lived in my house since 1982 (38 years) and say hello to everyone on the street each day. Today, as I walked on my routine path, people crossed over to the nature strip, to avoid accidental closeness. Not a single smile or hello en route!
Of course Hopper couldn’t have predicted our current worldwide pandemic, but he described the social consequences of our virus a century ago. The loss of direct human contact is not easy today – our elderly parents are at risk of not getting nursing care, university and high school students are missing lectures, and marriages are put under stress.
Nowadays, if we sit alone in cafes, we’ve at least got mobile phones to make us feel connected. Since retiring from work 15 months ago, I too used that technique. But the truth is that modernity has thrown up urban lifestyles that are totally cut off from normal sociability. When the pleasures of modern life are removed, for any reason (eg retirement, divorce, pandemic), loneliness remains.
In the coronavirus era, we all hope to defy Hopper’s hard vision of alienated individuals and instead survive “as a community”. But how ironic is it that we have to survive by self-isolation!
"We're all in this together, we're all in this together...." Probably not (:
