Edward Hopper (died 1967) and coronavirus (2020)

An important influence on American Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was Robert Henri; he taught the young artist at the New York School of Art from 1900. Robert Henri was part of the Ashcan School of American realist painters, and was dedicated to an unsentimental depiction of New York.

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.

Hopper
Automat, 1927
Des Moines Art Center in Iowa

Hopper
Girl at Sew­ing Mach­ine, 1921

Hopper
The Hotel Room, 1931
museothyssen 

Hopper
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

Social isolation in the time of a pandemic,
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 (: