Friends,
Is the
artist Edward Hopper's paintings which I saw at the National Gallery some years
ago the perfect complement to being under lock down?
Kagiso,
Max
In
Lockdown With Edward Hopper’s Prophetic Paintings
Posted
By Monika Zgustova On July 17, 2020
Automat by Edward Hopper (1927).
When I lived in Chicago, I often went to the
Art Institute to admire the paintings of Edward Hopper, especially Nighthawks.
Later on, I would do the same thing in New York, at the Whitney; both galleries
have excellent Hopper collections. I remembered those visits when, in full
lockdown, social media were flooded with images of this painter’s work. I asked
myself: why is it Hopper, precisely, who is speaking to us from such close
quarters during this period?
Edward Hopper is the painter of solitude. Of
solitude and isolation. Whereas some languages, like Spanish, have only one
word, ‘soledad’, the English language has a near synonym for solitude:
loneliness, meaning a sad, unwanted solitude. The same two words exist in
Czech: ‘samota’ – ‘osamelost’. There are surely many different opinions about
this, but as far as I’m concerned, Hopper paints both types of solitude.
Nighthawks shows four people
in a bar late at night: a man and a woman who are not a couple, sitting
together; and another man sitting a little further away along the bar, each
person absorbed in his or her own melancholy mood. The barman puts the
finishing touch to this image of desolation: he is washing
glasses
and even though he’s answering a question somebody’s asked him, his demeanour
shows that he’s not interested in making small talk: he wants these last few
customers to leave as soon as possible; whereas they know that if they abandon
the piercing silence of the bar, they will feel more desolate than ever. The
characters in Nighthawks are an example of solitude in the
sense of loneliness. As is The Hotel Room: a tired
woman who is reading in a hotel room, her bags still unpacked, a detail which
gives a temporary feel to the setting. The woman in Automat is
sitting at night in an empty cafeteria; her anguish is there for all to see,
emphasized by the fact that she has only removed one glove.
glasses
and even though he’s answering a question somebody’s asked him, his demeanour
shows that he’s not interested in making small talk: he wants these last few
customers to leave as soon as possible; whereas they know that if they abandon
the piercing silence of the bar, they will feel more desolate than ever. The
characters in Nighthawks are an example of solitude in the
sense of loneliness. As is The Hotel Room: a tired
woman who is reading in a hotel room, her bags still unpacked, a detail which
gives a temporary feel to the setting. The woman in Automat is
sitting at night in an empty cafeteria; her anguish is there for all to see,
emphasized by the fact that she has only removed one glove.
Melancholy, instability, unease: words which
describe the mood of many of Hopper’s paintings. Paintings which are a perfect
example of what is known as ‘liminal space’. The word ‘liminal’ comes from
Latin: limen means ‘threshold’, so a ‘liminal space’ is one
which lies beyond the world with which we are familiar. In liminal spaces, one
feels that one is out of kilter, in uncharted territory. It is a transitional
space-time which can eventually change people. Bars, airports, train or plane
journeys and hospitals can all be examples of liminal spaces, which almost
always involve travelling through time. As is the case with the Davos
sanatorium which Thomas Mann described in The Magic Mountain, in
which the patients try to cure their tuberculosis while transforming themselves
in the process.
During lockdown, I looked at Hopper’s
paintings on my computer screen and felt that they were all located in liminal
spaces. I became more sharply aware of this after quarantine, that time when we
were all confined to our homes, barely being allowed to go out. It was a
transition between two realities: one which was familiar, the normality we left
behind three months earlier; and another, as yet unknown, waiting inevitably
for us once our temporary, solitary period of lockdown comes to an end. In this
liminal space of obligatory self-isolation, as the media bombarded us with
defiant messages about the fearful world that we will discover when the
lockdown is over, we feel like Hopper’s characters: alone and uneasy about the
world which awaits us.
In our unstable word, which Zygmund Bauman
so lucidly described as liquid, Hopper is the painter who best expresses our
anxious solitude. Today, his paintings are nothing less than prophetic.
URL to
article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/17/in-lockdown-with-edward-hoppers-prophetic-paintings/
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment