Notes

Top Edward Hopper Secrets
The closing of the epidemic in New York has been declared so many times--I have heralded many a false spring--and every time, with an uneasy, stumbling one-step-forward, one-step-back rhythm, that to declare the end of the era for good is squishy and dubious, like other declarations of the end of things that have a nature that may have none: irony or liberal democracy. even the Jets quarterback crisis are just a few other examples of things that won't end when we are told that they're over.

However, a recent weekend, as seen through the eyes of one newly recovered from a delayed (and thankfully, not a serious) illness it seemed to be at last, a genuine moment of recovery. It could be felt on the streets and even in the subways, where those people who are not covered now outnumber the people who remain cautiously and prudently covered. This is a self-organized phenomenon, is fueled with a sense of exasperation as much as it is by scientific certainty. With a common, or perhaps more fatalistic defiance the inhabitants of the city seem to have decided it is, as John Lennon might have said, the pandemic is over when we want it to be. The windows and lights of Lincoln Center for Paul Taylor's Saturday matinees have been lit and the plaza is crowded; The R train is again crowded, even if the prevalence of helpless passengers on the subway and street is not to be missed. The peculiar, familiar civic oscillation of ugliness and sublimity has come back, remarkably unaffected.

https://torgi.gov.ru/forum/user/edit/1497759.page of this period of recovery might be located but it is unlikely to be at the exhibition of the paintings of Edward Hopper of New York, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October. The show will continue until the 5th of March. The exhibition fills the entire floor of the Whitney's newish headquarters, down near the High Line, a structure whose existence is itself proof that things happen faster within New York than we can imagine. This High Line had been a barbed-wire wilderness, haloed by a forlorn pipe dream to save it in the turn of the century. It is now so well-known as as an "amenity" that we almost forget about it, or sneer at its pretensions: "The High Line district, indeed!"


The Hopper show is always packed. Whitney's spaces, fortunately are large enough to accommodate the crowd, but it is also unmistakably emotional and intense. There is a hush and murmur of undivided attention. Though not all the famous Hopper made the trip--"Nighthawks" remains locked in Chicago as its headquarters--the majority of his most beloved works are on display here. New Yorkers are back to be in the company of our own local photographer, whose works are remain haunting even after nearly 100 years of art-historical rage The woman bent over changing her clothes in a window made of brownstone, as if viewed from the old Second Avenue El; the usherette with her hair in a bob, lying half asleep on the wall of the luxurious movie palace; and even the oddest bits of street poetry, such as the formal front of a traditional pharmacy that New York was once filled with, advertising Ex-Lax with equipment. (We are struck by these photos to remember that among the most notable effects of the pandemic has been the loss of cinemas, which have been largely degraded from their once palatial role, they now seem unlikely even to hang on as the hangars they have been transformed into--as well as small pharmacies that have which have been absorbed into the massive fluorescent business that is Walgreens.)


The paintings are never "dramatic" in the normal sense of disseminating a story, Hopper's paintings are, as John Updike once said, "models of therapeutic reserve," respecting their subjects even as the painter scans their psyches. In the stunning, beginning of "Night Windows," of 1928 woman who is unadorned and in half , bends in her red slip, in her brightly lit house while we gaze inside. This isn't a sexy gesture but a practical gesture which is only sexy because of our fleeting view of it. The opposite of voyeuristic intimate, it's intimate, at least for a moment--we are briefly inside the room while we walk by outside. It's the summer season and it's New York: the curtain on the left, puffing out and releasing a tiny amount from the breeze she experiences and the dingy baseboard radiator beyond will remind us of the amount of rent she has to pay. The three-part division of the bay window against dark is a gentle reminder of a typical altarpiece, with the central figure with the right wing glowing red and yellow and the left wing surrounded with a ghostly pneuma, an epiphany glimpsed from the dark. Though Hopper's images can be lewd but they never look lecherous; instead, desire is sublimated into a kind of awe. This was the genius for an enigmatic story that distinguished Hopper's work from illustration in magazines We can empathize with his people, but what we are empathizing with is left unsure. One truth of art is like a truth of taste: truffles and Parmesan are a short stop away from disgust, and great photographs are typically one stop away from illustration, or, with abstract ones and abstract ones, from anarchy. It's not a stretch to say that a Pollock is like a typical drip cloth--the art is made in a way that is close to the anarchy to move with its edge. Hopper is often just an eloquent leap from illustration in magazines, since there was in the illustration of magazines of his day the unassuming and unpretentious curiosity about what the current world is. We don't feel any pity for the people of Hopper's time as their ambitions and loneliness are similar to our own.
The melancholy and mystery a street, De Chirico's inspiration for his premonitory modern depiction of the city's lights, shadows, and light, could be the title of the entire exhibit. Hopper, one sees, was not a politician, nor literary or even a "cinematic" painter but a theatrical one; the most poignant exhibit in the show is of an impressive collection of Broadway ticket scraps of paper, which the family of the artist kept as souvenirs of playgoing. (One observes, however, the fact that they were within the three-dollar mark.) Hopper's space, his diorama-like proscenium boxes, evokes exactly the stylized realism of Broadway theatre of his day--naturalistic in intent, but with a sense of realism that is made up by obvious stylizations, intense lighting as well as painted flats. Although Hopper is often acknowledged as having influenced his work by, and being influenced by the dramatic lighting styles of film noir in the forties, in truth his ideas are based on the odd and older drama created by bright patches of color caught in dramatic chiaroscuro in a neatly framed space--diagonal slashes of scarlet dress in lamplight against a dull brownstone windows--a genre that movies would not conquer until at least the period in "Vertigo." It is the set designers from Hopper's era--look at Jo Mielziner's melancholic, unorthodox sets for "Death of a Salesman" or "A Streetcar Named Desire"--that share with him a common language, with entire back yards and houses squeezing onto the stage, illuminated by moody blues and creepy oranges. Stage lighting and stage sets haunted Hopper's imagination, and his idea was, in a way, was to recreate the intensity of the stage's design. OAI is able to see his subjects in the same way that theater goers would, waiting to sit in the dark and watch the drama of another from a few feet away.

When one is walking through the exhibit, a variety of art-crit distinctions and determinations appear under one's always patient eye--as one has to do more than even the normal amount of hopping and skipping between the crowds to get an overview of every picture. Hopper was a remarkably inept animator of line, his famed stillness as much accepted as gained, and the stability of his designs in the stifling of his line. The most humorously inept image that is in this show was "Bridle Path," from 1939, which features three horses that are so flimsy as to seem snatched off the carousel of a young child and stumble uneasily within Central Park. The awkwardness is not merely only limited to the horses; it extends throughout the construction of the picture, as though being impelled to move something induced a reverse pattern of paralytic anxiety within the artist. Moving things was not Hopper's purpose as it was not his gift. One can see that his tender, enlivening touch with light was at its finest between the late twenties and thirties, with the images of the forties and beyond--with Hopper insistently remaining in his mise-en-scene scene, as real artists always do. But his work was becoming less elegantly lit, and more meticulously imagined in often uneasy, blocky forms, with a more evident emotional resentment.


Whatever. One person once said of Magritte, the fact that it's a good thing that Hopper was not a superior painter, since then he would have been a significantly worse artist. It's like another Dali complete with all effects and virtuoso fauxry, shallow rather than disturbing. Hopper has many similarities to our American Magritte: A snoop on the bourgeois way of life that was transformed into art through his ambivalent attraction to them, as well as an artist lifted rather than lowered due to the modest simplicity of his techniques. However, a deeper, or anyway bigger, question is raised by the exhibition also. Hopper has always been part of the poor conscience associated with American modernism. I remember how his stunning depiction of the usherette "New York Movie," was once relegated to a tiny space that was its own in moma's house, just a few blocks from the much loved but still more derided Wyeths. The reason for this was not shame from the curators, exactly, but uncertainty about where to put Hopper or what they could say of him, or where he "belonged" in the larger story of the rise in American art and the success of American painting and art, with Hopper uneasy neither in the art movement which led to Minimalism or in the more sexually appropriative and gay one that brought about Pop.


But even if Hopper has been a part of the sinister conscience associated with American modernism, then he's part of the public conscience in New York. The enticing appeal of Hopper to the audience at the Whitney is the quiet and serious note of gazing and approval--producing not at all the annoyed rhythm in which people read the wall's labels, mutter bits of them to their child or spouse, then shrug, in a vain effort at understanding the meaning behind it--reminds us that, if Hopper is our Magritte as well, he's also the same as our Philip Larkin, too. In the same way that Brits enjoy Larkin's poetry despite the constant sadness of his vision--they see "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" as a delightfully honest and not grim, so New Yorkers are enthralled by Hopper despite the constant melancholy of his. In both of these slightly bearish and conservative artists, maybe it's the capability to restrict pleasure in order to evoke emotions that touch us. Hopper noticed that the apparent sadness of urban life is in fact a part of its humour. Every aspect of the city he shows us is unconnected, isolated--and yet his images of loneliness appear not grim and instead proudly self-sufficient. (Times Square, Macy's, all these places of gathering, with New Yorkers as frantic as water bugs when the light goes on, as Florine Stettheimer loved to sing about, are not present in his work.) We somehow find more credible and, in a bizarre but important point, more comfortable the image of isolation than we do that of gathering.



A sudden feeling of a tug on your heart suggests the reason this exhibit is crowded and feels so alive. What we have missed because of the lack of crowds is the opportunity for solitude. After seeing an unpopulated New York, we realize now that our best life in this city lies in being a bit unnoticed in places that are too visible and oblivious to the people watching, and left to discover our inner personas. Poetry lovers from New York have always known this reality. The poets of New York have always known this. Maeve Brennan, this journal's Long-Winded Lady, wrote, "New York does nothing for those of us who love her except implant in our hearts a feeling of homesickness that is a mystery until we go away from her and discover the reason we're so anxious. When we are at home or on vacation we feel nostalgic for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse , but because the city holds us and we aren't sure why." Perhaps after the pandemic, the home-sickness of those who have been at home is reflected in the rooms. The city holds us and we're sure of the reason.

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