Notes

Top Edward Hopper Guide!
The closing of the pandemic in New York has been declared numerous times--I've witnessed many a false spring--and each time with an uneasy, stumbling one-step-forward, one step-back and to declare the end of the era for good is fuzzy and uncertain, as do other declarations about the end of things , which are, by nature, could be devoid of irony as well as liberal democracy and the Jets quarterback crisis are just a few other examples of things that won't end when we're told they're over.

However, a recent weekend, as seen through the eyes of someone who had recently recuperating from a late (and thankfully, not a serious) bout with the virus it seemed to be at last, a genuine moment of return--one that could be felt on the streets and in the subways, where those non-masked are now more numerous than those of us still warily, prudentially covered. It's a self-organized return fuelled with a sense of exasperation as much as it is by scientific certainty. With OAI , or perhaps just a bit fatalistic snark the inhabitants of the city seem to have decided that they are, like John Lennon might have said the pandemic has ended when we want it to be. The lights and windows at Lincoln Center for Paul Taylor's weekend matinees are shining, and the plaza full and The R train is mobbed again--even there is a plethora of helpless passengers in the subway and on the street is unmissable as well--and that peculiar, familiar civic oscillation of ugliness and sublimity has come back, astoundingly intact.

The core of this current moment 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 March 5th. The exhibition fills the entire floor of the Whitney's newish headquarters, located close to the High Line, a structure whose existence is itself proof that things happen faster within New York than we can imagine. The High Line had been a barred-wire wilderness, shrouded in a forlorn pipe dream to save it at the beginning of the century. It has now become so familiar and an "amenity" that we almost ignore it or sneer at its pretensions: "The High Line district, indeed!"


It is no surprise that the Hopper show is always crowded. The Whitney's venues, thankfully are large enough to hold the crowd. They are the show is unmistakably emotional and emotional. There is a quiet and silence of total attention. Although it is true that not all of the famous Hopper was able to make the trip--"Nighthawks" is still locked in its home in Chicago--most of his most beloved works are on display here. New Yorkers are in the presence of the local pictorial poet, his images still haunting us after almost a century of art-historical ferment: the bending woman changing clothes unselfconsciously in a brownstone window, as if viewed from the old Second Avenue El; the usherette with her hair bobbed, lying half asleep on the walls of the extravagant cinema palace; and the oddest bits of street poetry as the staid front of an old-fashioned pharmacy that New York was once filled with, advertising Ex-Lax with equipoise. (We are struck by these photos that one of the nameable loss of the pandemic are cinema theatres. Long since abandoned from their former regal role, they now seem unlikely to last like the hangars that they have become, as well as smaller pharmacies that have been integrated into the fluorescent business that is Walgreens.)


The paintings are never "dramatic" in the normal sense, unspooling some story, Hopper's paintings are in the sense that John Updike once said, "models of therapeutic reserve," respecting their subjects when the artist scans their minds. In the gorgeous, first "Night Windows," of 1928, a woman, naked and in half form, bends to her left in her slip of red, in her brightly lit apartment while we gaze inside. This isn't a sexy gesture but a functional gesture, which is only sexy because of our brief glance at the woman. The opposite of voyeuristic intimate, it's intimate, at least for a moment--we have a brief glimpse of the room as we look out the window. It's summer and it's New York: the curtain on the left, sputtering it, is the tiny relief of the breeze she is feeling as the baseboard radiator beyond is a reminder of the rent she pays. The tripartite division of the bay windows in the dark is a gentle reminder of a conventional religious altarpiece, with the central figure, the right wing fiery yellow and red, and the left wing surrounded by a phantom pneuma that is of the night. Though Hopper's images are at times lecherous however, they're never leering rather, the desire is transformed into a sort of awe. This is what made Hopper's enigmatic parable that separated Hopper's art from magazine illustration; we empathize with his characters however, what we're empathizing with is not clear. Art is similar to a fact of taste: truffles and Parmesan are a short stop away from a sour taste and the best images are usually one step away from illustration, or in the case of abstract images and abstract ones, from anarchy. It's not a stretch to say that a Pollock looks like a regular drip cloth. The art is close enough to anarchy that it can dance on its edge. Hopper is usually a brisk leap from magazine illustration, because there was in the illustration of magazines of his time the unassuming and unpretentious curiosity about life as it exists. We don't feel any pity for the people who lived through Hopper's work; their dreams and isolation are too much like our ones.
The mystery and melancholy of a street, De Chirico's inspiration for his premonitory contemporary work of shadows and city light, could be the title for the whole exhibition. Hopper It is clear that Hopper was neither a political nor a literary nor even the term "a "cinematic" painter but a theatrical one. The most poignant exhibit in the show is of a tidy collection of Broadway-ticket scraps of paper, which the family of the artist kept as souvenirs of playgoing. (One also observes the fact that they were within the range of three dollars.) Hopper's diorama-like space, with its proscenium boxes, evokes exactly the stylized realism of Broadway stage of his time--naturalistic in its intent, yet with a sense of realism that is made up of obvious stylizations, extravagant lighting, as well as painted flats. Although Hopper is often credited with having influenced and, in turn, being influenced by the dramatic lighting styles of film noir during the late forties, his style is based on the bizarre and older drama created by the brilliant patches of color caught in dramatic chiaroscuro neatly framed space--diagonal slashes of red dress lit by lamplights, against a dingy brownstone window--of a kind that film would not be able to overcome until the period that of "Vertigo." It is the set designers of Hopper's era--look at Jo Mielziner's melancholic and unorthodox sets in "Death of a Salesman" or "A Streetcar Named Desire"--that have a common language, with entire houses and back yards squeezed into the stage and illuminated by moody blues and eerie oranges. Stage lighting and stage sets haunted Hopper's imagination, and his project in a way was to reproduce the ferocity of the stage's design. Hopper is able to see his subjects like theater goers do, eager to be seated in darkness and watch the drama of another just a few feet away.

As one walks through the exhibition, various art-crit distinctions and determinations are revealed under one's observant eyes. One must be more than the usual amount of hopping and skipping among the crowd to get a view of each picture. https://yarabook.com/1637102452511280_208409 was an exceptionally inept animator of line, his infamous quietness being as widely admired as it was it was a fact, the strength of his designs engrained in the limitation of his lines. The most gruesome, 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 walk around through Central Park. The awkwardness isn't limited to the horses but is evident throughout the construction of the picture like being driven to create motion caused a reverse line of paralytic panic within the artist. Making things move wasn't Hopper's purpose and certainly not his gift. It is evident the tender, lively touch with light was at its finest during the late twenties and the thirties, along with photographs of the forties and beyond--with Hopper determinedly staying with his mise en scene, just as true artists always do. But his work was becoming less elegantly lit and more meticulously imagined with often uneasy, blocky shapes, with a more obvious thematic of alienation.



Whatever. Someone once said, of Magritte, the fact that it's a good thing Magritte was not a better painter, since then Magritte would have been far worse artist. Another Dali with all the effects and virtuoso fauxry and shallow, rather than terrifying. Hopper can be described as our American Magritte who was a spy on bourgeois manners that was transformed into art through his conflicting feelings towards them as well as an artist lifted, not reduced, by the dignity of his techniques. However, a deeper or perhaps more important, issue 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 small space that was its own in moma, which was not too far from the well-loved, but still more derided Wyeths. There was no shame on the part of the curators, in fact, it was uncertainty about where to put Hopper or what to make of him--where Hopper "belonged" in the larger history of the rise of American art and the triumph of American painting, with Hopper sitting uneasily neither in the abstract evolution which led to Minimalism or in the gayer appropriative one that led to Pop.


But even if Hopper makes up the dark image that is American modernism, he is an integral part of the civic awareness in New York. The magnetic attraction of Hopper to the people who attend the Whitney is the quiet and serious remark of gaze and applause, not the annoyed rhythm in which visitors read the wall labels, mutter bits of them to a child or spouse, then smile, in an vain attempt to comprehend what the hell this is--reminds us that if Hopper represents us as Magritte as well, he's also the same as our Philip Larkin, too. As Brits enjoy Larkin's poetry despite the constant sadness of his vision -- they see "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" as delightfully candid and not grim, so New Yorkers love Hopper, despite the relentless melancholy of his. Both of these artists are conservative and bearish artists, maybe it's the capability to restrict the pleasure of their work in order to bring out emotions that touch us. Hopper realized that the apparent sadness of urban life is in fact a part of its humour. The city life he shows us is unconnected, isolated--and yet, his pictures of loneliness appear not grim and instead proudly self-reliant. (Times Square, Macy's, all those gathering places, with New Yorkers who are as chaotic as water bugs once the lights come on, as Florine Stettheimer was known to sing, do not appear in his work.) We can somehow discern more truth and--a strange but significant point--more relaxing the images of solitude than those of gathering.


Then, a sudden pull on the heart reveals why this exhibition is so packed and so alive. What we have missed because of the lack of crowds is the opportunity for the solitude. We have finally seen an unpopulated New York, we realize that the best way to live in the city is being unseen in too-seen places, overlooked while others are taking a look, left to be our own self. Poets from New York have always known this truth. According to Maeve Brennan, this magazine's Long-Winded Lady, wrote, "New York has nothing to offer those who want to be in love with her, except to implant into our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we get away from her and discover the reason we're so uneasy. When we are at home or on vacation We are homesick to New York not because New York was better, and not because she used to be worse but because the city is holding us, and we're not sure why." Maybe after the pandemic, the homesickness of people who were kept at home echoes throughout the rooms. The city holds us, and we know why.

Homepage: https://yarabook.com/1637102452511280_208409