Notes

You, Me And Edward Hopper: The Truth
The closing of the epidemic in New York has been declared multiple times, and I have witnessed many a false spring myself--and every time in a stumbling, unhappy one-step forward, one-step back rhythm that declaring the end of the era for good is uncertain and squishy, just like other declarations about the end of the world that are, by nature, might not have any irony, liberal democracy, and the Jets quarterback crisis, all of which are other instances of things which will not be over after we've been told they're over.

However, a recent weekend, as seen through the eyes of one newly recuperating from a late (and, luckily, unserious) illness, seemed to mark, finally, a real moment of return--one that could be felt on the streets and even in the subways, where the unmasked now far outnumber the people who remain cautiously and prudently covered. It's a self-organized return fuelled as much by willed exasperation as by scientific awe. With a common, perhaps more fatalistic defiance the inhabitants of the city seem to have decided that, like John Lennon might have said the pandemic has ended if we want it. The lights and windows at Lincoln Center for Paul Taylor's Sunday matinees are lit up, and the plaza full with people; the R train is again crowded, even there is a plethora of helpless individuals in the subway and on the street is unmissable as well--and that peculiar, familiar civic oscillation of beauty and sublimity is back, astonishingly and uninhibited.

The genesis of this period of recuperation could be in the exhibit 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 exhibit covers an entire floor in the museum's new headquarters, down near the High Line. Its existence is proof enough that things happen faster within New York than we can imagine. The High Line had been a barbed wire wilderness, obscured by an unfulfilled pipe dream to save it, at the beginning of the century, and has since become such and an "amenity" that we almost do not even think about it, or even sneer at its pretenses: "The High Line district, indeed!"


Hopper show is a must. Hopper show is always crowded. The Whitney's rooms, thankfully, are large enough to absorb the crowd--but the show is unmistakably emotional and emotional. One feels the silence and the hushed sound of complete attention. While not every famous Hopper made the trip--"Nighthawks" is still locked in Chicago, but the majority of the most popular are in this. OAI are back with the help of the local pictorial poet, his images still haunting after almost a century of art-historical ferment such as the woman who bends to change her clothes unselfconsciously in a brownstone window, like if it were a glimpse from the old Second Avenue El; the usherette in bobbed hair resting on her back, half asleep, against the wall of the lavish cinema palace; and such awkward bits of found street poetry as the staid front of an old-fashioned drugstore that New York was once filled with, advertising Ex-Lax with the aid of an equipoise. (We are in the midst of being reminded about the infamous effects of the pandemic has been the loss of movie theatres--long since degraded from their once palatial role, they now seem unlikely even to hang on as the hangars they have become--and also small pharmacies, assimilated into the fluorescent world that is Walgreens.)


In no way "dramatic" in the normal sense of disseminating a story, the pictures of Hopper are in the sense that John Updike once said, "models of therapeutic reserve," respectful to their subjects as the painter scans their minds. In the beautiful beginning of "Night Windows," of 1928 woman who is headless and seen as half-formed, stretches in her red slip in her brightly lit house while we gaze inside. It is not a provocative but a functional gesture, made sexy only by our fleeting view of it. A far cry from voyeuristic intimate, it's intimate, even if 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, sputtering it, is the tiny relief from the breeze she experiences, and the ugly baseboard radiator to the right is a reminder of the rent she pays. The triangular division of bay windows against the darkness is a gentle reminder of a conventional religious altarpiece, with the figures in the middle with the right wing glowing red and yellow and the left wing filled with a ghostly pneuma, an epiphany of the night. While Hopper's artworks can be lewd but they never look lecherous rather, the desire is transformed into a form of contemplation. This is what made Hopper's mysterious parables that differentiate Hopper's artwork from the magazine illustrations and we can identify with his characters but what we're empathizing with is not clear. Art is like the truth of taste that truffles and Parmesan are just a few minutes away from being disgusting and the best images are usually one step away from illustration or, with abstract ones and abstract ones, from anarchy. It's not a stretch to say that a Pollock looks like a regular drip cloth. It's near enough anarchy to dance with its edge--and Hopper is often an eloquent leap from illustration in magazines, since there was in the illustration of magazines of his time an unassuming, open concern for life as it is. We don't feel any pity for Hopper's people; their dreams and isolation are a lot like our ones.
The mystery and melancholy of a street, De Chirico's inspiration for his modern premonitory painting of city lights and shadows could be the title of the whole exhibition. Hopper, one sees, was not a politician, nor a literary nor even the term "a "cinematic" painter but a theatrical one; the most moving display in the exhibition is a neat collection of Broadway-ticket stubs, kept by the Hoppers as a souvenir of their time at the theatre. (One observes, however, that prices for the tickets were all within the range of three dollars.) Hopper's space, his diorama-like proscenium boxes, recalls the stylized realism of the Broadway stage of his time--naturalistic in its intent, yet with a sense of realism that is made up of obvious stylizations, extravagant lighting and painted flats. While Hopper is often acknowledged as having influenced, and in turn with having been influenced by, the dramatic lighting design of film noir during the 1940s, his ideas are based on the shrewd and old-fashioned drama produced by brilliant areas of color captured in dramatic chiaroscuro neatly framed space--diagonal slashes of scarlet dress in lamplight and a dark brownstone window--of a kind that films would never conquer until at least the period that of "Vertigo." It is the set designers of the time of Hopper--just look at Jo Mielziner's melancholic and crooked sets in "Death of a Salesman" or "A Streetcar Named Desire"--that are a part of his common language, with entire houses and back yards squeezed squarely onstage and lit by moody blues and creepy oranges. Stage lights and stage sets haunted Hopper's imagination, and his project in a way was to replicate the intensity of stage design. Hopper looks at his subjects as theatergoers would, waiting to sit in the dark and see an actor's story unfold from just a few feet.

While walking through the exhibition, various art-crit differences and conclusions emerge under one's necessarily patient eyes. One must be more than the standard amount of hopping and skipping through the crowd to gain an image. Hopper was an exceptionally awkward animator of line, his famous stillness as much accepted as gained, and the stability of his designs in the limitation of his line. The worst--indeed, almost humorously inept image of the show is "Bridle Path," from 1939, which features three horses that are so flimsy as to appear as if they were taken from the carousel of a young child and stumble uneasily within Central Park. The awkwardness is not merely limited to the horses but extends throughout the design of the image, as though being impelled to create motion caused a reverse line of panic paralyzed in the painter. Making things move wasn't Hopper's goal, and it was also not his talent. And one notices that his tender, enlivening touch with lighting was at its peak between the late twenties and the thirties, along with pictures from the forties and beyond, with Hopper insistently remaining in his mise-en-scene scene, as real artists always do--becoming less elegantly lit, and more abstractly imagined in sometimes uneasy, stifling forms, with a more obvious pathos of alienation.



Whatever. Somebody once said, in reference to Magritte, that it was a blessing that he was not a better painter, because Magritte would have been much worse artist--another Dali complete with all effects and virtuoso fauxry that was shallow instead of disturbing. Hopper has many similarities to our American Magritte as a spy on bourgeois manners that was transformed into art through his conflicting feelings towards them, as well as an artist boosted, not reduced, by the dignified simplicity of his methods. But a deeper, or anyway bigger, question is opened by the show as well. Hopper was always part of the negative image of American modernism. I can remember when his gorgeous depiction of the usherette "New York Movie," used to be hived off to a little space that was its own in moma, which was not too far from the much-loved but largely snubbed Wyeths. There was no shame on the part of curators in the least, but doubt about where to place Hopper or what to make of him--where he "belonged" in the larger story of the rise in American artwork and also the triumph of American painting and art, with Hopper uneasy neither in the abstract evolution that led to Minimalism nor in the more gay appropriative style that led to Pop.


But even if Hopper makes up the sinister conscience of American modernism, then he's part of the civic awareness in New York. The enticing appeal of Hopper to the people who attend the Whitney, the hushed and serious remark of gaze and approval--producing not at all the annoyed rhythm in which people read the wall's labels or utter fragments of them to their child or spouse, and then smile, in an vain attempt to understand the significance of this--reminds us that, if Hopper represents us as Magritte and he's our Philip Larkin, too. In the same way that Brits enjoy Larkin's poetry despite the constant melancholy of his vision -- they see "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" as refreshingly candid and not depressing, New Yorkers love Hopper despite the constant sadness of his. In both of these slightly conservative and bearish artists, perhapsit's their ability to constrain pleasure in order to evoke it that touches us. Hopper noticed that the apparent sadness of city life is also part of its gaiety. Every aspect of the city Hopper depicts is isolated, uncommunal--and yet, his pictures of loneliness appear something other than grim, and proudly self-sufficient. (Times Square, Macy's, all those gathering places that have New Yorkers as frantic as water bugs once the light goes on, as Florine Stettheimer was known to sing, do not appear in his writings.) We find more convincing and--a strange but significant point--more comforting the imagery of solitude than the image of gathering.


Then, a sudden pull on the heart reveals why this exhibition is so packed and so alive. What we have missed in the absence of crowds is the opportunity for the solitude. Having seen at last an un-populated New York, we realize that the best way to live in this city lies in not being seen in the places we are, overlooked while others are taking a look, left to be our own personas. Poets from New York have always known this truth. As Maeve Brennan, this journal's Long-Winded Lady, wrote, "New York has nothing to offer those who are inclined 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. At home or away, we are nostalgic to New York not because New York was better and not because she used to be more threatening, but because the city holds us and we aren't sure why." Perhaps after the outbreak, the homesickness of those so long kept at home radiates through the rooms. The city holds us and we do know why.

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