Notes

Edward Hopper - Choosing the right Strategy
The finality of the pandemic in New York has been declared so many times--I have heralded many a false spring myself--and every time, with a stumbling, unhappy one-step forward, one-step back rhythm that declaring it over for good feels uncertain and squishy, just like other declarations about the end of things , which have a nature that could be devoid of irony as well as liberal democracy and the Jets quarterback crisis, all of which are other examples of things that will not end even when we are told that they are over.

Yet a recent November weekend, as seen through the eyes of one newly recovered from a delayed (and thankfully, not a serious) bout with the virus it seemed to be finally, an authentic 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, prudentially covered. This is a self-organized phenomenon, driven with a sense of exasperation as much as by scientific awe. In a typical, maybe just a bit fatalistic snark citizens of the city appear to have decided they are, as John Lennon might have said the pandemic has ended if we want it. The windows and lights of Lincoln Center for Paul Taylor's weekend matinees are shining and the plaza is packed and there's a flurry of people on the R train is mobbed again--even when the plight of helpless people on the subway and street is unmissable as well--and that strange familiar civic oscillation of ugliness and sublimity has come back, astoundingly unaffected.

The core of this current moment of recovery might be located but it is unlikely to be at the exhibition of Edward Hopper's paintings of New York, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October and will persist until the 5th of March. The exhibit covers an entire floor in the Whitney's newish headquarters, located close to the High Line. Its existence is proof enough that things happen much faster in New York than we can imagine. http://cqms.skku.edu/b/lecture/238688 is said that the High Line had been a barbed-wire wilderness, haloed by a forlorn pipe dream to save it in the turn of the century, and has since become such and an "amenity" that we almost ignore it or shrug off its pretenses: "The High Line district, indeed!"


Hopper show is a must. Hopper show is predictably crowded--the Whitney's spaces, fortunately are large enough to hold the crowd. They are also unmistakably intense and emotional. The audience is surrounded by the hush and murmur of undivided absorption. While it is true that not all the famous Hopper was able to make the trip--"Nighthawks" is still locked in Chicago, but the majority of the favorites are here. New Yorkers are to be in the company of our own local pictorial poet, his images remain haunting even after nearly 100 years of art-historical rage: the bending woman changing clothes unselfconsciously in a window made of brownstone, as if glimpsed from the old Second Avenue El; the usherette with her hair bobbed, resting on her back, half asleep, against the walls of the extravagant movie palace; and even such awkward bits of found street poetry, such as the formal front of an old-fashioned pharmacy one of the kinds New York was once filled with, promoting Ex-Lax using equipoise. (We are reminded by these images that one of the infamous loss of the pandemic are movie theatres--long since degraded from their once palatial role They are now unlikely to last to the status of the hangars they've been transformed into--as well as small pharmacies that have which have been absorbed into the massive fluorescent world of Walgreens.)


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 even as the artist probes their minds. In the gorgeous, early "Night Windows," of 1928, a woman, naked and in half , bends in her red slip in her brightly lit home as we look into her. This isn't a sexy gesture but a practical gesture made sexy only by the brief glimpse we get of it. It is not voyeuristic at all, it is intimate, if only for a second--we have a brief glimpse of the room as we pass by outside. It's the summer season at the moment in New York: the curtain on the left, puffing and releasing a tiny amount from the breeze she experiences, and the ugly baseboard radiator to the right will remind us of the amount of rent she pays. The tripartite division of the bay windows against the dark is a gentle reminder of a typical altarpiece, with the central figure, the right wing fiery yellow and red, and the left side engulfed with a ghostly pneuma, an epiphany of the night. Although Hopper's paintings can be a bit sexy but they never look lecherous rather, the desire is transformed into a form of reverie. This is what made Hopper's enigmatic parable that separated Hopper's artwork from the magazine illustrations and we can identify with his people, but what we are empathizing about isn't clear. One truth of art is similar to a fact of taste: truffles and Parmesan are one brief stop away from being disgusting and the best photographs are typically one stop away from illustration or in the case of abstract images and abstract ones, from anarchy. It isn't wrong to say that a Pollock is like a typical drip cloth. It's close enough to anarchy that it can move with its edge. Hopper is often just one quick leap away from the world of magazine illustration because there was in the illustration of magazines of his day, a declared, unassuming concern for life as it exists. We don't feel any pity for Hopper's people; their dreams and isolation are too much like our personal experiences.
The mystery and melancholy of the street, De Chirico's famous phrase that he used to describe his modern premonitory depiction of the city's lights, shadows, and light could be the title of the whole exhibition. Hopper It is clear that Hopper was not a politician, nor a literary nor even a "cinematic" painter but a theatre artist. The most moving exhibit in the exhibition is a tidy collection of Broadway-ticket stubs, 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 the Broadway theater of the day, naturalistic in its intent, yet with a realism composed entirely by obvious stylizations, extravagant lighting, as well as painted flats. While Hopper is often believed to be being influenced by and, in turn, having been influenced by the dramatic lighting designs of the film noir era of the 1940s, his vision depends on the odd and older drama produced by brilliant colors caught in dramatic chiaroscuro within a neatly framed space--diagonal slashes of scarlet dresses in the light of a lamp and a dark brownstone window. It was a style that movies would not overcome until the period of "Vertigo." It is the set designers of the time of Hopper--just look at Jo Mielziner's melancholic, set designs to "Death of a Salesman" or "A Streetcar named Desire"--that have a common language, with entire back yards and houses squeezing squarely onstage and lit with eerie blues and moody oranges. Stage light and stage sets haunted Hopper's imagination, and his project was, in a way, was to replicate from life the intensities of the stage's designs. Hopper looks at his subjects in the same way that theater goers do, eager to sit in the dark and watch the drama of another from a few feet away.


When one is walking through the exhibition, various art-crit distinctions and decisions appear under one's always patient eye--as one has to do more than the usual amount of hopping and skipping among the crowd to get a view of each picture. Hopper was a remarkably unnatural animator of line, his famed quietness being as widely admired as it was won, the stability of his designs engrained in the limitations of his lines. The worst--indeed, almost hilariously inept picture of Hopper's show "Bridle Path," from 1939, in which three horses so wooden as to seem snatched off the carousel of a young child and walk around within Central Park. The awkwardness isn't limited to the horses but is evident throughout the composition of the picture, as though being impelled to move something caused a reverse pattern of paralytic anxiety in the painter. Making things move wasn't Hopper's intention as it was not his talent. It is evident that his tender, enlivening sense of light was at its finest during the late twenties and thirties, with the images of the forties and beyond, with Hopper determinedly remaining in his mise-en-scene scene, as real artists always do. But his work was becoming less elegantly lit and more abstractly imagined in often uneasy, blocky designs, and with an evident thematic of alienation.


No matter. One person once said of Magritte the fact that it was a blessing he was not a better 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 terrifying. Hopper can be described as our American Magritte: a spy on bourgeois manners, turned into art by his indifferent attraction to these people, as well as an artist elevated, not reduced, by the modest simplicity of his methods. However, a deeper, or perhaps more important, issue is raised by the show as well. Hopper was always part of the poor conscience associated with American modernism. I can remember when his gorgeous depiction of the usherette "New York Movie," was hived off to a tiny hallway that was its own in moma's house, just a few blocks from the well-loved, but still more derided Wyeths. There was no shame from the curators, in fact, it was the uncertainty of where to place Hopper or what to say of him--where Hopper "belonged" in the larger history of the rise of American artwork and also the victory of American painting, with Hopper not being a part of the art movement that led to Minimalism nor in the gayer appropriative one that brought about Pop.


But if Hopper has been a part of the bad image that is American modernism, then he's an integral part of the civic awareness that is New York. OAI to the audience at the Whitney The hushed 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, and then smile, in an vain attempt to comprehend what the hell this is--reminds us that even if Hopper represents us as Magritte and he's the same as our Philip Larkin, too. The way Brits are awestruck by the poems of Larkin despite the constant melancholy of his vision--they hear "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" as delightfully candid and not depressing, New Yorkers are enthralled by Hopper despite the constant melancholy of his. In both of these conservative and bearish artists perhapsit's their capability to restrict pleasure to create the emotion that we feel. Hopper noticed that the apparent sadness of city life is in fact a part of its humour. The city life Hopper depicts is solitary, incommunicative--and yet, his pictures of loneliness appear something other than grim, and proudly self-reliant. (Times Square, Macy's -- all these places of gathering that have New Yorkers who are as chaotic like water bugs when the lights come on, as Florine Stettheimer adored to sing about, are not present in his writings.) We somehow find more credible and--a strange but significant point--more relaxing the images of solitude than that of gathering.



And suddenly a pull on the heart reveals why this exhibition is so busy and alive: what we missed because of the lack of crowds is the opportunity for solitude. Having seen at last an unpeopled New York, we realize that the best way to live in the city is not being seen in the places we are and oblivious to the people looking, left alone to become our secret selves. Poets from New York have always known this fact. As Maeve Brennan, this journal's Long-Winded Lady, wrote, "New York has nothing to offer the people who want to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that is a mystery 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 used to be better but not because she was more threatening, but because the city holds us, and we aren't sure why." Perhaps , after the pandemic, the homesickness of people who were kept at home is reflected in the rooms. The city holds us, and we know why.


Website: http://www.sse.tottori-u.ac.jp/hp-keiei/index.php?birkaycock331171