Staring At Hopper

The American painter, Edward Hopper, is among the few artists who truly captured the soul of an era. HIs paintings --of lonely lighthouses, nude women staring into space from nearly empty rooms, brick store fronts the color of dried blood --capture, as few other artists have captured, both the spirit and the alienation of an age.

It could be a still-frame from an Alfred Hitchcock movie –a stately lighthouse towering above eye level. Were not the blues so beautiful and rich it would be bleak. A window lit interior would be reminiscent of Vermeer but for the missing tapestries. There are no virginals, no Sixteenth Century maps. Just a young woman staring blankly out the open window at nothing at all.

Hopper's most famous painting is Night Hawks of 1942 --a depiction of three people together, at night, but alone in a near empty diner in Greenwich Village in the wee, small hours of a morning. It's American "film noir" set against an imagined sound track, perhaps a sax.

A parody of this painting is almost as famous as the original. In it, the diner is peopled by Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Humphrey Bogart. If the street outside is not wet, it should be and will be, soon; if not tonight, some night! Hopper is relevant today in the same way as is Casablanca --also a product of the war year 1942. Both capture the frustration of people alone in an uncaring world. As Rick might have put it then or now, the problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in a crazy, mixed-up world, nor our world on the brink of WWIII, another great depression, a police state.

Hopper himself claimed no such intention. His purpose --he says --was merely to capture the play of light and shade. He wrote: "The picture is an attempt to paint sunlight as white, with almost or no yellow pigment in the white. Any psychologic [Sic] idea will have to be supplied by the viewer."

Hopper never intended to develop an “American” style but did so in spite of himself. His goal was more modest. 'All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.'"

He succeeded admirably. His "House by the Railroad" of 1925, is a study of sunlight on the side of a house, to be sure, and much more besides. For a younger generation, it was the Bates Motel. We are curious but not enough to want to go inside. Like his silent, lonely human observers, the façade stares back at you!

In 1951, Hopper returned to the open window theme. This time he left out the staring woman. We are left with an open window to an open, flat sea.

Stare at a Hopper long enough and you will find yourself in Hopper’s universe beside the young woman staring out the open window, among anonymous souls together but alone in a diner, beside like the stately lighthouse regarding a vast but empty ocean. It was Friedrich Nietzche who said that if you stare into the abyss long enough, it will stare back at you. Is that what it means to be alone?