Hopper imported, or smuggled, some emotive powers of European traditions to unforgiving American soil. And a certain smoldering vehemence in Hopper puts me in mind of Théodore Géricault, except tamped down to static views of drab actualities. His poetic liberties in a realist mode point back to one of his favorite predecessors, Gustave Courbet. Highly literate, he read and reread nineteenth-century German and French poetry all his life. Hopper was explicit on this score, saying, in 1933, “I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.” Exasperated by questions of what his works meant, he squelched one interviewer by exclaiming, “I’m after ME.” The remark reflects his debts to European Romanticism and Symbolism, which he absorbed in depth while stripping away any stylistic resemblances. The reason, beyond exacting observation and authentic feeling, is an exceptional stylistic cleverness. Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind’s eye. I rely as well on memories that we likely share of encountering “Nighthawks” (1942) and “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), but also, really, anything from his hand. I take its fine catalogue, edited by the exhibition’s curator, Ulf Küster, as occasion enough for reflecting anew on the artist’s stubborn force. I haven’t seen “Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape,” a large show at the lately reopened Beyeler Foundation, Switzerland’s premier museum of modern art, outside Basel. With Hopper, the going-on is not a choice. I’ll go on.” Now delete the first sentence. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous tag “I can’t go on. We might freak out if we had to be those people, but-look!-they’re doing O.K., however grim their lot. Regarding his human subjects as “lonely” evades their truth. He leaves us alone with our own solitude, taking our breath away and not giving it back. If his pictures sometimes seem awkwardly forced, that’s not a flaw it’s a guarantee that he has pushed the communicative capacities of painting to their limits, then a little bit beyond. Nearly every house that he painted strikes me as a self-portrait, with brooding windows and almost never a visible or, should one be indicated, inviting door. He was an able draftsman and masterly as a painter of light and shadow, but he ruthlessly subordinated aesthetic pleasure to the compacted description-as dense as uranium-of things that answered to his feelings without exposing them. Though termed a realist, Hopper is more properly a Symbolist, investing objective appearance with clenched, melancholy subjectivity. But his mature art, which took two decades to gestate before consolidating in the nineteen-twenties, is timeless, or perhaps time-free: a series of freeze-dried, uncannily telling moments. His subjects-atomized persons, inauspicious places-are specific to his time. Born in Nyack in 1882, and dying in 1967 after living for half a century in an apartment on Washington Square, he couldn’t conceivably have developed as he did in any other culture. Hopper’s region is the Northeast, from New York to parts of New England, but his perceptions apply from coast to coast. Only law-we’re a polity of lawyers-confers unity on the United States, which might sensibly be a Balkans of regional sovereignties had the Civil War not been so awful as to remove that option, come what may. “E pluribus unum,” a magnificent ideal, thuds on “unum” every day throughout the land. Aloneness is his great theme, symbolizing America: insecure selfhoods in a country that is only abstractly a nation. But he is always doing that, pandemic or no pandemic. The visual bard of American solitude-not loneliness, a maudlin projection-speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance. So have other stay-at-homes, I notice online. I’ve been thinking a lot about Edward Hopper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |