Artist of the week: Edward Hopper
Owing to his haunting depictions of social isolation, the American painter is being hailed as the artist of the corona-age
Curators in Switzerland must have been devastated when the coronavirus forced the closure of their major new exhibition of works by Edward Hopper, days after it had opened. On the other hand, the Beyeler Foundation could hardly have chosen a more “apt” artist to focus on in these strange times, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. A “lyricist of modern isolation”, Hopper (1882-1967) captured solitude like no other modern painter – as you can see, if you visit the gallery’s online version of the show, and take one of its “guided visits” analysing some of the American painter’s most enduring works. Among them is (1940), on loan from MoMA, which depicts a small rural petrol station at twilight, its sole attendant standing beneath a Mobil logo of Pegasus – an “emblem of freedom” on a lonely road into the vastness of America. There is also 1950’s which depicts Hopper’s wife, Jo, standing tensely at the window of a clapboard house, and gazing out “as if imprisoned”. In lockdown, such scenes have taken on a new resonance.
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We may feel a sense of community, when we join together to clap for the NHS each week, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian – but given the number of Hopper-themed memes doing the rounds online, I can only assume that many of us feel “coldly distanced” from one another. One of the most widely shared posts brings together a selection of his images – people sitting apart from one another in a restaurant; a man alone in his flat – and is entitled: “We are all Edward Hopper paintings now.” It may be “a glib joke with a side order of self-pity”, but if we take it seriously, it is a worrying insight into the kind of crisis of loneliness Hopper foretold. He was painting in the Jazz Age, but the people he depicted hadn’t been invited to the party. They didn’t need a pandemic to isolate them, however: the modern world did that, with its “cold, plateglass windows”, lonely gas stations and tall blocks filled with small apartments. The isolation he depicts is horrifying – as one of his biggest fans understood: Alfred Hitchcock modelled the Bates Motel on a Hopper painting.
Yet it would be wrong to view Hopper’s paintings only as evocations of loneliness and alienation, said Alex Greenberger in Art News. The artist himself spoke of the “hideous beauty” of American architecture, and of finding joy in light: he described his “elation” at seeing the sun pour in through the windows of his house, an effect he replicated in paintings such as 1952’s
which shows “a woman in a slip sitting on a bed”, staring vacantly out at an urban landscape. If Hopper has a lesson for us during this crisis, perhaps it is to “take pleasure in light – the smallest but also biggest of things”.
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