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... not themselves. We, as viewers, are left with the memory of those moments in our own lives, and forced to examine our assumptions about who we are and how we related to the world around us in the way only true great art can make us do. Deliberately so or not, in Hoppers still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings the artist often exerts a powerful psychological impact distantly akin to that made by the Metaphysical painter de Chirico; but while de Chiricos effect was obtained by making the unreal seem real, Hoppers was rooted in the presentation of the familiar and concrete. This is not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have (perhaps overwhelmingly in late adolescence) of being on our own in the human condition. When we look at that dark New York street, we would expect the fluorescent-lit cafe to be welcoming, but it is not.
There is no way to enter it, no door. The extreme brightness means that the people inside are held, exposed and vulnerable. They hunch their shoulders defensively. Hopper did not actually observe them, because he used himself as a model for both the seated men, as if he perceived men in this situation as clones. He modeled the woman, as he did all of his female characters, on his wife Jo. He was a difficult man, and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her was; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model.
Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a chilling, alienating, and often vacuous place. Everybody in a Hopper picture appears terribly alone. Hopper soon gained a widespread reputation as the artist who gave visual form to the loneliness and boredom of life in the big city. This was something new in art, perhaps an expression of the sense of human hopelessness that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930 s. By their very nature, cities are responses to mankind's deep-seated need for socialization.
Beyond their facades of concrete and steel, they exemplify the universe of human experience writ large across a skyline or down a crowded boulevard, all the while exposing the sharp contradictions inherent in all of us. By offering an opportunity to immerse ourselves in the humanity that surrounds us, cities also let us drown our identities in a larger sea by allowing for a kind of anonymity unlike any found elsewhere. If we choose to accept the terms of a city with its density and cacophony and demands on survival, whether to work or live, it can be said that we choose an inherent belief in our own future among the collection of all possible futures, and show our willingness to share in those possibilities alongside our fellow man. The difference between community and isolation, however, is among the clearest and most easily identifiable of contradictions cities force us to confront. Long a favorite subject of artists and writers, loneliness in a crowd is often shown to be right on the surface, captured in the face of someone sitting on a park bench or subway seat or in the downcast eyes of the late-night wanderer. However, isolation can also be regularly hidden from our view, on the back streets and boulevards, or any old street at all.
Further, the mechanization of society, long considered a boon we can hardly live without, has furthered this process along by allowing us to place steel and glass, concrete and iron and our own heightened sense of space between us and our neighbor. In such a world, everyday tasks such as driving a car or riding in an elevator put us in a position of enforced loneliness. Whether we know it or not, out in public and amongst our fellow man but unable to break through those barriers both physical and psychological that keep people isolated and alone, if only for a moment and especially during the hard times. Edward Hopper knew about the barriers that a city imposes.
He used them in the language of his work as a painter in a way few others could ever hope to, and in the process held a mirror up to ourselves as viewers. His works, filled with empty rooms, early morning skylines, late night offices, sparsely populated railcar's, shuttered drug stores, and abandoned sea sides, speak to us across time and space directly to the heart of our experience as social beings. There are no people in many of his paintings, where seemingly there should be some, and in his shadowed bedrooms and New England cottages and roadside gas stations we are forced into placing ourselves at the center of a scene where we can hardly imagine a human being ever has set foot. In others, where people appear, alone or in pairs, backs turned to us or glances cast elsewhere, waiting out the end of a work shift or the arrival of a lover, you can almost feel their need to leave, to escape the frame in order to gain freedom. This all is used to render the painting in the way Hopper originally imagined, perhaps, empty and devoid of life. Many Americans have long exhibited about cities themselves.
It is inherent in the character of Americans to equate freedom with the freedom simply to be left alone, a freedom that is often hard fought in order to be maintained at any cost. Cities have turned out not to be a comfortable stomping ground for the isolationists among us, who we find ever more ascendant in our public lives, in policy and entertainment alike. That isolationism extends outward, past our borders, hardly encourages the hope in some of us that we can reverse the trend here at home, and in our own hearts. Edward Hopper confronted those fears in our place, seeing them in the faces and places of those struggling with a changing landscape in the country well before television conspired to keep us in blue-lit cocoons and technological splendor encouraged us to extend our power worldwide at the blink of an eye without ever meeting those whose lives we effect. In captured them for us to see well beyond his time, he powerfully reminds us of the universality of human isolation, and the never-changing need to battle it with all our might by recognizing that it exists, too, in our lives, and in our own empty rooms, early-morning skylines and late-night offices. Edward Hopper, whose work dealt with the loneliness of the big city, also has had a long association with cinema.
Cinema served as an inspiration for Hopper and his paintings have directly influenced many filmmakers - Dario Argento, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Ridley Scott, and Quentin Tarantino and now Sam Mendes have all used his haunting images as visual inspiration for their work. Mendes Road to Perdition uses Hopper-like techniques of manipulating light and space to communicate a sense of isolation, loneliness and desolation. The bold, somber colors of Hoppers palette are employed in both the clothes and the sets of Perdition. The characters move in and out of darkness and are often bathed in shadow creating a sense that they are not only isolated from each other but from the environment they inhabit. This sense of isolation is further conveyed by the use of space.
In an early scene Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) goes upstairs to call his father Michael (Tom Hanks) to dinner. The son stands at one end of a corridor and calls to his father who is seen through a half-open door at its far end. Their physical distance mirrors their emotional distance. They live together yet they are isolated from each other, a condition, which afflicts most of the characters in Perdition.
Edward Hoppers paintings are marked by striking just-positions of color, and by the clear contours with which the figures are demarcated from their surroundings. His extremely precise focus on the theme of modern men and women in the natural and man-made environment sometimes lends his pictures a mood of eerie disquiet. In House by the Railroad, a harsh interplay of light and shadow makes the abandoned building seem veritably threatening. On the other hand, Hoppers renderings of rocky landscapes in warm brown hues, or his depictions of the seacoast, exude an unusual tranquility that reveals another, more optimistic side of his character. Hopper painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theatres, cinemas and offices. Nevertheless, even in these paintings, he stressed the theme of loneliness his theatres are often semi-deserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage.
Hopper was a frequent moviegoer, and there is often a cinematic quality in his work. As the years went on, however, he found suitable subjects increasingly difficult to discover, and often felt blocked and unable to paint. When the link between the outer world he observed and the inner world of feeling and fantasy broke, Hopper found he was unable to create. Hopper finished his last painting Two Comedians in 1965.
On 15 May 1967, Edward Hopper died in his studio at Washington Square North, isolated if not forgotten. Although his work was outside the mainstream, his simplified style was one of the influences on the later representational revival and on pop art. Hopper became a pictorial poet who recorded the starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for example, in his pictures of lighthouses and harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing deserted streets at night. Some paintings, such as his celebrated image of a gas station, Gas (1940), even have elements, which anticipate Pop Art. His true importance has only been fully realized in the years since his death.
Sources: Goodrich, Lloyd. Edward Hopper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. , Publishers, 1989. Levin, Gail. Hoppers Places.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Mailing, Kara Ann. Edward Hopper.
New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. , 1992. Strand, Mark. Edward Hopper. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994. web web web web
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