The closing of the epidemic in New York has been declared numerous times--I've witnessed many a false spring myself--and each time with an uneasy, stumbling one-step forward, one-step back rhythm that declaring the end of the era for good is squishy and dubious, like other declarations of the end of things , which are, by nature, may have none: irony, liberal democracy, and even the Jets quarterback crisis, all of which are other instances of things that will not end even when we're told they're over.
However, nighthawks painting image , in the eyes of a person who has recently recovered from a belated (and, luckily, unserious) outbreak of the virus was, finally, a real moment of recovery. It could be felt on the streets and even in the subways, where the non-masked are now more numerous than those who are still cautiously, prudentially covered. It's a self-organized return fuelled with a sense of exasperation as much as it is by scientific certainty. With a common, perhaps merely fatalistic defiance the inhabitants of the city seem to have decided, as John Lennon might have said, the pandemic is over If we wish it. The windows and lights at Lincoln Center for Paul Taylor's Saturday matinees have been lit and the plaza is packed and The R train is mobbed again--even when the plight of helpless individuals on the subway and street is not to be missed. The bizarre, uncharacteristic civic oscillation between beauty and sublimity is back, remarkably and uninhibited.
The genesis of this period of recuperation could be in the exhibition of the paintings of Edward Hopper of New York, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October. The show will continue until the 5th of March. The exhibit covers an entire floor of the Whitney's newish headquarters, which is located near the High Line. Its existence is proof enough that things happen much faster in New York than we can imagine. It is said that the High Line had been a barred-wire wilderness, shrouded in the gloomy pipedream of a lonely man to save it, at the beginning of the century, and is now so well-known as as an "amenity" that we almost do not even think about it, or even sneer at its pretenses: "The High Line district, indeed!"
Hopper show is a must. Hopper show is predictably crowded--the Whitney's venues, thankfully they are big enough to hold the crowd. They are it is also unmistakably emotional and intense. There is a quiet and silence of total concentration. Though there are a few exceptions to the fact that not all the famous Hopper made the trip--"Nighthawks" is still confined to Chicago as its headquarters--the majority of the favorites are here. New Yorkers are now with the help of our local photographer, whose works are remain haunting even after nearly a century of art-historical ferment: the bending woman changing clothes unselfconsciously within a brownstone window as if glimpsed from the former Second Avenue El; the usherette with her hair in a bob, lying half asleep on the wall of the extravagant cinema palace; and the oddest bits of street poetry as the staid front of an old-fashioned pharmacy that New York was once filled with, advertising Ex-Lax with equipoise. (We are reminded by these images about the most notable loss of the pandemic are cinema theatres. Long since abandoned from their former regal role, they now seem unlikely to survive 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 glowing world that is Walgreens.)
The paintings are never "dramatic" in the normal sense of disseminating a story, the pictures of Hopper are, as John Updike once said, "models of therapeutic reserve," deferential to their subjects when the artist scans their minds. In the gorgeous, early "Night Windows," of 1928 the subject, who is headless and seen as half-formed, stretches in her red slip inside her brightly lit apartment as we look into her. It is not a provocative but a functional gesture, that is sexy due to the brief glimpse we get of the scene. The opposite of voyeuristic, it is intimate, at least for a moment--we are inside the room for a brief moment as we pass by outside. It's summertime at the moment in New York: the curtain on the left, sputtering it, is the tiny relief of the breeze she is feeling, and the ugly baseboard radiator in the background is a reminder of the rental she pays. The tripartite division of the bay windows against the darkness softly reveals the shape of a traditional altarpiece, with the figure in the middle with the right wing glowing red and yellow and the left wing filled with a ghostly pneuma, an epiphany glimpsed from the dark. Although Hopper's paintings are at times lecherous however, they're never leering; instead, desire is transformed into a form of contemplation. This was the genius for an enigmatic story that distinguished Hopper's work from illustration in magazines We can empathize with his characters however, what we're empathizing with is left unsure. The truth about art is similar to a fact of taste Truffles and Parmesan are one brief stop away from a sour taste, and great photographs are typically one stop away from illustration, or in the case of abstract images, from anarchy. It isn't wrong to say that a Pollock resembles a common drip cloth--the art is made in a way that is close to the anarchy that it can dance with its edge--and Hopper is often just a brisk leap from illustration in magazines, since there was, in the magazine illustration of his time the unassuming and unpretentious interest in the world as it exists. Open Art Images feel sorry for Hopper's people as their ambitions and loneliness are a lot like our own.
The mystery and melancholy of the street, De Chirico's inspiration for his premonitory modern painting of city lights and shadows could be the title of the entire exhibit. Hopper, one sees, was neither a political nor a literary nor even a "cinematic" painter but a theatrical one. The most poignant exhibit on display is an impressive collection of Broadway ticket tickets, which were that the couple kept as a souvenir of their time at the theatre. (One also observes that the prices were all within the range of three dollars.) Hopper's diorama-like space, with its proscenium boxes, evokes exactly the stylized realism of Broadway stage of his time--naturalistic in its intent, yet with a sense of realism that is made up of obvious stylizationsand intense lighting and painted flats. Although Hopper is often believed to be having been influenced by, and in turn with having been influenced by, the dramatic lighting design of the film noir era of the forties, in truth his vision depends on the bizarre and older drama produced by brilliant colors caught in dramatic chiaroscuro within a well-framed and neatly-framed space, with diagonal slashes of scarlet dress in lamplight and a dark brownstone windows--a genre that film would not be able to conquer until at least the period that of "Vertigo." It is the set designers from Hopper's era--look at Jo Mielziner's melancholic, unorthodox sets to "Death of a Salesman" or "A Streetcar Named Desire"--that share with him a common language, complete houses and back yards squeezed into the stage and illuminated by moody blues and creepy oranges. Stage lighting and stage sets enthralled his imagination, and his idea was, in a way, was to reproduce the ferocity of stage design. Hopper peeks in on his subjects as theatergoers are, eager to be seated in darkness and watch someone else's drama unfold from a few feet away.
As Open Art Images through the exhibition, various art-crit distinctions and determinations emerge under one's necessarily patient eyes. One must be more than the usual amount of hopping and skipping between the crowds to get a view of each picture. Hopper was an exceptionally unnatural animator of line, his famous quietness being as widely admired as it was won, the stability of his designs engrained in the limitation of his line. The most gruesome, hilariously inept picture that is in this show was "Bridle Path," from 1939, in which three horses so wooden as to appear as if they were taken from the carousel of a young child and fall awkwardly through Central Park. The awkwardness isn't just only limited to the horses; it extends throughout the design of the image like being driven to create motion caused a reverse line of panic paralyzed in the painter. Making things move was not Hopper's intention, and it was also not his gift. One can see that his soft, vibrant ability to capture light was at its finest between the late twenties and thirties, with the photographs of the forties and beyond--with Hopper insistently sticking to his mise en scene, just as true artists always do. But his work was becoming less elegantly lit, and more abstractly imagined in often uneasy, blocky forms, with a more obvious pathos of alienation.
No matter. One person once said of Magritte the fact that it was a blessing Hopper was not a superior painter, since then Hopper would have been a much worse artist--another Dali complete with all effects and virtuoso fauxry and shallow, rather than haunting. Hopper has many similarities to our American Magritte who was an observer of bourgeois behavior that was transformed into art through his indifferent attraction to these people, also an artist that was lifted and not lowered by the dignity of his techniques. However, a deeper, or perhaps more important, issue is raised by the exhibition as well. Hopper has always been a part of the poor conscience that is American modernism. I can remember when his gorgeous depiction of the usherette "New York Movie," was hived off to a small room that was its own in moma, not far from the well-loved, but also vilified Wyeths. It was not shame on the part of curators, in fact, it was the uncertainty of where to place Hopper or what to make of him--where the artist "belonged" in the larger story of the development of American artwork and also the victory of American painting as well as Hopper uneasy neither in the art movement that led to Minimalism , nor in the more sexually appropriative and gay one that brought about Pop.
But if Hopper has been a part of the bad conscience of American modernism, he's part of the civic awareness that is New York. Hopper's magnetic appeal Hopper to the crowd 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 children or spouse, only to shrug, in a vain attempt to understand the significance of this--reminds us that, even if Hopper can be our Magritte as well, he's also our Philip Larkin, too. In the same way that Brits enjoy Larkin's poetry despite the constant melancholy of his vision -- they hear "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" as refreshingly candid and not grim, so New Yorkers are enthralled by Hopper despite the constant melancholy of his. In both of these bearish and conservative artists, maybe it's the ability to limit pleasure to create emotions that touch us. Hopper caught that the seeming sadness of city life is also part of its gaiety. Everything about the urban life that he depicts us as is unconnected, isolated--and yet his images of apparent loneliness seem somehow something other than grim, and confidently self-sufficient. (Times Square, Macy's, all these places of gathering that have New Yorkers who are as chaotic like water bugs when the light goes on, as Florine Stettheimer was known to sing about, are not present in his work.) We somehow find more credible and--a strange but significant point--more comfortable the image of solitude than that of gathering.
A sudden tug on the heart suggests why this show is packed and so alive. What we did not see because of the lack of crowds is the opportunity for peace. We have finally seen an unpopulated New York, we realize that our greatest pleasure in this city lies in not being seen in the places we are, overlooked while others are looking, left alone to discover our inner personas. The poets of New York have always known this reality. As Maeve Brennan, the magazine's Long-Winded Lady, wrote, "New York has nothing to offer those who are inclined to be in love with her, except to implant into our minds a feeling of homelessness that baffles us until we leave her, and then we discover the reason we're so restless. In the city or out we feel homesick for New York not because New York was once better and not because she used to be worse but because the city is holding us, and we're not sure why." Perhaps after the outbreak, the homesickness of those so long kept at home is reflected in the rooms. The city holds us, and we do know why.