Sometimes A Line Is Just A Line

                        

(Edward Hopper's People in the Sun and Room by the Sea)

Edward Hopper is an artist I admire immensely. This review by Professor Donald Kuspit of Hopper's art currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York irritated me to no end. The ever manufactured new angle, interpretation, reconstruction, deconstruction of an established and well known artist's work have their merits only if something hitherto unknown surfaces about his/ her life and philosophy to shed new light on the artist's motivation and technique. Beyond that we ought to leave art alone - to be seen, understood and enjoyed by viewers as they see fit. I have argued this before in an earlier post  where I made a similar point about the heavy handed silliness of art mavens.

"There’s been much talk about the moody silences of Hopper’s spaces and the oddly disturbed figures around or in them -- they seem to be living the lives of quiet desperation that Thoreau spoke of. But I suggest that the people are distractions from Hopper’s real concern: buildings. They abound in Hopper’s works, often dwarfing the figures into insignificance _ _ or using them as foils to offset structure and space. Buildings are man-made constructions of geometrical space, and as such inherently abstract and autonomous. They have a charismatic quality of their own, independently of the people who use them. Hopper is a kind of Cubist, treating buildings as abstract structures with a life of their own, and often more uncannily alive than the people who use them.

Cubism was in part inspired by Cézanne’s "little cubes," as Picasso called the buildings that spotted Cézanne’s late landscapes. They are the point of departure for the cunning geometry of the buildings in Picasso’s early Analytic Cubist masterpieces ...  Hopper’s houses also have the authority of geometry, but they look peculiarly irrational next to Picasso’s Cubist houses, which, for all their oddness, have a quasi-Bauhaus look, although they’re eccentrically rather than dogmatically rationalist.

Hopper’s houses are also recognizable as functional buildings inhabitable by human beings. Picasso’s aren’t: they have no human function. They’re pure abstractions, formal constructions which seem to have no human significance......  Modern rationalist architecture is in fact not very functional, if part of its function is to emotionally support people, not simply to physically contain them.

Hopper’s buildings may read as Cubist archisculptures, but they clearly have psychosocial import. Hopper registers their effect on the people who live and work in them: his buildings raise the pressing question of when a house becomes a home -- an empathic place, more humanly meaningful than an abstract castle. Never, Hopper’s pictures imply: the fit between his buildings and his people is not very good. (italics mine)

Did we need to be reminded of this rather easily discernible truth contained in the last line of the preceding paragraph? Whoever sees Hopper's art will figure out quickly that the "aloof misfit" between the human figures and their surroundings is in fact what makes Hopper's Americana distinct from Norman Rockwell's cheerful version. The title of Kuspit's review poses the wholly unnecessary riddle : "Edward Hopper: Cubist in Disguise?" In my opinion, Hopper was nothing in disguise. He was a brilliant realist who painted what he saw and felt. Yes, he drew a lot of buildings. Buildings have sharp angles, lines and geometric shapes and they cast shadows of sharp angles, lines and geometric shapes. So what?  Should that make him a cubist?  Sometimes a line is just a line and an angle forms where the lines meet. Happens all the time when you draw or paint. There were (and are) artists who willingly defined themselves as impressionists, expressionists, cubists, surrealists etc. etc.  Hopper did not. In fact from what I know, he didn't talk about his art much and let the paintings do the talking. Please read the review if you have the patience and note that Kuspit admits in the end that Hopper was not in fact a cubist. Then what was the point of this lengthy speculation?  Please see some of Hopper's work here and decide if one has to go into such convoluted lengths to truly appreciate Hopper's forlorn brilliance?

Comments

[Anna]

Kuspit will have done the ultimate disservice that a bad critic can do to his subject if his review squelches the interest of potential visitors to the Whitney Hopper exhibit, which is quite wonderful (I saw it while in NY last Friday).

In fact, one thing I like about the exhibit is precisely its "show don't tell" curating style. Several of Hopper's large oil paintings are paired with well selected examples of the many charcoal sketches he did in preparation for each work. The sketches allow a visitor to see the way in which the structural space was mapped first; how character sketches were developed separately; where a figure was sometimes added or subtracted to a scene as Hopper played around with different compositions.

The accompanying placards provide historical detail about Hopper's relationship to the different locales pictured, and what is known about his process of developing a particular work of art. They are actually wonderfully terse.

Similarly, the exhibit also includes a nice collection of Hopper's very early art-- the commercial illustration that he trained to do as a teenager, and paintings and sketches from his time in Paris as a young man-- together with some nicely chosen quotations from letters and journals, and some more fairly understated contextual commentary about the influence of this early development. An impressively comprehensive selection of work for a Hopper fan (of which I am one, as well), and interestingly organized.

As a side note, I find the cool light and empty spaces in Hopper's paintings peaceful rather than crushingly lonely.

The Whitney HR Department must be doing something right, because the other big show there right now, on the influence of Picasso on contemporary painters, is also impressively curated, again on the "show don't tell" principle: by placing paintings side by side, it persuasively argues the influence of Picasso's forms and techniques not just on the usual suspects, but on artists I never would have associated with him, like Jackson Pollack and Roy Lichtenstein. No really.

I wholeheartedly recommend both shows to anyone in or near NY these days.

[Ruchira Paul]

Thanks Anna, for the eye witness report on Edward Hopper's art show. How I wish I could see the Whitney exhibit. I have seen isolated Hopper works but never a dedicated display of a large number of his paintings. I think the the largest number of Hopper in one room I saw may have been at Yale. Isn't that Room By The Sea owned by Yale?

I probably came down unnecessarily hard on the Kuspit review. He is just doing his job as a professor of philosophy and history of art. And like all scholars, he found a new angle to play around with for a scholarly exegesis. It doesn't have to mean anything to the lay admirers of Edward Hopper. I doubt that he will deter anyone from checking out the Whitney show.

I must say that like you, I too find in the empty spaces, lines, shadows and self contained aloof figures in Hopper's paintings a strange aura of relaxation. Not at all the melancholy as is commonly associated with them. Which is further proof that experts such as Kuspit, need not bother telling us what a painting "means."

As for your other comment on the Mughlai Chicken post, my husband (he more than I) and I are not especially celebratory ANY time of the year. I (not he) probably would have been more enthusiastic had we had more family around. Festive cooking is much more fun when several people participate. But we did, until a couple of years ago, meet for both Christmas and Thanksgiving. And I did cook the requisite food. But plane travel during Thanksgiving has turned so horrendous that both kids have given it a miss for the past two years. Unlike at Christmas, when one can stagger the travel dates a bit, ThxGiving pretty much makes a Wednesday arrival and Sunday departure mandatory. We don't do much for Christmas either, except eat and sleep. But my son's birthday on Christmas Eve gives us a "reason" for the season and gift giving. I myself find Christmas time very pretty. I enjoy and admire the festive decorations of my neighbors, the greeting cards and gift exchange, charitable giving and if I have time and energy, a Midnight Mass at a Catholic church. None of this is religious for me of course but I enjoy the activities.