![]() ![]() I sat in a corner, eating fingers of chocolate and taking occasional sips of orange juice. We gazed blankly past one another at the serving counter or out into the darkness. No one was talking, no one admitting to curiosity or fellow feeling. The chairs and seats, painted in childishly bright colours, had the strained jollity of a fake smile. The lighting was unforgiving, bringing out pallor and blemishes. Objectively speaking, it wasn’t a beautiful building. I remember finding the Hopperesque one evening in a service station off the motorway between London and Manchester. We feel Hopper’s presence behind the photographs of Andreas Gursky and Hannah Starkey, the films of Wim Wenders and the books of Thomas Bernhard. Hopper is the father of a whole school of art that takes as its subject matter threshold spaces, buildings that lie outside homes and offices, places of transit where we are aware of a particular kind of alienated poetry. We become sensitised to what one might call the Hopperesque, a quality now found not only in Hopper’s North American locales, but anywhere in the developed world where there are motels and service stations, roadside diners and airports, bus stations and all-night supermarkets. The 24-hour diner, the station waiting room or motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a place of their own in the ordinary world.Ī side-effect of coming into contact with any great artist is that through their work we start to notice things we can understand, but previously hadn’t thought worthy of consideration. The figures in Hopper’s art are not opponents of home per se it is simply that, in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or on to the road. It may be easier to give way to sadness here than in a living room with wallpaper and framed photographs, the décor of a refuge that has let us down. The lack of domesticity, the bright lights and anonymous furniture, may be a relief from what can be the false comforts of home. In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafés, we too may dilute a feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community. The artist puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naïve – as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. Others in the room may be on their own, men and women drinking coffee by themselves, similarly lost in thought, similarly distanced from society: a common isolation with the beneficial effect of lessening the oppressive sense within any one person that they are alone in being alone. Despite the starkness of the furnishings, the location itself does not seem wretched. It has the power of a great melancholy piece of music. It may be eleven at night in February in a large North American city.Īutomat is a picture of sadness – and yet it is not a sad picture. She is trying not to let her hand shake as she moves the cup to her lips. She unwittingly invites the viewer to imagine stories for her, stories of betrayal or loss. ![]() The woman looks self-conscious and slightly afraid, unused to being alone in a public place. The décor is functional, with a stone-topped table, hard-wearing black wooden chairs and white walls. The room seems large, brightly lit and empty. It is late and, to judge by her hat and coat, cold outside. In Automat 1927, a woman sits alone drinking a cup of coffee. It is sad books that console us most when we are sad, and the pictures of lonely service stations that we should hang on our walls when there is no one to hold or love. Yet despite the bleakness Hopper’s paintings depict, they are not themselves bleak to look at – perhaps because they allow us as viewers to witness an echo of our own griefs and disappointments, and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by them. It is often night, and through the window lie the darkness and threat of the open country or of a strange city. They are in search of work, sex or company, adrift in transient places. They may have just left someone or been left. Their faces are vulnerable and introspective. They gaze out of the window of a moving train or read a book in a hotel lobby. They stand reading a letter beside a hotel bed or drinking in a bar. His figures look as though they are far from home. Loneliness is the dominant theme in his art. ![]() ![]() Edward Hopper belongs to a particular category of artist whose work appears sad but does not make us sad – the painterly counterpart to Bach or Leonard Cohen. ![]()
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