Edward Hopper — a deceitful voyeur
The first symptoms of claustrophobia began to creep as soon as the quarantine was decreed while reading timely interpretations of Edward Hopper’s work.
Despite its exceptional nature, the current pandemic continues to be — ultimately — a privileged place for observation of the profound effect on our spirits, excluded from the official World Health Organization’s statistics- not necessarily known for including what is most prevailing nowadays: FEAR, and UNCERTAINTY.
Edward Hopper’s paintings reflect the social context in which the artist lived, seen now from a polysemic point of view through the global quarantine.
Particularly today, we can make an even deeper reading of the artist’s body of work, within the frame of the desperate times we call upon from our popular memory.
The current world of isolation closely resembles the American artist’s trademark. He died more than 50 years ago, and, even though he lived through a different historical time — it was not quite so antagonistic.
Without any reference to other aspects of his work, nor ignoring his status as an abuser of his wife-muse-co-worker, it is solitude, and the distinctive features of exclusion, tension and silence expressed in human situations of loneliness that shaped the social imagery of his time, that turns him into the painter of the metaphor of silence and the solitude of the big cities with enormous spacial gaps between characters and monumental architectural volumes.
As a cultural agent, Hopper captured the collective imagination of his time, including his references to a distinctive social situation.
Conservative in politics and social affairs, Hopper said, for example, that “the lives of artists should be written by people very close to them,” as if the natural multiplicity of meanings that the image evokes were not included in the analysis.
The possibility that he accepted the orphan reality of elements does not help this analysis to decode the metaphor, from the same framework of ingenuity and simplicity with which his work is analyzed.
Hopper was not at all naive. It is hard to believe that from a Freud scholar, educated within the Baptist church, with a solid academic background and exposed to other cultures.
It would be rather shallow to frame him only as a realistic painter who made several trips to Paris, where he was impacted by Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet and his exquisite use of the light. This would an act of emptying the image from the content.
Edward Hopper also lived through one of the most dynamic and fraught periods of failure in American diplomacy. Two of them were, without a doubt, the humiliating landing in the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missiles crisis.
Not only was the world on the brink of war, but there were important consequences for the social interaction within the North American system.
Hopper’s work refers to the deep impact of the crisis unleashed with the American discovery of Soviet nuclear-capable projectiles in Cuba, and to the witch hunt later materialized by McCarthyism.
His work is a mirror of the particular loneliness of someone who, alone and defeated, understand that Hollywood is the only place for happy endings
Paranoia was not only a byproduct of unbalanced minds but a foundational element of the story beginning with the missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination (and the many more following), the Vietnam War, and the Manson murders.
The ‘60s were a time Hopper when a cynical political paranoia emerged promoted by the counterculture’s movement, a new realism, and deep social despair. Hopper probed this perspective from a wave of new maturity, incorporating “unpleasant” ideas, making them an attractive alternative and certainly more familiar with a point of contempt for power.
Non-inclusion and contempt for the American Society’s reaction to the layers of power and the establishment, became at once, the greatest strength and the source of its most obvious weakness.
The degree of readiness for nuclear installation was remarkably inadequate and barbaric, as was the disinformation received in schools for children drilling to protect themselves from attack, the absurd readiness of homeowners to build air-raid shelters, as the crisis became imagined as an imminent prospect of nuclear confrontation. The population was facing an imagined and unseen threat with nowhere to go — as is the case for the current pandemic.
In any case, life under the Cuban and the missile crisis had an impact on American political and cultural life. Fear of nuclear disaster, fear of the other, social stigmatization became part of our culture.
The anti-communist climate and collective hysteria within a population that was beginning to enjoy a high standard of living as a result of “opulence”, closely resembles the formidable perception of the current North American economy, from a temporal perspective that covers three successive measures, namely:
- The stock market and real estate market have climbed to record values.
- The promotion of economic values above human life.
- The promotion of polarization in society as a power tool.
The vagueness of information does not exempt him from the responsibility for the paranoia of that historical period marked by the rapid deterioration in civil liberties and the resurgence of the question of “subversives in government” that marked the period between the end of World War II and early 1947, the Truman Doctrine (which played a predominant role in American politics), and subsequently, the witch-hunt, omitting the legal principle of innocence from McCarthyism to everything that represented “a threat” to capitalism.
He knew perfectly well and chose to promote a way of hiding the dirty laundry of the American empire, becoming through the process a symbol of unfathomable complicity, at the height of the Cold war.
Hopper chose to talk about loneliness, without being specific about what was happening in that society. At best, choosing to have viewers build their own narrative, which could be apt for this or any other society on the planet.
“Even during an era of national prosperity and cultural optimism, moreover, his art continued to suggest that the individual could still suffer a powerful sense of isolation in postwar America.” (Jessica Murphy, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2007).
I think that we should be able to relate to fear in a much healthier and human way and face it for the simple fact of having the opportunity to cultivate a fairer, calmer, and honest way of living
Feelings from which empathy and solidarity can emerge.
Raquel Glusman — April 2020.
