Hopper is a little bit of an anomaly. A twentith century representational realist or more accurately naturalist painter. But absolutely modern. There is no contradiction really, he painted less real space than a kind of meta-space, beyond simple psychological reductions to inner experience or rather naive naturalistic portraits of an outside visable world. Where and what is this place of spaces he painted?
To answer my own question I think a little like Manet his paintings are about spectatorship, except where Manet was very much a society painter, for the American Hopper, society is always out of view. Society has already been overcome, that's why it is rare to see anymore than a single individual in his pictures. There is just this freedom to have in front of us something to view. The spectator - freedom, freedom therefore the spectator. Just for comparison's sake, Van Gogh painted pictures that definitely do not this - his paintings are co-creating a world that definitely does not exist outside of a making, participation, a process of production. What is idealised, and is both attractive and melancholic in Hopper is the illusion he offers, that there can be places to view the world that are of the world, but not altogether part of the world, his paintings take their place with other spectral productions of the 20th Century like cinema; all ghosts that try to walk in sunlight.
Hopper's connection to cinema is always noted, the idea that his paintings suggest stills from movies. Are they not also in some sense experiences whose descendents we find in our reactions to contemporary media? Wasn't 9/11 like a movie, when celebrities are seen in real-life, when we can't quite believe something is happening 'before our eyes'. The fantasy suggests everything is moving too fast and it is disorientating. Perhaps it is quite the opposite, and like Hopper the painter we are quietly, almost unconsciously marking out a place from which to sit back and watch the world as it appears to disappear in front of us.
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Hi, Citizen,
I'd be very interested to kmow your views on Andrew Wyeth. Years and years ago I saw an exhibition of his works at the Royal Academy in London and didn't know what to make of it - still don't know!
Gail Levin has said that in the art of Edward Hopper (1882-1967), tense, unhappy men and women, in whom we recognize something of our neighbors and ourselves, play out mysterious dramas in silent, stripped-down spaces, on stages raked by an unrelenting and revealing light.
By contrast, Wyeth’s characters often gaze out at us from rural backgrounds suggesting rootedness -acceptance, if you will. And yet, and yet.....I'm still strangely haunted by some of his character studies and pictures of rural life - there is a sense of loneliness and distance in some of the domestic subjects which might, instead, be expected to convey a sense of security and rootedness.
In his book The Voice and the Myth: American Masters, Brian O’Doherty says this:
Today Christina’s World is one of the two or three most familiar American paintings of the 20th century. Only Grant Wood, in American Gothic, and Edward Hopper, in one or two canvases such as House by the Railroad or Nighthawks, have created works of comparable stature. He goes on to say: ‘…….under his surface optimism and sentiment, Wyeth's vision is not always settling. As Mark Rothko said: "Wyeth is about the pursuit of strangeness." "But," he added, "he is not whole as Hopper is whole." I THINK I know what he means.
So, is Wyeth ‘just’ an illustrator, a literalist of limited imagination?
unfortunately I don't really know anything about Wyeth, though I think he may be based in Pennsylvania ! It's interesting that Rothko was thinking about him and Hopper, I suppose of course he must have had ideas about them, I'm not sure what he could mean about the wholeness of Hopper, except if he's refering to their pictorial completness. That's v.good what Levin says about Hopper, I suppose also in American art there is something elegiac always I think going on, the commemoration of some presence, it's a counterpoint to the vitality which we think of characterising American culture, but I think it's very dialled into this feeling which cannot really mourn or contemplate total disappearence, what's gone can persist, the continuation of what's passed in the present, or something :)
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