There is a force in Hopper’s paintings that is fierce and unrelenting in its desire to reveal the truth. It is not the people or the buildings of New York, it is the light and the way in which it descends on whatever is in it’s path. This is not the bright happy Renoir sunshine or the beautiful diffused Monet haze. There is nothing warm or friendly about Hopper’s light – cold and powerful it prowls the city ripping away pretenses that collect in the corners, exposing the loneliness that lies hidden in the buildings we build. With indiscriminant x-ray eyes it sees through both the sophisticated pose of a woman in some lurid lobby and the timid attitude of the strange lady on the train. In the absence of the sun the light howls through the night making the neon lights of the Night Hawk’s Café look lost while it’s customers stand out like targets. Other times the light waits silent and patiently outside watching through a window as the boss tries not to lust after his secretary under the doomed glow of the electric light inside.
There are paintings where Hopper’s figures try to stand up to the light – the woman on the bed facing the morning pouring in through the window looks more like a brave sacrificial victim, and the exuberance of the girl stepping out of her building into the bright afternoon is as thin as her dress. There is no enjoyment here but there is understanding as the man sits on the bed next to his sleeping wife, a woman whom he has spent his entire life with but doesn’t know why. But these are harmless questions we all ask while the other is sleeping. For Hopper’s people there is no falling back into the shadows to rest. The shade is a black impenetrable place called death where nothing exists but these black shadows along with Hopper’s bright light build a solid wall that appears to us stronger than our own reality, clearer than the city we thought we knew. The light in the painting leaps out at us, shattering our own cozy fantasies.
Of course, our reaction is to say that was New York in the past – and it is true, New York now is not so stark. It is covered with lights and advertisements, wearing boutiques and restaurants like the garish make-up of an old woman trying to look sixteen. I remember Soho when it was a produce market, a workingman’s place. Buildings were empty and artists ere moving in. Now it looks like the insides of a giant maul that some unknown force has gutted and splattered all over the city. Hopper’s paintings pull us in and suddenly we are all filled with longing for a time when things were more black and white, for a more solid time, when loneliness wasn’t something you ran away from.
Artillery Magazine Vol 3 no. 1 October 2008