Edward Hopper: Hotel Window.
There’s a tendency to make Hopper into something quaint and kindly and to ignore the times when he’s not. He’s not allowed a trace of Europeanness. Documentaries smother him in big band jazz. But some of his pictures have an eerie side to them and the gaze, while I’d never say it wasn’t often compassionate, hardly strikes one as benign when it peers into glary rooms and contracts big geometric spaces into tunnels. Hotel Window is a good example of what I mean. A hotel room that feels as big as Grand Central Station but a Grand Central Station that somehow feels claustrophobic. All that spaciousness comes to point at the woman, who looks away as if there were anyone else in the room that could be the object of attention. And being lit like that, she must wish she were out in the anonymous dark.
Office at Night.
In Office at Night, the light again seems over-bright, like stage lighting. The unpleasantness is not just a function of the light, though, or of the not-quite-right angles; it has something to do with the guilelessness of the people spied on. It’s an embarrassment to be found serving time so innocently and in so exposed a place, to have been caught in the act of doing nothing much again. These two couldn’t have an affair if their lives depended on it. They couldn’t shut a door or window, couldn’t turn off a light.
Eleven AM.
Similarly affectless, the woman in Eleven AM, naked but for her shoes. Some people might see this as a touch of humour on Hopper’s part, but as she, like many of Hopper’s people, stares dreamily out the window (they’re often oversize, as if to show people for cowards), there seems something more pathetic about it. Is that as close as she could get to going out?
Night Windows.
Edward Hopper: Hotel Window.
There’s a tendency to make Hopper into something quaint and kindly and to ignore the times when he’s not. He’s not allowed a trace of Europeanness. Documentaries smother him in big band jazz. But some of his pictures have an eerie side to them and the gaze, while I’d never say it wasn’t often compassionate, hardly strikes one as benign when it peers into glary rooms and contracts big geometric spaces into tunnels. Hotel Window is a good example of what I mean. A hotel room that feels as big as Grand Central Station but a Grand Central Station that somehow feels claustrophobic. All that spaciousness comes to point at the woman, who looks away as if there were anyone else in the room that could be the object of attention. And being lit like that, she must wish she were out in the anonymous dark.
Office at Night.
In Office at Night, the light again seems over-bright, like stage lighting. The unpleasantness is not just a function of the light, though, or of the not-quite-right angles; it has something to do with the guilelessness of the people spied on. It’s an embarrassment to be found serving time so innocently and in so exposed a place, to have been caught in the act of doing nothing much again. These two couldn’t have an affair if their lives depended on it. They couldn’t shut a door or window, couldn’t turn off a light.
Eleven AM.
Similarly affectless, the woman in Eleven AM, naked but for her shoes. Some people might see this as a touch of humour on Hopper’s part, but as she, like many of Hopper’s people, stares dreamily out the window (they’re often oversize, as if to show people for cowards), there seems something more pathetic about it. Is that as close as she could get to going out?
Night Windows.
