Lonely Places
Millions of people are acquainted with Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks” (1942). You wouldn’t conclude from this painting that Hopper was actually a lousy painter. He never mastered the art of drawing; he had trouble depicting the human form (the lady nighthawk’s arms?) and was clumsy with perspective and composition .
He excelled in his depiction of light and shadow, and above everything else, he wrapped most of his scenes in a warm, restorative blanket of melancholy. Clement Greenberg wrote in 1946 ”Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist”.
Hopper turned his hand to scenes of the Cape, of Gloucester and other locales, but his urban scenes pose the possibility that a brickfront walk-up with shear curtains over two open windows, a steam radiator, plaster walls and a few hardcover books could be a refuge from the clatter and cultural cannibalism of American life. Or, you could sit on a chrome and leatherette stool at midnight and have a coffee without hearing a siren or the thundering speakers of a passing Acura with wheels like razor blades.
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember places like the Nighthawk’s cafe. They existed everywhere through the 1950’s; before the demons of urban renewal, flush with reformer’s gold and fanciful ideas about urban living, destroyed all of them, and most of everything else. Rustling up the inhabitants of the old neighborhoods, they herded them off to the soul-desolating brick and sheetrock iron maidens of ”the projects”.
Now the third generation of these bereft pawns of progressive policy seek outlets in drugs and violence. They have no refuge, no lonely personal place to restore themselves, no space to collect on the debts that progressive brutalism has imposed upon them. A place to breathe without sighing. We give them what we can, the tinsel of materialism and the fraudulent promises of more, and even more, education to force rational order from moral devastation. It can’t be done.
We build mocking monuments to what we destroyed. We gild the skulls and bones of the old cityscapes, scrub the surviving redbricks clean and lease the space to kitsch dealers. We outfit malls and trendy shopping centers in the architectural image of the remembered store fronts, some of them even containing pieces of the real thing - retail Frankensteins, with a plinth here, a column there, and herringbone brick underfoot. Disney does the same thing; the effect is fit only for children and undiscriminating adults.
Everyone’s looking for a place to be alone, or to leave a mark in the hardening cement. And something else they want, I think - a place free of cant, free of social commentary, free of the governing compulsions of reformers, free of a political class intending to service the contradictory demands of the spirit and the body, and a little silence that equals inaction on the part of our political masters.
I expect to see a lot more of this as the progressive Obama years grind on. Somehow the left thinks he can restore the good things we no longer have, and make us whole again. By pressing hard enough, his beneficent state will turn ordinary human flesh into diamonds. I guess we’ll find out.
Archived in: Education, Liberalism, Obama, PovertyNovember 15, 2008 at 7:05 pm | Trackback
4 comments
Painters, like writers, are “stuck” with the seven themes of the human condition. Of course one may do as Rothko or Pollock and put color on the canvas for the sake of color; soup cans might say something, you tell me.
The old Masters confined themselves to the studio, the French, oh yeah those French, starting with the Barbizon School escaped and that led to the Impressionists and…if you know anything about art this was not well accepted in the salons. So nu, art is always about strife, internal and external.
All important artists, both minor and major, that will withstand time’s test, capture both light and the human condition and transfix them on the medium, be it canvas or paper. Now closely examine those works, you will find odd parts, malformed building constructs and light where it cannot possibly be. Small items but visually important, necessary to pull the viewer, no, pull you into the image.
I include the printmaking arts, Seriagraphy, Lithography and Woodcuts in the Fine Arts only if done by hand.{ inking and pulling of the print)
Otherwise they’re graphic arts requiring some machanical interface.
Now to the rest of the post. The days of Steichen, Weegee, and Minor White are over. No more photos of the pulse of the city unless it is photoshopped. Can you tell, yes I can but only in photoshop unless it is blatantly bad. Even when I find an image that is grabbing, I have trouble getting space in the paper.
What is missing is the feeling for life. Everyone wants to put a spin on it instead of letting the story tell itself. Why? Isn’t the story powerful enough? Or is it that it might not SERVE your ends. Therefore it gets rearranged, remuddled, or demolished.
In that case everyone loses, mostly art, certainly life’s quality.
I don’t know much about the subject, but if hyper-realism is replacing “letting the story tell itself”, then we’re in an ominous age of blanket manipulation and propaganda. Hopper is then literally and figuratively dead. His kind of work, including Birchfield’s for example, is like a photo album where we make up happy stories about Uncle Dave, who was really a monster. The lights are going out, in other words.
What do you make of the high-contrast engraved steel images of Obama, the ones that look like Gestapo recruiting posters? Views from just below the chin with his head central, in greys, whites, blacks and reds? This is art that stomps on your face, like a goosestep.
I know this. Whatever is going to happen now is entirely unknown, and unlike anything we expected. Its visible in little images here and there, intentional ones and by mistake. Welcome to the 1930’s all over again.
Government Art, approved for public consumption. Children of the Revolution bravely looking into the Radiant Future, chins up stalwart and resolute.
Now fish wrap!
Government Art, soup cans, big eyed turtles and Elvis on black velvet might get people to open their wallets, but it is going to wind up in collections as fad art and be on PBS Road Show of things that don’t sell. Hell, the frame may be worth more than the canvas.
Even the names turned out studio sweepings, worth only a sou or two. Piccaso’s lino cuts sell for as little as $10, he turned out hundreds.
I asked the question before, “Just what does a soup can say to you?” Now look at the “Persistence of Memory” or any one of the “Water Lilies.” Now the “Night Hawks” and explain the evocative feeling versus a soup can. Measure this against the classical and the neo-classical painters. I didn’t say you have to like them, use them as a measure for all other art.
This holds true for music, writing and dance too.
Most importantly, it works for ethics. That guidepost is doing the right thing when no one is looking.