Category — Poverty

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.