Hopper's Wistful Legacy

The line snaked halfway around the block last weekend at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Hundreds of people leaned against utility poles and sat on stoops, waiting 45 minutes to reach the museum door.

Two old women with thick New York accents chatted about their families. A teenage girl in a light blue satiny shirt stood reclining against her boyfriend. A smartly uniformed doorman on 75th St. told those blocking his entrance about a store where they could find a magazine. In the autumn rain, umbrella salesmen were making a killing.

Varied as they were, these people had at least one thing in common: they had come to see the exhibit "Edward Hopper and the American Imagination" during its last weekend on display at the Whitney. And they were willing to wait.

I had wanted to see the exhibit for months. Before this, my experience of Hopper had been limited to reproductions taped to my walls and to three small paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I did not realize so many others would come, and I wondered why they were there.

Hopper's paintings stand as American icons, so worked into our consciousness that nearly everyone will recognize his style, but many may not know his name.

He is a painter of urban loneliness: many of the 59 paintings at the exhibit pictured only one person in an isolated room, and even those with two people showed strained interaction at best.

His most famous work is probably "Nighthawks," a 1942 painting of a man and woman sitting in a yellow, flourescently-lit bar, attended by a white-outfitted bartender while the streets outside lie green and deserted. It has made its way, in original form, onto Starbucks Coffee mugs and containers, and in a slightly altered form onto posters with movie stars in place of the unknown couple.

At first, the glossy oil painting looked glamorous, with the shiny silver coffee pots in the bar and the clean lines and colors. But as I peered through six people to look more closely, it seemed not glitzy, but wan and bleak. The man and woman seemed bored with life and with each other. Their hands touched only barely, as if in an afterthought.

Other paintings in the exhibit showed a similar lack of community. Hotel rooms and trains, one person in each, dominate Hopper's landscape; gray office buildings and solitary Cape Cod houses illuminated by eerie winter light are de rigeur. His colors are often lurid, with chartreuse green on a living room wall where the floral wallpaper should be, and his subjects' eyes are often mere black dots.

Why, then, in the face of bleakness, was the exhibit shoulder-to-shoulder, and why did the museumgoers wait in line on Saturday when they could have been sitting at home, dry and warm?

They came because Edward Hopper's paintings are as true today, or perhaps truer, than when he set his brush to them. He is a painter of nostalgia for an America that was lost with the advent of cars, automation and urbanization. He is a painter of solitude for a country that has become increasingly atomized, where the California freeway lanes for carpoolers are often empty for hours at a time. He is a painter of loneliness for a country that has become increasingly lonely, where people search for cyberlove rather than knocking on a neighbor's door.

The exhibit-goers tried to suck out of his paintings all they could, often standing before each one for minutes at a time, as if to swallow it whole and take it with them to ward off their fears of being alone. For, strangely, in his bleakrless came a certain comfort; seeing those 59 pictures together with hundreds of people made his solitude communal. And knowing that we were not as lonely as those in his pictures also gave a certain comfort.

At the end of my hour spent in the exhibition, I wanted to return to my favorite paintings, but somehow that seemed overwhelming. Instead, I took the elevator down, glanced at the gift shop's posters and reappeared on Madison Ave. to find that the line still stretched halfway around the block.

Sarah J. Schaffer's column appears on alternate Fridays.