August 15, 2022 Issue

I see in this week’s issue there’s going to be an Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney, opening October 19: see Andrea K. Scott, “Art: Fall Preview.” Not many events can pry me from my roost here on the Island. But that Hopper show just might do it. Notice in her preview that Scott describes Hopper as “the bard of American solitude” – solitude, not loneliness. Peter Schjeldahl pretty much shot down that idea a few years ago when he said,  

His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. (“Ordinary People,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2007)

He hammered the point again recently:

Regarding his human subjects as “lonely” evades their truth. We might freak out if we had to be those people, but—look!—they’re doing O.K., however grim their lot. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous tag “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Now delete the first sentence. With Hopper, the going-on is not a choice. ("Apart," The New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2020)

Okay, I get it – solitude isn't loneliness. But that girl sitting at the table in Hopper’s great Automat ((1927) seems pretty damn lonely to me. Can we split the difference? Not solitude, not loneliness – melancholy. Hopper’s paintings seem drenched in exquisite melancholy.

Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)