Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #10 "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's (1909)

Time to kick off my “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” archival series. Each month I’ll look back and choose what I consider to be one of this blog's best posts. Today’s pick is "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' " (July 26, 2012):

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in his An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said in her great "The Treasure of Comanche County" (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005) about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates relishes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

The Art or the Life: On Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930)

Christopher Benfey, in his recent “Buildings Come to Life,” The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2023), tells me something about Edward Hopper I didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t want to know. He says, “A life-long conservative Republican, he was vehemently opposed to the New Deal.” According to Benfey, he called FDR a “jackass.” I’m a fan of Hopper’s paintings. I’m also a fan of FDR. For me, the New Deal was the greatest government program of the twentieth century. It saved millions of people from the trauma of being out of work during the Great Depression. John Updike said of FDR,

Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by. [“Laissez-Faire is More,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007].

I totally agree. So where does that leave me, now that I know that Hopper, one of my favorite painters, “vehemently opposed the New Deal,” and considered FDR a “jackass”? Is it possible to continue loving his work knowing that he held such wretched anti-humanistic views? 

This raises that old vexing question – can you separate the art from the artist? Can you separate Faulkner’s racism from his Light in August? Can you separate Eliot’s anti-Semitism from his The Wasteland ? Can you separate Naipaul’s violence against his wife from his A Bend in the River? 

I don’t have the answer. I know Flaubert’s position: only the work matters; the life doesn’t. Nevertheless, once I know certain aspects of the life, I find it hard to forget them. Looking at Hopper’s wonderful Early Sunday Morning (1930), with its sunlight on the flat and ruddy brick, I find myself wondering how a guy with such a mean, narrow outlook could paint something so ravishing? Benfey, in his piece, offers a clue. He points out the absence of people in many of Hopper’s pictures. He says, “What Hopper discovered was that when people are gone, the buildings come to life.” Hopper, unlike, say, FDR, wasn’t a humanist. And this is reflected in his paintings. Maybe in this way, at least, his life and art are reconcilable. If he wasn’t the way he was, he wouldn’t have painted the way he did. Still, in light of Benfey’s revelations, I find myself looking at Hoppers slightly differently now. My love has been shaken. 

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)

  

June 8 & 15, 2020 Issue

Okay, here’s a question. Peter Schjeldahl has written five pieces on Edward Hopper, including his new “Apart,” in this week’s issue. Which one’s the best?

His first “Hopper,” titled “Edward Hopper,” appeared in the September 27, 1989, issue of the Manhattan magazine 7 Days, and is collected in his The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990 (1990). In it, he calls Hopper “a towering original,” “a majestic poet in the painterly equivalent of plain prose.” He says of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, “This is a picture to look at until you are exhausted, your attention burned to a fine ash. Then look some more.” He describes this great painting beautifully:

It is a dead-on view of cheap two-story buildings, with storefronts, raked by the light of sunrise. The colors bring it off: reds, greens, and yellows laid light-over-dark to yield a glowering brightness (punctuated with black rectangles), a buttery effulgence good enough to eat. The tacky shops, for which humble would be too fulsome a compliment, are transfigured by the colors and by a play of highlights and shadows as clever as the fingering of a virtuoso guitarist. A barber pole, leaning as if the sunlight were a gale trying to flatten it, concentrates in its incongruous gaudiness – so it seemed to me the other day, looking at it – the whole doomed human will to beauty.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930)

Schjeldahl also refers to Hopper’s preparatory drawings:

These aren’t “studies,” in the usual sense, so much as conceptualizations that recall sketches with which certain great directors – Einstein, Hitchcock, Sirk – planned their shots. They show the elements of a painting like MoMA’s New York Movie (my own favorite Hopper) being worked out in advance with a fierce eye for exactly the right effect. Every detail in a good Hopper is specific, none is extraneous, and everything sings.

He also notes that Hopper “rarely let a painting alone until it had been packed to creaking with bleak, explosive libido.”

Schjeldahl’s first piece on Hopper is brilliant. Most critics would be content to leave it at that. But Schjeldahl is just warming up.

His next “Hopper” is titled “Hopperesque,” which originally appeared in the exhibition catalogue Edward Hopper: Light Years (1988), and is included in his 1991 collection The Hydrogen Jukebox. “Hopperesque” is loaded with memorable observations. For example:

Hopper is more a naturalist than a realist, and a symbolist above all.

Hopper’s nonrealism is clinched by the sketches and studies for his paintings. These are the work not of an observer of the visible world but of an imagination-powered metteur en scène, a stage or film director blocking in the vision of a final effect to be reached through cunning labor. Each drawing considers one or more of the decisions that will accumulate to dictate the picture.

A psychoanalyst might adduce a neurotic pattern from the unenterableness of most Hopper buildings: we rarely see a door clearly, and when we do it rarely looks operable, let alone inviting. All the life of the buildings is in their glaring windows.

Any sense of isolation in Hopper is always defiantly upbeat: not loneliness, but solitude.

 Like Hopper’s houses, his people are invariably caught in the act of seeing.

In my own favorite Hopper painting, New York Movie, an orchestration of ferociously sensual effects pivots in the reverie of the tired usherette. (She overwhelms me: sister, daughter, lover, victim, goddess all in one, caught in the movie palace that is a modern philosophical realization of Plato’s Cave.)

You attain Hopper’s wavelength when you register how the subjectivity of his places and people is subsumed to the whole picture.

A Hopper painting is a window turned inside out. You don’t look into it. It looks out at you, a cyclopean glance that rivets and penetrates.

Like “Kafkaesque,” “Hopperesque” names not a style but a particular face of reality – which we would feel even if Hopper had never lived, though more obscurely.

A supreme masterpiece like the Whitney Museum’s Early Sunday Morning, with its light-transfigured row of dumpy storefronts, may ravish us, but not in a way apt to remind us of Raphael. A poignance of imperfection unites the painting with its subject, producing a naked factuality as lethal to idealism as DDT is to gnats.

Nor is a sentimental formula like “beauty in the ordinary” called for. What Hopper does in paintings of the mundane is far more devastating: he annihilates “the ordinary” along with “the beautiful” and every other conceivable category of aesthetic experience.

Hopper plainly was comfortable with the voyeuristic impulse, which informs so much of his art directly and just about all of it indirectly – along a Platonic sliding scale from the grossest to the most transcendent knowledge, from the intrusive glance of Night Windows to the metaphysical mystery of Light in an Empty Room.

I submit that a polymorphous sexual alertness – “adhesiveness,” in Walt Whitman’s wonderful term – informed Hopper’s perception of the whole world.

He is excited by the unguarded moment, the exposed innocence, of a person, a building, a place – anything at all, though certain things and situations (generally involving windows) pique him more than others.

If one of the purposes of criticism is to suggest fresh perspectives and interesting ways of looking at a particular subject, as I believe it is, Schjeldahl’s passionate “Hopperesque” succeeds magnificently.

Schjeldahl’s third “Hopper” piece is “Ordinary People” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2007), a review of the 2007 Hopper retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In his previous two pieces Schjeldahl mentions that New York Movie is his favorite Hopper. In “Ordinary People” he describes this painting in loving detail:

Consider his second-most-powerful image, after “Nighthawks”: “New York Movie” (1939). In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. 

That “Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality” is inspired. It reprises the “Plato’s Cave” reference in “Hopperesque,” but this time Schjeldahl redesigns it to maximize its punch. “Where are we? I think we’re in Plato’s Cave” makes me smile every time I read it.

Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939)

“Ordinary People” contains another memorable painting description. Schjeldahl says of Hopper’s Office at Night:

There are Hoppers that don’t work, while others, in instructive ways, work somewhat too well. I have in mind “Office at Night” (1940), in which a preposterously voluptuous secretary at a filing cabinet eyes a piece of paper on the floor as her handsome boss reads a document at his desk. The light denotes sunset. A summer wind disturbs the shade at an open window. For me, the dancing pull cord of the shade is one of the choicest details in art history, as an objective correlative, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, of “memory and desire.” Seen from an elevated point of view, the wonderfully articulated lines and contents of the space cant toward the window. I just wish the office were empty. What will happen between the characters touched by the melancholy and erotic breeze? I don’t care. They are types from central casting in an overly explicit cinematic narrative, such as Hopper commonly subsumed to his vision.

Schjeldahl’s notice (and interpretation) of that “dancing pull cord” is superb – one of my favourite details in all his writing.

Edward Hopper, Office at Night (1940)

Schjeldahl’s fourth “Hopper” is “Between the Lines,” a brief review of the Whitney’s 2013 exhibition “Hopper Drawing” that appeared in The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town.” Here it is in its entirety:

The exhibition “Hopper Drawing,” at the Whitney, lets us into the factory of hand and mind that created “Nighthawks,” “New York Movie,” “Early Sunday Morning,” “Office at Night,” and other touchstones for which “iconic” is praise too faint. Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge. Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role. The show explains the power of Edward Hopper’s compositions but leaves their spiritual pang mysterious. What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him. Also on view are masses of early work which establish Hopper’s talents, developed in Paris, as a master sketcher and an apt emulator of Post-Impressionism—gifts that he plowed under to achieve a mature style, which confronts the world not as a reflection but as a précis of soul-testing melancholy and life-saving glints of grace. 

In this short piece, Schjeldahl emphasizes a couple of points he’s made before: (1) that Hopper’s compositions evolve from preliminary sketches and drawings (“Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role”); and (2) that Hopper isn’t a realist (“Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge”). For me, the outstanding line here is “What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him.” That “slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life” is marvellously fine – a perfect description of Hopper’s best pictures.

Schjeldahl’s fifth “Hopper” piece, “Apart,” appears in this week’s New Yorker. It’s both a reflection on Hopper’s relevance right now in this time of containment (“The visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness, a maudlin projection—speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance”) and on his art, using the catalogue of the Beyeler Foundation’s current show “Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape” as a departure point. In a line that sums up a lifetime of looking at Hoppers, Schjeldahl writes, “Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind’s eye.”  

Schjeldahl loves Hopper. And so do I. His “Hopper” quintet is delectable. Which of the five is the best? I’m slightly partial to “Ordinary People,” mainly for its inspired noticing of that “dancing pull cord.”

Eleanor Cook on Bishop's "Filling Station" and Hopper's "Gas"

Edward Hopper, Gas (1940)

Eleanor Cook, in her Elizabeth Bishop at Work (2016), makes an intriguing comparison between Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 10, 1955; Questions of Travel, 1965) and Edward Hopper’s Gas (1940). She says of “Filling Station,”

It is a descriptive poem, yes, but I think Bishop may be writing an ekphrasis of sorts, an ekphrasis of a painting that should exist, a shadow painting. Look at Edward Hopper’s painting Gas (1940), a painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Point for point, “Filling Station” is the opposite. Hopper’s is meticulously clean, as against “Oh, but it is dirty!” The owner shutting it down in the evening is dressed in white shirt and tie, as against Father dressed in an ill-fitting “dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit.” There is no outer porch with “grease- / impregnated wickerwork,” a dog, comic books, taboret with a doily and “a big hirsute begonia” (a fine touch). Bishop’s poem depicts a filling station that is more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting. 

I’m not sure what Cook is getting at when she says “Filling Station” may be an “ekphrasis of sorts.” There’s nothing in the poem that suggests that. It appears to be a record of what Bishop saw at an actual gas station. Bonnie Costello, in her Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), says “Filling Station” is a “response to direct observation.” Cook’s contrasting of “Filling Station” with Hopper’s Gas is interesting. Her point about Bishop’s poem depicting a gas station that is “more challenging as subject than Hopper’s painting” is a good one. She says that Hopper’s painting is of a gas station “seen as aesthetic object.” I think Bishop’s poem is about a gas station seen as a piece of folk art. In that sense, I suppose, "Filling Station" is an "ekphrasis of sorts."

October 30, 2017 Issue

I relish description. One of my favorite forms of it is ekphrasis. There’s a wonderful example of it in Peter Schjeldahl’s “Think Big,” a profile of the painter Laura Owens, in this week’s issue. Schjeldahl describes Owens’s one-off installation Ten Paintings:

The paintings didn’t exist yet, except in the potential form of concealed panels that shared a continuous surface of room-girdling handmade wallpaper: in effect, a single painting, more than fourteen feet high and more than a hundred and seventy-three feet long, executed in acrylic, oil, vinyl paint, silk-screen inks, charcoal, pastel, graphite, and sand. Non-repeating bitmap patterns, derived from a scanned piece of crumpled paper, underlay passages of newsprint reproductions, fugitive brushwork, a micrographic version of Picasso’s “Guernica,” and attached whatnots, including a watercolor of a sailing ship by Owens’s grandfather, patterns of embroidery by her grandmother, and a drawing by her younger brother Lincoln, who is a chef in New Orleans. Prevailing blacks, whites, and pale blues, with purple accents, imposed a gently rhythmic unity. At intervals on the walls, phone numbers were printed, with invitations to text any question that a viewer might have. The nearest of eight concealed loudspeakers would deliver an answer in a male, female, or robotic voice, to spooky or daffy effect, from a computer that Owens, with technical help, had programmed to recognize a hundred key words. (Imagine an ultra-high-tech Magic 8 Ball.) To the query “Where are the paintings?,” all the speakers replied, “Here!”

This is very beautiful, and its specificity (“Non-repeating bitmap patterns, derived from a scanned piece of crumpled paper, underlay passages of newsprint reproductions, fugitive brushwork, a micrographic version of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ ”) is what is beautiful.

Schjeldahl is a master ekphrasist. Here are five more examples of his work:

1. Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907):

The subject is placed off-center, to the right, on a canvas more than four and a half feet square. Imperious and smart, making her slightly horse-faced features seem a paradigm of feminine perfection, she wears a shoulder-strap gown with a cloak-like, billowing outer layer and broad gold and silver bracelets and a bejewelled silver choker. A storm of patterns—spirals, targets, nested squares, split ovals, checks, dots, short vertical bars, arrowhead triangles, ankh-like eyes—may represent fabric, furniture, and wallpaper, or they may be sheer invention. Most of the ground (not background, because almost everything in the picture that isn’t flesh snugs up to the picture plane) is mottled gold. Her asymmetrically upswept hair is painted matte black. Her right hand is oddly raised to her shoulder and, wrist bent at a painful-looking right angle, is grasped by her left, as if to restrain it. (On a Viennese note of that epoch, the pencil-outlined fingers faintly suggest claws.) Her frontal gaze turns inward, registering sensations that can only be sexual. Her dark-shadowed hazel eyes, under tapering black brows, are wells of seduction; someone could fall into them. Her bee-stung red mouth parts to expose two competent teeth. Blue tints along her collarbones, wrists, and hands hint at subcutaneous veins: erogenous zones. She is a lighthouse, or shadehouse, of desire. (Lauder, speaking for the Neue Galerie, has called the painting “our ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” I have seen the “Mona Lisa,” and “Adele” is no “Mona Lisa.” Not very much is mysterious about this cookie.) The picture is most excitingly viewed, after close inspection, from afar. Patterns shatter into drifting, pure abstraction while the facial expression still reads at full power. The double pleasure dizzies. [“Golden Girl,” The New Yorker, July 24, 2006]

2. Fra Angelico’s The Annunciatory Angel (ca. 1450):

The androgynous angel, in pink robes with a slash of blue, leans forward as if into a gust of wind, one hand on his chest and the other beginning to advance in a gesture of offering. The face is intent but serene. A swiftly brushed wing, of brown feathers, merges with the gilt background, above a swath of patterned floor in convincing perspective. The delicately roughened surface texture gives sensuous immediacy – suddenness, even – to a figure that feels less lit and shaded than made of materialized light and shade. [“Heaven on Earth,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2005]

3. Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (1939):

In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. [“Ordinary People,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2007]

4. Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940):

It presents Kahlo in a plain white blouse, with a thorned vine twisted around her neck, drawing drops of blood, and a dead hummingbird with outstretched wings, worn like a crucifix. A monkey toys with the vine at one shoulder; a black cat stares from behind the other. A background of ornamental vegetation includes what may be a zinnia and a fuchsia, which appear to be morphing into diaphanous insects like the two silver filigree butterflies in Kahlo’s hair. [“Native Soil,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2015]

5. Arshile Gorky’s Scent of Apricots on the Fields (1944):

A pileup of loosely outlined, thinly painted fragmentary shapes, like plant or body parts, embedded in passages of golden yellow, hovers above a green suggestion of a table and below a skylike expanse of brushy rose red. Dabs of raw turpentine cause runny dissolutions, as if some forms were melting into their white ground. The downward drips yield a paradoxical sensation of buoyancy. The picture’s visceral shapes seem to ascend like putti in a Renaissance firmament. The dynamics are at once obvious and inspired, stroke by stroke and hue by hue, and deliriously affecting—when viewed near at hand. [“Twentieth-Century Man,” The New Yorker, November 2, 2009]

Strand's Solitude

Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)

The recent passing of Mark Strand returned me to his great little book Hopper (1994), a wonderful collection of aesthetic meditations on twenty-three of Edward Hopper’s paintings. So many of Hopper’s pictures – Morning Sun, Automat, Western Motel, Hotel Room, Summer in the City – sway me with their feeling of solitude. Strand identified with them. In Hopper’s concluding piece, he says that the silence of Hopper’s rooms “weighs on us like solitude.” This links with Dan Chiasson’s observation, in his eloquent "Mark Strand's Last Waltz" (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, November 30, 2014): “Strand surveyed his outward circumstances—relative health and prosperity, growing fame, the undeniable good fortune of being alive—from a peephole cut into the exterior wall of his solitude.”