Hopper and Warhol at the Whitney: The Self in the Artist, The Self in the Art

“Any psychological idea will have to be supplied by the viewer.”

What one sees while looking at Hopper's paintings are, among other things, a series of figures who are either alone having no one to look at, or who are joined spatially and are not looking at one another. His figures, with the possible exception of the waiter in Nighthawks, have very minimal or have no eye contact with one another. Either they are situated as though posed for compositional purposes or are caught in an instant of random, ordinary behavior. But none of them visually acknowledges the personal presence of their fellows, although one might infer that their bodily demeanors implicitly address a kind of felt awareness. Otherwise, as commentators have observed, they are contained by their settings. They also often portray states of extreme isolation, which may signify calm introspection or desolate loneliness, depending on what one brings to, or wants from, the canvas. Hopper has been quoted as objecting to the emphasis on loneliness; but Gail Levin in her thoughtful Introduction to Edward Hopper, the Art and the Artist (New York: Norton, 1980), has shown how the artist reworks an early sketch of people, e.g. in a hotel lobby, until the quotient of their interaction is reduced to nearly zero. Consequently, the absence of eye contact, and all the social connectedness and amiability that are so implied, contributes to and indeed intensifies the sense of lonely, self-separateness, which the artist values as though it held some important adaptive power overlooked by others.

If the figures in the paintings often either stare past one another or off into indeterminate space, do they ever look toward us? Again, the answer is overwhelmingly negative. That unforgettable eye to eye gaze and smile of the Mona Lisa as well as of countless Medieval and Renaissance Madonnas is as absent from Hopper's women as Olympia's more wanton gaze is missing from his nudes.