Oh, Hoppery Day

There was a day last week, Wednesday I think it was, when I received a postcard (something of a pleasurable rarity these days) from a friend who lives in the Netherlands. He’d visited an exhibition of American Realist art in the north-eastern Dutch town of Assen, and the card was of “Morning Sun”, painted by Edward Hopper in 1952. Wonderful. I enjoy a good Hopper of a Wednesday morning. As, arguably, the greatest Realist painter of the twentieth century, Hopper has long been one of my favourite artists. Also, as someone happy in the ordinary, shabby environments of daily life, he is someone to whom I can relate. As, I suspect, can many people.

Later that day, full of Hoppery anticipation, I watched a programme, one of a series, about American art. This one was supposedly about the effects of the big city – essentially New York – upon artists living there, and especially on those who had emigrated from eastern Europe. Just my sort of thing, or so I thought. Sadly, the programme was a total disappointment, with a presenter who – despite an uncanny ability to identify the Brooklyn Bridge at close range - frequently got in the way (literally as well as figuratively) of the works he was describing. He made me feel itchy, and not in a nice way.

You can’t libel the dead, which is just as well. Hopper was described as a voyeur who rode the elevated lines of New York City so that he could look in upon ladies through upstairs windows. That’s how he got his material for the likes of “Morning Sun”, according to this presenter. My understanding – gleaned, admittedly, from books, and not from any inside source available only to clever people in the art world - is that Hopper mostly used his wife, Jo, as the model for the female subjects in his paintings. While it was made clear that Hopper was not a Peeping Tom in the normal sense, “voyeur” is a word with a specific meaning. Unfortunate, to say the least.

Next, Hopper was labelled a curmudgeon, not – one might have imagined - an essential fact in a high speed tour of the man’s role in art history. Then there was all the usual tired old guff about “Nighthawks”, loneliness and alienation in the big city, the psychological spaces between people, and so on. Yawn. Nothing about the sheer beauty of the paintings, the atmospheres, their inspiration, the celebration of place, the lights and weathers and seasons and times of day. Just the old urban alienation shtick. Voyeurism, curmudgeon, alienation. Tick. Job done.  And then rapidly off topic to something that the presenter evidently liked; some celebrated daubs by émigrés with long and crunchy birth names whose pernickety enunciation he  repeatedly demonstrated. Not really what you want in a programme with the potential to educate and to appetise. Hopper-maligned, I hopped off to bed, hopping mad.

Inevitably, as a Realist, as a technically competent artist, whose works are pleasant to look at and easy to understand, and as someone with wide appeal (as witnessed by calendar sales, year after year) Hopper is not a significant focus of interest for the Art Establishment. He’s not likely to impress the polysyllabically enabled critics and curators who – together with the works they so admire - were so effectively destroyed by the superb Jonathan Meades, in a recent programme on “Jargon”.

As usual, Meades was inventive, scathing, hilarious, hugely intelligent, hyper-articulate, rivetting, making full use of television as a medium upon which can be presented simultaneously an imaginative and knowledgeable presenter able to act and to mimic, accompanied by pertinent background images, text, and music. Proper multimedia. One’s only criticism of Meades is that he provides so much that it’s hard to take it all in. This single programme about the present day abuse of language could and should be expanded into a whole series, covering, for example, corporate life, television reporters, sports, politics, academia, the internet, and the diversity and equality industries. Meades makes one painfully aware – sometimes from laughing too much - of just how moronic most television, and most of modern life, actually is.

A modern life which would have been the despair of Edward Hopper. Famously, the artist stated that his ambition was to paint the sunlight on the side of a house. What he also painted, although I don’t think he ever said as much, explicitly, was silence. While loneliness and alienation are not desirable states, aloneness, solitariness, and quiet can be. Silence is what, so often, we lack.

 
In the overcrowded cities of our overpopulated land it’s hard to find somewhere uncontaminated not so much by the banalities of excessive commentary and advice on how we’re supposed to think but by hideous noise; “attention, this vehicle is reversing”, car alarms, someone jabbering highly important nonsense into a phone, some discordant hate-filled noise blaring from a portable gadget or car-bound device. The curse of electronics and its spin-offs. And the visual insults. Perfect views ruined by big fat ugly parked cars, skips, scaffolding, graffiti, phone masts, wind farms, ill-placed signs, delivery vans, yes, always a bloody white van comes tearing round the corner the moment you reach for your camera. 

Oh, for an empty street, silent but for perhaps an ambient hum of city energy, the miaouw of a streetwise moggie, the confident clatter of a distant train, a plaintive horn on a riverboat, even the occasional echo of a school playground – streets away - off a vast blind wall … Sunshine and silence. Something to paint. Oh, Hoppery Day.