As a result of the covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of millions of people living in isolation have experienced the deepest individual and collective loneliness in human history. Public places that are not necessary for daily life are almost completely closed, and everyone tries to stay at home, or stand alone in front of the window and look out through the bay window (Cape Cod Morning); or sit alone in bed in the early morning sun (Morning Sun Morning Sun); or sit in the office and stare out the window, thinking about what is happening in life (Office in a Small City) Or wait in a quiet restaurant and practice social distancing (Sunshine in a Cafeteria). Today's human situation exacerbates the realism of the painting, "Perhaps, I am indeed unconsciously depicting the loneliness of a big city. More than seventy years later, this state of severe loneliness and alienation has labeled us, who have been devastated by the epidemic, the paintings of the American realist painter Edward Hopper.
Edward Hope is a master of urban realism known for depicting the lonely landscapes of American urban life. Hope was born on July 22, 1882 in Nyack, New York, to two children, to textile merchants of Dutch descent. As a teenager, Hope showed a talent for painting at an early age, inheriting not only his mother's good artistic status, but also absorbing the French and Russian culture that his father loved. In 1899, Hope received a correspondence course to study art, and then transferred to the New York School of Art and Design (New York School of Art and Design) under the tutelage of Robert Henri, a promoter of the realistic style of urban life in the United States, and traveled to Europe three times to experience the artistic atmosphere of that era and to appreciate the Dutch Baroque master Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The style of the French Impressionists Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet. Hope's paintings maintain his own unique solitude and contemplation of the world, with strong symbols of personal emotion. He depicts modern life in the United States from a unique perspective, and is good at capturing the lonely fragments of urban people's daily life, painting after painting like movie screenshots or stage drama scenes, so that we in the epidemic can easily see our own shadow in Hope's paintings.
Automat (1927).
The Vending Shop is a 1927 painting by Hope, in which a young woman sits alone at a table, gazing at her coffee with a quiet and desperate look, wearing a twenties-style bell hat that doesn't quite match her green raw coat. The woman's eyes drooped, staring at the cup and an empty plate, and the chair opposite was empty, indicating that she had been there for some time. A plate of fruit is placed directly behind her, suggesting that she is fertile. The large round table symbolizes her own "inner world". The reflection on the glass window is nothing in the room except for two rows of fading lights. The partition window also saw no moving figures on the street, only the reflection of the vending shop lights in the dark window. From the single gloves she wore to her fur coat, from her delicately crossed legs, to her red lipstick, from her body language, to her facial expressions, Hope used a variety of techniques to emphasize her vulnerability and loneliness.
Rich sense of character, special composition, cold and warm color treatment, Hope in his more poetic way, the unique literary aesthetic, that is, a series of imagery, time, perspective and narrative techniques favored in literary works into the painting, so that his paintings have a unique quality, so that his "Vending Shop" inspires people's spiritual resonance. Hope's use of paintings to express the solitary nature of human beings may stem from his own character. He was a lonely man himself, with few close friends, and perhaps that was the real reason he captured the loneliness of the vast sea of people in urban life.
Room in New York (1932).
Throughout his life, Hope has stated that his art is not an exact transcription of nature, but a condensation of many scenes and impressions. The Paintings of the New York Room appear to be a home, and men and women seem to be a couple; yet there is an inexhaustible coldness and tranquility in the air. On the left, sitting in an armchair, a man in a black vest and wearing a white shirt is intently reading the newspaper. On the right-hand side, a lady in an elegant red dress is playing the keys of the piano. The man dressed as if he had just returned from work, in stark contrast to his wife in a red evening gown. She may be hoping to get rid of the suffocating family life and regularities around her, to get rid of each other's alienation. Yet the closed door that sits between the couple marks the solidity of their physical and mental separation. Even the sound of her hand tapping on the piano keys could not take her husband's attention off his newspaper. The light in the painting is so strong, red and yellow, still in black and white contrast, between the lively tones, but it is a kind of silence. There was no communication between husband and wife, and everyone seemed to be in their own loneliness.
Hope excelled at coordinating the complementarity of colours, with the pleated lampshades of upholstered chairs and hidden lights echoing the woman's red dress. Part of the open window, the window was painted with thick shades of blue, gray, and black, as if a blinding moonlight was sprinkled on it. The painting is said to have been inspired by the brightly lit interiors seen by the artist near the area where Washington Square lived. Perhaps Hope wants people to understand that the two are in the same situation, but there is no sense of synchronization, as if one of them is taken away from the painting, and it will not feel abrupt. The loneliness of leaving no detail on a person's face can touch each of us and thus make people imagine being part of it.
Nighthawks (1942).
Completed in 1942, Nighthawk presents a gloomy and dark cinematic character with a sense of structure that is very different from real space. Nighthawk is said to have been inspired by "a restaurant at the intersection of two streets on Greenwich Avenue in New York." "But its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative imagery have qualities that transcend its particular region, are timeless, universal. The scene depicted in the work takes place late at night, at a restaurant on the corner of the street that has not yet closed. The surrounding shops are closed and the empty streets are uninhabited. There are four figures in the painting: a man drinking alone, a middle-aged man and a waiter. The two people on the right of the picture may be lovers, and the man with his back to him sits lonely. Although the waiter should look up, he seems to be looking at the empty street outside the window behind the customer, and each person seems to be in the same picture, but in fact, he is living in his own space. Each group of characters has something in front of them, but the restaurant is even more sparse. Although they were in the same room, there was no eye contact or language, as if separated by invisible forces. These middle-class figures, silent, smoking, drinking alone, appear lonely and reserved. This sense of alienation and loneliness of urban attributes has a sense that even if people are so close to each other, they have nothing to say.
"Nighthawk" is Edward's most representative painting, the carefully arranged lighting will lead the audience's attention into the narrow space, the overlapping transition of light and shadow, making the picture more intriguing while orderly. Although the characters are close to each other, there is no interaction, as if there is a wall invisibly separating the characters. At that time, the United States had just experienced the longest and most destructive economic depression in history. Record unemployment and rapid declines in household incomes have plunged society into a collective mental atrophy. The glitzy American dream became the moon in the water overnight. Economic constraints are reality, but what makes people more unable to hide is spiritual confusion.
Hotel Lobby (1943).
One of Edward Hopper's most famous masterpieces, Hotel Lobby features not only engaging scenes for everyday scenes of real American life, but also depicting them in such a way that the viewer has enough questions to form their own narrative of what is happening. In the hotel reception area, Hope showed the audience three guests — a young woman sitting alone reading a magazine and an elderly couple waiting in the corner of the room. It's unclear who's waiting for whom, or whether the couple will leave or arrive. The couple appeared uneasy and stiff, and it was unknown whether they had ever disagreed or were quietly waiting. Adding discontinuity is the interaction or lack thereof between women and couples. The painting was created around December 1942, when the United States entered World War II, and many scholars believe that the sense of estrangement in the painting shows the undercurrent between countries after World War II.
Hope has always had a fondness for houses, hotels, and streetscapes as landscape themes. He prefers to express the color and emotional changes under light and shadow, and is good at using the strong contrast of light and shade, empty space or characters that appear alone, suggesting the coldness and alienation of modern life. Hope deliberately avoids beautiful human figures and insists on portraying the imperfections of human and human nature, thus giving his paintings a sense of honesty and emotional depth, fully embodying the artist's well-known complex thoughts, while cleverly capturing the zeitgeist of New York in this wonderful transitional period. Throughout the Great Depression, Hope's work gained unprecedented resonance. He truly reflects reality, and the emotions expressed in it continue until the end of his creative career. This emotion seemed to him to be an eternal human condition.
Cape Cod Morning (1950).
Hope is particularly fond of using windows to express indoor life, and has created a large number of paintings with windows in his lifetime, which can evoke people's infinite thoughts through simple objects and simple compositions. In Cape Cod Morning, a woman looks out of a bay window and looks at something at the middle distance, just outside the frame. The windows are cast in deep shadows, protruding from the façade bathed in bright light. Here, half of the composition is endowed with a landscape of colorful golden meadows, bound only by undulating clouds. The still posture of the woman in red gazing into the distance and the dramatic light and shadow create an anxious sense of anticipation inside an isolated protruding window, and the forked image hints at the dichotomy between her inner space and the world outside. This ubiquitous inner tension is often found in much of Hope's work, but digging deeper into it, as observers are accustomed to doing, misses the subtleties of the artist.
Hope's paintings are simple but intensely tense, combining the form of the painting with the narrative of the scene, as well as reinforcing each other, with deep meaning. A cold scene can evolve into a fragment of a story, mostly in the middle, making people can't help but speculate about the past and future of people and things. The profound metaphors of many Hope paintings suggest a certain power in everyday things that can only be discovered after a long time of staring. "Cape Cod Morning" fully shows Hope's expressiveness for light and composition, and is good at using enclosed spaces and blocky lines to transcend the appearance of reality, so that it presents not a woman staring out of the window, but a character who is gracefully detached from the world.
Morning Sun (1952).
Windows and light are representative elements of Hope's paintings, seeing how light and shadow affect the colors of the room and express the atmosphere of loneliness. The painting depicts a woman sitting alone on an unscheduled bed. She wore a simple salmon-colored dress that exposed her bare arms and thighs, her knees close to her body, her arms crossed and holding her legs. She faced the window, which allowed sunlight to shine into the room. The woman sat almost expressionless, looking at the sight before her, almost falling into contemplation and contemplation. The light in the morning light mainly shines on the woman's body. One could clearly see that the sun was warming her arms, legs and face, and she was almost bathed in the warmth of the sun. Although the light source is outside the frame of the work, it is the contact point between the interior and external worlds of the painting. The effect of the light outside the windows on the wall and the bed behind the person sitting strengthens this connection. Hope chose to paint the room in fairly basic colors, which looked monotonous. One was able to glimpse some of the details of the street located below, which further enhanced the sense of silence and loneliness within the four walls of the room.
Hope wrote in his 1933 Notes on Painting: "Most of every art is an expression of the subconscious, and for me most of the important qualities are subtle in the subconscious, and the importance of conscious rational thinking is very little." The issue of female and social isolation is a recurring theme in Hope's paintings, as shown between the outer and inner worlds of his paintings. In The Morning Sun, two worlds are connected to the sun through windows, creating a connection between the two worlds.
Office in a Small City (1953).
The Office of a Small City is a painting by Hope in 1953. In this painting, the artist depicts a man sitting in a corner of his office observing the landscape outside. A large amount of sunlight reflects from the surface of the building and shines through the windows on the characters inside. Like Hope's other paintings, one cannot know exactly what happened to the people in them. Maybe he was actively gazing at something on the other side of the window. Maybe he saw someone through the window of the building opposite, or what was going on in the street below. Perhaps he may have been lost in daydreams, observing nothing, or being overwhelmed by the work placed before him. Maybe he stared passively out the window, thinking about what was happening in his life. The impersonal atmosphere of the office itself and his alienation from his invisible colleagues are vividly reflected. Although his corner office provided light and air, he seemed to be trapped in place, framing the office window, his head resting on another window and the wall of a distant building, creating a feeling of isolation and loneliness inside the office.
Hope is passionate about the depiction of urban landscapes, but never uses busy streets or bustling cities as a background, especially focusing on the relationship between people and the environment through architecture, aptly expressing the monotony, tedious life of the city and the loneliness that this life brings to people. "The Office of a Small City" depicts loneliness and beauty in a uniquely vivid and delightful way, showing the tension between traditional culture and modern culture of the 20th century. In the lower right corner, he painted a false façade on the office building to make it look like a traditional building to passers-by. In fact, the office is like a lifeless piece of concrete. Despite the huge windows, the office remained dizzying and dreary, which Hope's wife, Josephine Nivison, described as "a man in a concrete wall." ”
Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958).
Each of Hope's paintings is like a movie still, a random point in the middle of a timeline, and in an instant, there are countless different story lines that may occur before and after. "Sunshine in the Cafeteria" depicts a man and a woman sitting at different tables in a sunny cafeteria. They are the only customers. In a sense, Sunshine in the Cafeteria reverses elements of nighthawk scenes. People don't see restaurants with counter staff, but cafeterias where no one serves customers. Customers have bright daylight instead of night scenes with fluorescent lights. The restaurant is located in a quiet side street, rather than a clearly prominent corner of the big city. People don't look inside from the outside, but from the inside out. But the most important difference is that while the night owls apparently came to the restaurant together, the two restaurant guests were strangers. She sat in the sun, and he sat in the half-shadow. He turned to her, but looked out the window to hide his interest. She couldn't even show this level of interest, and even inadvertently tried to catch his eye. She might have turned to him unconsciously, but hesitated, looking down at her own hand. This doesn't work. Unless one of them takes the initiative, it will not be possible to overcome the harsh shadow line between men and women.
Light and the shadows it creates play an important and suggestive role in Hope's paintings, either outlining the sharp edges and corners of things, or guiding the viewer's gaze, or describing the relationship between people, revealing the elusive deep psychological structure of modern times. In this painting one sees that the artist is interested in the suspenseful moments before the first attempted sexual contact, the mental and emotional force field that may arise between two strangers, and the body movements show distress or boredom. Just like the sunlight of a cafeteria shines through the large windows, how to penetrate the closed world of the self.
Chair Car (1965).
The painting was created two years before Hope's death, and its core element is light, and Hope creates mottled patterns of light and shadow, and uses light to unify the scene. There are four people in this "passenger car", seated separately, no one in direct contact with the others, and there is a feeling that although they are in the same picture, they are not related. The lady closest to the audience seemed to be reading something or looking at the notes she was holding. The other lady one could see was expressionless. She may be partitioning or thinking hard. Whatever she was doing, it could be seen that she looked lost or less satisfied. We couldn't see the faces of the two men in the background. The car looked so isolated that it couldn't see anything but the people on the chairs, doors, and windows. All you can see outside the car window is the sunlight, which combines with the green inside the car, with special emphasis on the basic simplicity of the scene. The rarity of passengers and the emptiness of space may also hint at an anxious emotional state, although another interpretation is certainly possible, particularly the artist's use of sunlight as a warm note and contrasts with the loneliness implied by the traveler. Light may also play a thematic role, filling the carriages and turning the windows into opaque shapes with its brightness, obscuring the outside world, thus enhancing the mystery behind the scene. Hope's paintings depict scenes in which many people share a space, and there is often zero communication between individuals and others, an invisible barrier shields the transmission of individual feelings, which undoubtedly hints at a certain relationship built between people, but it is also a barrier, and the life that desires freedom eventually falls into loneliness and loneliness, revealing the sadness of urban interpersonal communication.
In 1962, at the age of eighty, Hope said, "I think I'm still an Impressionist. However, unlike the Impressionists, who captured real-time light and shadow in real time when painting outdoors, Hope often painted indoors, and his light and shadow were deliberately created for the picture situation through imagination. "Passenger Carriage" fully embodies the artist's most famous and unforgettable transcendent urban scene.
Hope is good at rendering the lonely emotions of urban people under the bustling life of urban people through the atmosphere formed by ordinary scenes and characters, taverns, hotels, rooms or gas stations at night. "There is no emotion that is worthless, and the asphalt road at noon under the hot sun, the old cars parked next to the tracks, the rain that evaporates into water vapor in the summer can lift our helpless boredom... All the dull, mundane American city life and the loneliness hidden behind the cityscape are the objects of my expression. "The silent sunshine, the simple composition, the sharp lines, the sharp shadows, the few breaths, and the expressionless characters have brought inspiration and impulse to many film directors and pioneers of the art of photography to create again." Countless film scenes, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott, can be seen in the profound impact of Hope's unique insights in his paintings. Robert Adams (Robert Adams) records the process of the Great Migration of the American West with images, and his photographic pictures absorb Hope's empty environment, creating staggered and orderly light and shadow effects with houses, scenery, sharp doors and windows, and the characters are in these cold lines of light and shadow, which appears isolated.
Hope's landscape is very simple and clear geometric composition from the surface. But it is precisely this composition that opens up the invisible inner world for the viewer. Behind the seeming simplicity of these paintings, there is a great deal of complexity and depth hidden. Hope's painting of the New Yorker is only a single shadow, the face is blurred, he uses the painting language of light and darkness, expressing the daily life, psychological state, and values of the New Yorker, but lacks specific story characters and plots... How complex human nature is, how prosperous New York is, how indifferent human nature is, how lonely New York is, based on Hope's most well-known painting, the American detective novelist Lawrence Block invited 17 of the most famous american contemporary best-selling novelists to write a short story And assembled into the book "The Story of Light and Darkness", 17 stories span suspense reasoning and mainstream literature, as if jumping from the canvas to the paper, which can be called a brilliant fit between literature and painting. Michael Connelly created three lonely men based on Nighthawk, and the lonely father commissioned a lonely detective novice to find his daughter. Stephen Edwin King's novel The Music Room, which Helmed Hoppe painted in 1932's Room in New York, is a testament to that again, by top best-selling authors who also have the skills and means of serious writers. Brock's "Autumn of the Cafeteria", based on "Cafeteria", is the last article in the collection of novels, which is not long, but it is the most concise work of the chief planner of the novel collection.
Excursion into Philosophy (1959).
As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies, the world is also shrouded in a haze of the Delta mutation virus. Countries have announced policies of social distancing at different times, but the response to dancing with drugs has also brought serious alienation to people in need of social interaction, urban life has not changed people to continue to distance themselves from real-life intimate relationships due to the wider availability of various social media, and the connection between people has become more delicate and fragile, becoming more alienated and lonely. Getting along with each other may be an emotional comfort, or an alternative sense of belonging, and when all this is momentarily withdrawn, people can only try to get used to a new way of living. Hope is like the explorer of "Excursion into Philosophy", trying to find the pure heart and emotion that people have lost for a long time, deeper communication, diving into the depths of the soul spirit with a paintbrush, portraying the loneliness and sorrow of modern people, and instantly solidifying it on the picture, so that the lost people can share, find their inner peace in loneliness, and redefine the time alone with themselves.