Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong
By Laura Perkins
I really wish that one Arthur Gilmore Doyle hereafter Doyle since I refuse to play his three- name monte game like he was some Brahmin grandee out of the 19th century swilling us with his robber baron
Heritage, pedigree some kenneled championship dog would get a life, would get some gainful employment other than clipping coupons or whatever the progeny of the robber barons does these days. Apparently after he arose out of his dead faint when I explained that James Abbott McNeill Whistler (four-name Montes are okay as long as you are an artist, once) was paying homage to the Whore of Babylon when he had his girlfriend of the time standing in a white dress with a sexually suggestive wolf’s head under her feet in painting variously titled The White Girl, Symphony In White and Homage To My Current Whore, well maybe not the last one. You would have thought that I had committed something like a mortal sin for having pretended that this great artist was not above some very risqué symbolism back in the days when such signs had to be submerged in polite society to sell to those self-same robber barons by the American ex-patriate (and other artists as well)
The gist of Doyle’s argument beyond the now usual hosanna to the saintliness of every artist who put paint to brush back in the 19th century when his robber baron forbears started buying artworks to move into high culture was that I am no art critic. A fact. Real fact which I have been at pains to declare. Doyle then went through some litany of names Johns Ruskin, Clement Devine, Erasmus Land and a few others none of them who I knew from Adam. Nor need to know since what I am about here in this series is showing there are more than two ways to at look ta works of art-sublime and more sublime. Some of them, those other ways while not sublime a word that Doyle used repeatedly to describe what I find more erotic than anything else. In that sense I have staked out some territory that has included sex in the equation when it has been called for whatever prissy Doyle may think. Especially with a guy like Whistler who slept with every one of his models, every woman who crossed his path as far as I have been able to discover.
He was sex-addled, I had to smirk to myself when one critic mentioned that Brother Whistler had a heathy interest in woman, oh really, as well as probably was high half the time, it would be interesting to see what kind of drugs he was doing let’s say when he was painting the so-called Symphony in Gray and Black or Etude in Beige and Chartreuse. Here, and this is only speculation not hard evidence, I think from that low-rent paint he was using so no wonder he had strange ideas about women, had called poor Johanna, his Whole of Babylon a lot worse than I have tagged him with. Once the medics revive Doyle again I may have a solution to our impasse. Here is my plan though which I think might be foolproof. I am moving on to 20th century artists specifically to Edward Hopper in this piece. Since Hopper did not have or use three names for his moniker, and everybody knows once you hit the 20th century even the most pristine abstract expressionists and advanced colorists know that it is all about sex and the unconscious desire to throw it on canvas I should be home free. So that should throw our man off the sense, get him off my ass.
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[Originally this is what I had to say about my plan which I have now scaled back. “So I have had enough of this. I have a plan, have been forced to devise a plan I think will work to keep Doyle off my ass. I have decided after three consecutive articles on 19th century painters which has caused me nothing but grief Doyle only being the most high-brow of the lot. You would not believe what vile things proper evangelicals full to the brim with Bible quotations and the like will utter in the anonymous cyberspace where troll-like they call home. For people who believe in repentance and forgiveness I have been shocked by the language and the vitriolic blasts I have had to endure for simply stating that even Renaissance guys, Leonardo, Fra this and that, definitely Botticelli when he was in his cups, Raphael when the turpentine high was on him only cared about subliminal ecstasy and rapture, ah, sex, when the deal went down. For that I am exiled from the Garden, forced to spend the time until End Times being flogged by dimwits-L.P.]
Now to Hopper the eternal mope-the guy who pictured alienation in about seven different ways. Really more since every freaking painting is like stab to the heart of modernity like we don’t already have enough nonsense going on without a guy endlessly painting bummers and having real critics like Alice Faye, Clem Devine, Lance Little and a fistful of others yakking about the man and moment meeting in about 1925 when Hopper was in his prime, before he started taking up with womenfolk and seeing where that led. Here is the kick though later on in life after he graced his canvases with alienated and angst-ridden folk he started to think about morality about the great arch of life from birth to death as he reached the age when men and women start to think about their own mortality. No big deal just had a country scene, a big old white house near some forest put an older woman, frail, what did Alice Faye call her, yes, matronly and then a younger woman dressed for the season, summer season and all that means. Beautiful-life and death. Along that same line had a self-conscious woman young in a summer dress looking cool as a cucumber except for an outsized hat which dwarfed her face looking like some latter-day Genghis Khan, ready to do battle with all to keep her place in the sum. But that was latter stuff, stuff I will detail more in another piece or two for today I want to get that Doyle off my case and need to stay with this alienation and angst business to get him to stop his cyber-madness. (I have no expectations on those troll-like angel pinheads calling End Times on me for we all have our collective crosses to bear, Christian or not).
That is later stuff when he got into the swing of things, when he had already made a name for himself as the master of the alienated and angst-ridden modern set. Who can forget that famous, maybe too famous, Nighthawks at the Diner where some Joe and Nemo’s crowd is waiting for Godot or somebody after the bars closed for the night and they need a saucer full of coffee and grease-laden hamburgers to set their world right. They might as well have been at the Automat for all the interaction between the lonely people. How about that great dimly lit drugstore with the Ex-Lax (or is it Ex-Lac) saying more about the world than any people-populated piece even though that whole scene is filled with more menace than if he had put a jack-roller over in the back behind that searchlight-like street light. One more to draw my point. How about that famous, or infamous, painting down at the National Gallery, now mercifully reopened, with the two people looking for all the world like they were ready for divorce court and the dog looking like the happiest one of the lot since at least he will land on his feet. I could go on and on, but I think I have made my point about Hopper being the king of alienation and angst in the post-Freudian world.
Naturally as I have done with the previous three artists looked at in this on-going series I have a special presentation, a scoop if you will about the why of Hopper’s mopery, why his people don’t smile. I have had access from the archives to his art school or whatever training he had and have found a very interesting discovery looking over some of his early facial drawings. Hopper, hold onto your hats, never learned to draw faces with people smiling, except maybe ironic closed-mouth smiles. Never could quite get the hang of people opening up their lips in order to smile, hell, or look like they were capable of talking. I thought I was dreaming but then I showed the specimens to Sam Lowell and he agreed that the closest Hopper got to a smile, to an open mouth was some early tooth-decayed grotesque done when he was an illustrator, something hideous which would not reflect modern life, modern angst.
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