Edward Hopper. Two Puritans , 1945.
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of stars,” Whitman writes in fragment 31 of his song. Hopper would give up the ambition of his “grandfather”. The journey work of the stars is far removed from the humble life of the grass, and every human being is simply dust in the wind. “And the narrowest hinge in my hand”, Whitman continues, “puts to scorn all machinery”. And Hopper must respectfully demonstrate the limitations of the poet’s assertions, teaching us how all “machinery” of which the megalopolis, the technological city, is the most complex expression, puts to scorn and dehumanises each of the leaves which are the characters in the painter’s works. But Hopper has also learnt from the author of Song... one essential thing, and in representing them he more than compensates these silent and solitary, anonymous figures, always lost in the morass of events, seeking shelter at the corner of the counter in a bar, in the overwhelming impersonality of a motel room, in the neatly aligned garden of a terraced house, and he shows us their essential, irrevocable dignity.
Like the poet, Hopper seems to want himself to “become the wound”. Like him, the painter refuses to ask his characters how they feel; in every painting he becomes one of them. It is not hard to think of Hopper painting another as if he were painting himself. Or to put it better, perhaps, moved to pick up his brushes in the conviction that by painting another he filled himself with meaning. As Whitman says: That I could forget the mockers and insults! That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers! That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning! These lines seem to provide the motif for an early painting by Hopper, heavily inf luenced by Munch. It is entitled Soir Bleu. On the terrace of a bar overlooking a lake or the seaside, decked out as if for a soirée, we see a bourgeois couple sitting at a table, looking disapprovingly at a clown, presumably a part
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