THE DOODLING DUCK Edward Hopper’s women

BY POOJA RAJADURAI ‘23

My recent visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art included a tour of the Edward Hopper exhibition, a showing of a painter whom we might be faintly familiar with, but who has truly shaped the landscape of American art in irrefutable ways. While making my way through the exhibit, I started to notice the way in which Hopper portrayed women: despite their varying degrees of nudity, it became increasingly apparent that this underrated American painter had portrayed them with respect and intrigue. Contrasted with Picasso’s dissection of women on the canvas, Hopper left his women whole, so much so that it can be argued that his women revealed the Sartrean concept of existential freedom. The explanation of Sartre’s philosophy merits a

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small digression which I hope you will allow me to do. Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher who believed that all conceivable freedom lay in that which we could bring our minds to understand, specifcally that our consciousness dictated our hope for meaning. Existentialism argues that we always have a choice, which can be exemplifed in the irony of a question postulated by historian Mary Beard; Beard argued that we shouldn’t judge the Oxfam relief workers in Haiti for using prostitutes because people usually make poor choices in difcult situations. She received backlash for this statement, but she doubled down by asking her students what they would have done in Nazi Germany, to which they all answered that they would have joined the Resistance. In response, she pointed out that statistically, most of them would have been collaborators or bystanders. The concept of answering questions of what we “would” have done with ideas of what we “should” have done is exactly where Sartre’s principles come into play. A true existentialist would argue with someone who claimed that they had no choice that they do in fact have a choice. As such, existential freedom is very difcult and relies on the individual to retain their freedom to choose.

Sartrean notions give rise to the prisoner’s freedom philosophy: not that the prisoner can come and go as he or she pleases, but rather, they have the choice of how to deal with life in prison. The prisoner, or the human, can never lose his or her ontological (or metaphysical) freedom. Interestingly enough, Sartre was not well received in the Americas initially because American philosophers found his ideology depressing. This can be surprising given that in simple terms, Sartre says a person can always be free. At least personally, I thought this was motivating, hopeful, positive even. But it’s important to note that Sartre was truly a man hardened by life. He had faced the loss of many close family members early in his life, was bullied as a child, and lived in France during WWII. Pushed to the brink of existentialism by his own weaning hope of fnding happiness in external materials, Sartre believed, in his own words, that “man is condemned to be free.” He believed that the world was a sphere of nothingness that gave way to nausea and the