Loneliness in art.

It is midnight in 1940s New York, and we are at a diner on Greenwich Avenue. The inside is bathed in strong fluorescent lights as compared to the stagnant darkness on the outside, reflecting onto us the anxiety and turmoil of our own inner minds. A waiter is serving the nighthawk and a lady, she could be anyone, his wife, girlfriend, a stranger. The nighthawk has a cigarette in his hands and there’s an invisible wall between him and the woman. A solitary man sits with his back towards us with a glass in his hands. There’s a certain eeriness in the air and we notice that there’s no entrance or exit to the diner. There is a door but it probably leads to the kitchen. The four figures are trapped in confinement, each lost in their inner worlds of pain, sorrow or guilt, for us to observe from a distance.

‘Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist’, once said Edward Hopper, creator of the well-known painting, the Nighthawks. Hopper was born in 1882, in a yacht-building centre town of Nyack, New York. He was inclined towards art from a very young age, and his parents provided him with all the necessary equipment to pursue his interests. Though, his parents insisted that he study commercial arts to have a reliable source of income. Hopper went on to work as an illustrationist for magazines in New York and he deeply despised this job. In some of his earlier self-portraits, we can see him represent himself as skinny, ungraceful and a bit anxious. This self-reflection was perhaps due to the struggle he often faced to find inspiration. Hopper travelled to Paris thrice to escape the commercialization of modern art, yet he claimed to never have heard of a ‘Picasso’.

Hopper was fascinated by cities and the life it brings. He would ride the El train and look at the dark glimpses of office interiors, that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on his mind. New York, despite being the greatest city in the world had this gloomy undertone to it. Hopper encapsulated these feelings in his realistic paintings.

Most of the hopper’s paintings feature solitary figures, reminiscing in their own worlds. They are regular people we see every day at regular places, yet he shows us something which we often fail to perceive. A gas station, motels, diners, a hotel room, light hitting them at a certain angle and the people in these pictures are often weary. It’s almost as if the loneliness seeps through these frames. In his painting The Automat, we see a woman sitting alone in a café. It is dark outside and the café is masked in artificial lights. She holds a cup and looks down, her figure suggesting the anxiousness and gloominess she feels on the inside. She seems lonely, alienated in a city filled with strangers. Lost in her thoughts and the world inside of her.

‘It’s probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don’t know. it could be the whole human condition’, Edward Hopper said on the lack of communication between the people in his paintings.

Hopper’s painting almost resembles frames out of a movie. Life is at a standstill and we are left to wonder what’ll happen next. This might be a result of Hopper’s love for theatre and movies.

His paintings are a safe abode to many like most of the artwork that touches on these very intimate themes tend to be. It is sort of a reminder that you’re not alone in this loneliness and there are people who have/are experiencing almost the same feelings elsewhere. One of the key features of his paintings is the depiction of the modern ‘American life’. And it is not just limited to a particular country but anywhere in the world with gas stations and restaurants. This feeling of isolation, doing the most mundane and general jobs, transcends. These gloomy themes in art are well-revered because it reassures us that these feelings are normal and it is not strange to experience them.

Hopper met Josephine, his wife, in his early forties. Jo was a social painter and Hopper finally had someone to be with. Yet as we know through his paintings, Hopper soon discovered that one can still be lonely, in a relationship. And that love does not put an end to loneliness. In his paintings, we see different characters who are together in that same frame yet lost in their own. ‘So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious.’

His career improved after his marriage. His paintings began to sell and he got critical acclamation and recognition. Though, he preferred a life of solitude, living out of the public eye. He painted his most famous artwork, Nighthawks in 1942. Unlike his other works, this painting had multiple figures, yet it evoked that very sense of loneliness. The lights and the colours in the painting set up the mood. When asked about the location of the diner in the painting, hopper said, ‘It’s a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets met'. Yet the place was not found anywhere in New York. Perhaps the diner did not exist in real life, but somewhere inside ourselves. ‘An expression of the subconscious’, as Hopper used to say.

Artists and writers through the decades have always talked about this omnipresent human condition through their respective art forms. Be it Murakami comparing us to satellites, ‘lonely lumps of metal in our own separate orbits’, or Plath writing multiple poems on the same. And Hopper’s art depicting urban loneliness and the sense of alienation persisting among a sea of people.

Though Hopper often shrugged off deeper psychological interpretations of his art, a mood of loneliness and regret still prevails over most of his work. And this hopperesque is something we all are still familiar with, years and generations after.

Circa August 2021