Interesting article on BBC Culture this morning about the depiction of urban loneliness in the paintings of Edward Hopper based on excerpts from The Lonely City, a new book by Olivia Laing.
Excerpt:
“This is the thing about cities, the way that even indoors you’re always at the mercy of a stranger’s gaze. Wherever I went – pacing back and forth between the bed and couch; roaming into the kitchen to regard the abandoned boxes of ice cream in the freezer – I could be seen by the people who lived in the Arlington, the vast Queen Anne co-op that dominated the view, its 10 brick storeys lagged in scaffolding. At the same time, I could also play the watcher, Rear Window-style, peering in on dozens of people with whom I’d never exchange a word, all of them engrossed in the small intimacies of the day. Loading a dishwasher naked; tapping in on heels to cook the children’s supper.”
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker (Source: Wikipedia). Born in 1882, Edward Hopper trained as an illustrator and devoted much of his early career to advertising and etchings. Influenced by the Ashcan School and taking up residence in New York City, Hopper began to paint the commonplaces of urban life with still, anonymous figures, and compositions that evoke a sense of loneliness. His famous works include House by the Railroad (1925), Automat (1927) and the iconic Nighthawks (1942). Hopper died in 1967 (Source: Biography.com).
Read the full article here: The dark side of the city | BBC Culture
About Wassily Kandinsky
There is an eternal attribute about the city that Harbert captures in depicting a waterfront city at dusk. The onset of dusk is indicated both by the colors of the painting’s background and the use of white in representing the internal lights of the buildings, much in the same way as Georgia O’Keefe’s Radiator Building-Night, New York (1927). In The Blue City, the lights of the city buildings are abstractly reflected in the water at the base of the painting. There is a vibrancy of color contrasted between the upper (reds, browns, and greens) and lower portions (blues, whites, and greens) of the painting. The Blue City reminds us in an abstracted form that the city is always in motion in every dimension (length, width, breadth – the horizontal and vertical – and time itself). In this sense, Harbert captures something about the eternal dynamic of motion in the city. When it comes to the existential being of the city, we may not see it from afar – for example, as we gaze at the skyline of a city – but motion is an essential fact of the thing itself.
About Rejcel Harbert
Perhaps skewed by an American perspective towards the land, it might suggest terre potentiel (the potential of the land). Humans have already intervened in the landscape for agricultural uses and the river already serves as a transportation hub, both associated with the support mechanisms for urban living. “In this pattern of fields, all is order, timeless structure, with a poetic element added… in twentieth-century creative language” (Source: PaulKlee.net). It is in this ‘timeless structure of order’ that can be found the design traces of a future urban pattern, a future city that has yet to emerge from the land but the potential for its emergence is already etched in the landscape. I love this painting, not so much for what it represents in the ‘here and now’ (though it is beautiful only on these terms) but what it represents about the possible, the “undiscovered country,” …the future, where all travelers must venture but none may journey before it is time.
About Paul Klee