Windows And Nudes: Edward Hopper at the Whitney
Going to see the city’s solitude, Annie and I ran into six people we knew. My neighbors Victor and Amy who had given me marigolds when summer ended from the boxes on their terrace. It was Victor’s birthday, they were there to see the Hopper. And we ran into S., a professor of ours who was with an early modernist (that was how he was introduced, as men become their subjects) she’d met a decade ago at a conference, visiting from England and wearing an Intrepid t-shirt, two sizes too large. I remarked that it must be a kind of whiplash to go from touring the arms of an aircraft carrier to strolling by Hopper’s paintings beside the same waterfront, within blocks. “Well,” he said, an early modernist, “it’s all culture.”
We used to be so brave and slutty, cramming ourselves regularly into these giant people-mover elevators, maskless and perfumed, to look at canvases shoulder to shoulder with beautiful strangers. I never knew just how brave and slutty I was. We used to sit in movie theaters, in the dark with these strangers, trusting like Odessyeus that if anybody fucked up treating a stranger like a prince the heavens would spoil their grace. Now, it was a special occasion to be so brave and slutty. It was Victor’s birthday; Ed was visiting from overseas, and Annie and I needed to alleviate the claustrophobia of our intense physical affection with the pressures of propriety that comes with sharing public space.
The Whitney was packed. Our tickets were even timed to make us mull around for eight minutes in the lobby to unburden the galleries upstairs of the cumulative weight of some attention.
Hooper’s paintings are of great American Solitudes. He came from the suburbs and made the Village live up to its name. His dedications are to the low-rise, the snapshot and the nude. His nudes have a Van Eyke quality of Eve before shame was invented, I mean a naive American nudity that doesn’t even contrapposto, that makes you really wonder how he ever got a model to do that for him, make him disappear. It’s like Schrödinger’s nudes, somehow x-rayed through the box and never set by observation. You get a feeling Hopper was the kind of guy who could look in a mirror without contorting his face into the mask of sociability, that he was comfortable, tragic and restrained enough to see himself and others slack jawed.
Mostly, his streets are empty. I mean they are walked in on dreaming or wondering too, exhausted or comfortable enough not to wear their infamous, celebrated garments of bustle or taxi cabs. Even I am young enough to remember nighttimes in Chinatown where Columbus Park chanted with crickets.
There is a kind of curatorial joke on the 8th floor where the Hoppers were hung: around a white divider on which was displayed a giant rectangular canvas of an empty main street of frumpy two storey brownstones, there’s a floor-to-ceiling wall of windows overlooking 14th Street and Gansevoort. Seating invites you to admire this landscape, typical of New New York: the tangled profusion of high rise; a billboard of a nearly-nude woman, just as in solitude but not at all alone, that reads “Supremacy” (a brand name?). Three American flags are visible. On an astroturfed rooftop yard, a group of five freezing guys hold a party around a folding table. Being in the new Whitney building is like being in a foreign embassy—I mean no matter what you’re experiencing with your senses, you can never really forget you’re standing on the soil of Real Estate. In some definite way, in the penumbras of vertigo, Real Estate is distinct from architecture. The other curatorial joke is that so many people, more than I had seen in one place in three years, had come to see paintings of the city empty.
On the river side of the museum, there’s a stairwell where you can find the one streaked and grimed window on the 6th floor. Just below, there’s a huge pit of stones and crap, spotted with the yellow hides of dirt movers and rock crushers. You get the idiot impulse to look for a plaque explaining it. In a couple of months it will be Manhattan’s first public beach.
Anyway, I hadn’t come for the Hoppers. I’d come to see if the Whitney finally got over themselves enough to bring a couple of their Larry Rivers paintings out of the basement and actually hang them on the wall. They hadn’t. I think I read somewhere that this new building has less wall space than the old one. This is what I’m talking about Real Estate. Still, I am learning about nudes and windows. When I first met Annie on 14th by the C train, I removed my glove just to kiss her cheek.