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 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, specifically that our consciousness dictated our hope for meaning. Existentialism argues that we always have a choice, which can be exemplified 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 difficult 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 difficult 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 finding 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 only way to fight this nausea was to look inward and find agency. By the 1950s however, existentialism became a more popular philosophy, especially with the help of American philosopher William Barrett, who investigated the historical and sociological significance of existentialism. Thus we set the scene for Hopper’s renditions of New York, women, and architecture.
Edward Hopper can be described as a pensive, solitudinous man who believed that the core of art could be found in an artist’s personality, and this was the defining aspect of originality in a world inevitably run on recreation. Hopper explored the world around him through a lens of aloneness more so than loneliness and utilized the simplicity of space, such as light, perspective, and water, to represent himself on the canvas. The many women he painted are often found in front of windows, seated or posing in such a way as to reveal their contemplation of life. His use of horizontal and vertical lines and their interactions, be it in the form of light coming through a window at an angle, or the end of a room seating a well-dressed woman, can be summarized in the words of Alfred Barr: the horizontals “are like the edge of a stage beyond which drama unfolds.” My own initial impression of Hopper’s paintings was that he likes corners, and it is true. His inclusion of women in these thoughtful and intentional replications of the world around him shows his respect for women. In his paintings, the women are still. They are as unmoving and fixed as the walls and windows he paints them in front of, and in the moment of his capture, they are completely unaware of their appearance to a perspective that renders them desirous through their gaze. The moving light of day also stills in these paintings and highlights the transcendence of such a moment, and we are grateful to have been included.
Hopper was no stranger to Sartrean thought and his depiction of women, especially Jo Hopper, his wife, shows that he gave them leave to be whole individuals with infinite possibilities for choice and freedom. It is always a welcome departure to see women be seen as humans and capable of fundamentally individual thought, and not as either goddesses or doormats, as Picasso liked to say. Edward Hopper’s popularity has only gone up over the years, and I find it fitting that the exhibition of his art in Paris drew in more visitors than Picasso. The Hopper exhibit at the Whitney Museum of art will be up until March 5 and if you also would like to view the world, and women, through the simplicity, wonder and longing that Hopper did and how he amazingly conveyed it through the canvas, I highly recommend it.
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