There are two strikingly opposed elements going on in this painting and I'm not sure I ever realized the second one until tonight.
This view no longer exists, save for its immortalization by Edward Hopper where you can see it hanging on Renzo Piano's new walls of The Whitney Museum of American Art in the smoldering hot neighborhood known as The Meatpacking District. It is Seventh Avenue at 15th Street, ironically a five-minute walk to where the painting now calls home. It is Sunday morning. It is 1930.
I've always been enamored by the crispness of Hopper's works, how he seems to suck every molecule of air out of his paintings so that we are left with something so dead it is alive. Or better put, utterly pregnant with possibility.
Here, the quiet closed shops on Seventh Avenue are topped with apartments. The only thing that suggests humans live behind the glass are the particular tastes of the window treatments. But the un-spinning barber pole, the cloudless sky, and morning's long shadows suggest more than a loneliness one might think at first. They suggest a stage where the first person to enter left will start the clocks and set in motion a series of events that might alter the flight path of a swallow in Capistrano or knock a nova towards a galactic spectacle millions of light years away.
What I never quite noticed in Hopper's works before is that this specificity, this crispness, this exactitude of a vacuum, is all illusory. He is an impressionist. I'd always assumed I knew what the shops were. But you cannot read the signs. I'd always admired the shadows of the detailed copper crown molding so easily found on the streets of New York City. But I'd assumed their detail, perhaps because I filled in the blanks with my own memory, or because the carefully crafted repetition of his impressions left me feeling the detail. I even wonder that I'd seen people in the windows in the past. They are not there.
But by giving us this template of a morning with which we are all so familiar, simply perhaps by the slant of light, and suggesting the things we know so well, Hopper fires up our imaginations, each of us different, with different stories to tell, the people waiting for their entrance, the hilarious, the terrifying, the stories of joy and pathos, the possibility behind each pane.
Hopper paints this masterpiece, deceptive as it is, and then turns to each of us and whispers, "Okay. Go!"
