Blog Meridian: Edward Hopper

Friday, September 05, 2008

"The illusion just happens": Revisiting Mad Men

Edward Hopper, Office at Night, 1940. Click to enlarge. Image found here.

I remember what I said before about Mad Men. But then the Mrs. and I sat down this past weekend to watch the 6 episodes of Season Two presently available via Cox Cable's on-demand service.

The Mrs. and I agree: If Hopper paintings could talk . . . with, for me, the emphasis on the "talking" bit.

[Aside: I'd originally said "Vermeer," she said "Hopper." She wins; whatever else Mad Men is, there's no escaping its American-ness.]

When advertising works well you don't even know you're being spoken to in a way. The illusion just happens.--Michael Gladis, who plays copywriter Paul Kinsey on the show, speaking on "the craft of ads."

And so it was for me as I watched these episodes, just as it has been for me with my recurring visits, both personal and virtual, with especially-compelling Hopper paintings. "The illusion just happens." Which is to say that whereas, in that earlier post, when I said this--

I would have said "photorealist painting" instead of "interior decoration magazine," but the ideas is the same: Cultural references as discreetly-deployed throw-pillows. Surface is all.

--now, having actually seen some episodes, I'm not distracted by that surface (though I was more than a little startled when one episode began with "The Infanta," the opening song on the Decemberists' album Picaresque). The show is, after all, about what lies below surfaces, whether of fabric, of image and, in particular, of language.

I'm still not sure what these people and their stories have to do with me--there's still, for me, an emotional distance between me and them, they still being new to me and all. But I do have to say that this show's craft, the demands it makes on the viewer to watch and listen closely, makes for compelling watching.

On the teapot in Edward Hopper's Chop Suey

Image found here. You can see the full image here.

While I wasn't able to make it to Chicago to see the big Edward Hopper-Winslow Homer exhibition, my colleague Larry the movie guy was. While there, he bought the exhibition catalogue for the Hopper portion of the exhibit and has been kind enough to let me have a look at it. So far, it's been sitting unopened on my coffee table. This weekend, this weekend. But this morning I got to looking at the cover image (more or less the image for this post), in particular at the teapot.

The various discussions on this painting that I've looked at differ as to its mood, but those who happen to mention it state that the two women are sharing a meal, probably lunch. While that may potentially be the case, though, I would argue that that is not the case in the moment depicted here. The teapot argues my case--or, rather, its presence does, along with the absence of something.

I was struck by the teapot's square squatness, by the way its color anchors the white space of a painting otherwise dominated by its same shade of red, by its suggestion of a cozy intimacy. But the more I looked, the more I was struck by the fact that it's present at all. Its spout points, anticipant, into the space between the two women, but there is only one blue bowl on the table. No eating utensils. No teacups.

The teapot sits there, but its contents can't be shared. And in any case, its spout is turned slightly in the direction of the woman facing the viewer, its handle away from either of them. Likewise, the bowl is closer to her; whatever its eventual contents, its placement suggests that its contents may not be shared, either. Nor does she herself seem much inclined toward sharing: note her body language compared to that of her table companion--the one sitting back in her chair, her hands in her lap and an expressionless gaze directed as much at the viewer as at her, the other with her forearms resting halfway across the table, hands (apparently) clasped in front of her.

Far from being a depiction of intimacy--the activity of sharing--the teapot in Chop Suey signifies a social impotence: the absence of that which might make intimacy possible. It's a depiction of voids that neither food nor language can traverse, of potentialities that cannot be realized.

This is an awkward lunch. But then again, this is a painting of a lunch scene done by Edward Hopper. What else could I have expected?

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Other places to look, if you're interested:

The Heretik meditates on Hopper's light in the painting and on the loneliness of the women in Hopper's art.

This ArtsEditor post by Christopher Graffeo on Hopper generally (though it mentions Chop Suey) offers a sustained take on Hopper's art's "coupling of defined subjectivity and ambiguous narrative." That quality, according to Graffeo, makes Hopper's art a handy way to demonstrate the postructuralist idea of Text.