The Lonely City Read Online Free PDF Page B

not-rightness, by rendering it in little jabs of white and grey and dirty yellow.
    For a few years he went back and forth to Europe, but in 1910 he settled permanently in Manhattan. ‘It seemed awfully crude and raw here when I got back,’ he remembered decades later. ‘It took me ten years to get over Europe.’ He was jarred by New York, its frenetic pace, the relentless pursuit of the long green. In fact, money quickly became a major problem. For a long time, no one was interested in his paintings at all, and he scraped by as an illustrator, hating the clichéd commissions, the dismal necessityof lugging a portfolio all over town, an unwilling salesman for work he didn’t think at all worthwhile.
    They weren’t exactly rich in relationships either, those first American years. No girlfriend, though there might have been brief liaisons here and there. No intimate friendships, and only occasional contact with his family. Colleagues and acquaintances, yes, but a life notably short on love, though long on independence, long too on that discarded virtue, privacy.
    This sense of separation, of being alone in a big city, soon began to surface in his art. By the early 1920s, he was making a name for himself as an authentically American artist, stubbornly sticking with realism despite the fashionable tide of abstraction filtering in from Europe. He was determined to articulate the day-to-day experience of inhabiting the modern, electric city of New York. Working first with etchings and then in paint, Hopper began to produce a distinctive body of images that captured the cramped, anxious, sometimes alluring experience of urban living.
    His scenes – of women glimpsed through windows, of disordered bedrooms and tense interiors – were improvised from things he saw or half saw on long walks around Manhattan. ‘They are not factual,’ he said much later. ‘Perhaps there were a very few of them that were. You can’t go out and look up at an apartment and stand in the street and paint but many things have been suggested by the city.’ And elsewhere: ‘The interior itself was my main interest . . . simply a piece of New York, the city that interests me so much.’
    None of these drawings show crowds, of course, though the crowd is surely the signature sight of the city. Instead they focuson the experience of isolation: of people alone or in awkward, uncommunicative couples. It’s the same limited and voyeuristic view that Alfred Hitchcock would later subject James Stewart to in the Hopperesque Rear Window, a film that is likewise about the dangerous visual intimacy of urban living, of being able to survey strangers inside what were once private chambers.
    Among the many people Stewart’s character L. B. Jeffries watches over from his Greenwich Village apartment are two female figures who might have walked straight out of a Hopper painting. Miss Torso is a sexy blonde, though her popularity is more superficial than it initially appears, while Miss Lonelyhearts is an unhappy, not quite attractive spinster, consistently displayed in situations that attest to her inability to find either companionship or contentment in solitude. She’s seen preparing dinner for an imaginary lover, weeping and consoling herself with alcohol, picking up a stranger, then fighting him off when his advances go too far.
    In one excruciating scene, Jeffries watches through a zoom lens as she makes herself up in a mirror, dressed in an emerald green suit, before putting on large black glasses to assess the effect. The act is intensely private, not intended for spectators. Instead of displaying the polished exterior she’s so painstakingly produced, what she inadvertently reveals instead is her longing and vulnerability, her desire to be desirable, her fear that she’s running short on what remains for women a chief currency of exchange. Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to