Edward Hopper, Night Hawks (1942)
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M. (1926) |
Hotel Room is one of at least four Hopper paintings with "hotel" or "motel" in its title, and a dozen others are set in bedrooms that have the look and feel of nondescript hotels or boarding houses. For Hopper, the hotel is the setting and symbol of modern dislocation, the place where anonymous, interchangeable people pause briefly on their unknowable journeys.
Henry James had preceded Hopper in the conclusion that the hotel was the supremely representative twentieth-century American building. In The American Scene, James called the hotel "a synonym" for a collapsed civilization, and he went on to ask if "the hotel spirit may not just be the American spirit, most seeking and most finding itself."
The hotel symbolized for James the very stuff of human restlessness, defying any margin of personal stability. A similar theme is at work in Hopper's pictures. To return for a moment to Thomas Hovenden's painting, Breaking Home Ties, Hopper's hotels and rented rooms are the antonyms and antitheses of such homes: home ties, once broken, are not repaired.