Hopper's transparent but impenetrable windows, on the other hand, are emblems at once of desire and separation. Sometimes dismissed as a mere mannerism, Hopper's windows are central to his understanding of life in the modern city. Where the window displays of the department stores stir up fantasies of intimacy, Hopper's subjects remain permanently inaccessible, unapproachable, even unreadable. [Click for CONFERENCE AT NIGHT (1949)]

Edward Hopper, Night Hawks (1942)
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M. (1926)
Consequently, Hopper's audience is reduced to an uncomfortable voyeurism -- and this is true regardless of whether the figures in a given painting are dressed or undressed. (Though I am obliged to add, parenthetically, a question my wife asked after visiting the Hopper exhibition last month: "Why do the men get to be lonely with their clothes on, but so many of the women have to be lonely naked?") [Click for MORNING IN A CITY (1944)]

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.

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