The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [14]
And in these ignored, often derided landscapes, Hopper found poetry: the poésie des motels, the poésie des petits restaurants au bord d'une route. His paintings (and their resonant titles) suggest a consistent interest in five different kinds of travelling places:
1. HOTELS
Hotel Room (1931)
Hotel Lobby (1943)
Rooms for Tourists (1945)
Hotel by a Railroad (1952)
Hotel Window (1956)
Western Motel (1957)
2. ROADS AND PETROL STATIONS
Road in Maine (1914)
Gas (1940)
Route 6, Eastham (1941)
Solitude (1944)
Four-Lane Road (1956)
3. DINERS AND CAFETERIAS
Automat‘(1927)
Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958)
4. VIEWS FROM TRAINS
House by the Railroad (1925)
New York, New Haven and Hat-ford‘(1931)
Railroad Embankment (1932)
Toward Boston (1936)
Approaching a City (1946)
Road and Trees (1962)
5. VIEWS INSIDE TRAINS AND OF ROLLING STOCK
Night on the El Train (1920)
Locomotive (1925)
Compartment C, Car 293 (1938)
Daivn in Pennsylvania (1942)
Chair Car (1965)
Loneliness is the dominant theme here. Hopper's figures seem far from home; they sit or stand alone, looking at a letter on the edge of a hotel bed or drinking in a bar, gazing out the window of a moving train or reading a book in a hotel lobby. Their faces are vulnerable and introspective. Having perhaps just left someone or been left themselves, they are in search of work, sex or company, adrift in transient places. It is often night, and through the window come the darkness and threat of the open country or of a strange city.
In Automat (1927), a woman sits alone drinking a cup of coffee. It is late and, to judge by her hat and coat, cold outside. The room seems large, brightly lit and empty. The decor is functional, with a stone-topped table, hard-wearing black wooden chairs and white walls. The woman looks self-conscious and slightly afraid, unused to sitting alone in a public place. Something appears to have gone wrong. She unwittingly invites the viewer to imagine stories for her, stories of betrayal or loss. She is trying not to let her hand shake as she moves the coffee cup to her lips. It may be eleven at night in February in a large North American city.
Automatic a picture of sadness, and yet it is not a sad picture. It has
Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927
the power of a great melancholy piece of music. Despite the stark-ness of the furnishings, the location itself does not seem wretched. Others in the room may be on their own as well, men and women drinking coffee by themselves, similarly lost in thought, similarly distanced from society: a common isolation that generally has the beneficial effect of lessening the oppressive sense within any one person that he or she is alone in being alone. In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafes, we may dilute our feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community. The lack of domesticity, the bright lights and anonymous furniture may come as a relief from what are often the false comforts of home. It may be easier to give way to sadness here than in a living room with wallpaper and framed photos, the decor of a refuge that has let us down.
Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naive—as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. The figures in Hopper's art are not opponents of home per se; it is simply that in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or onto the road. The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world—those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific poets.
6.
As the car slips