Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation
1981; College Art Association; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043249.1981.10792460
ISSN2325-5307
Autores Tópico(s)Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
ResumoEdward Hopper's Gas of 1940 (Pt. 9) is a potent image of a particularly American version of the condition of alienation. It is in no sense to be understood as “symbolizing” American life in general: the gas station does not “stand for” some transcendent idea beyond its own existence in the sense that the withered tree in Caspar David Friedrich's Old Oak in Morning Light stands for some idea like “heroic endurance,” a symbolic resonance reinforced by poetic light and suggestively infinite distances. Rather, Hopper, a realist, works with the rhetorical device of synecdoche, the substitution of a concrete part for an equally concrete whole. The power of the painting lies in its ability to convince on the level of the factual, in its terse visual rendering of the evocative in the everyday, of that which is glimpsed and briefly remembered while passing through. Yet Hopper's version of the factual is not characterized by the singularity, the almost picturesque particularization and pathos, of the documentary photograph by Walker Evans (Fig. 1), which specifies a kind of rootedness in a specific region, class, or social style.
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