signs of passion appear like rashes
As the Edward Hopper exhibit closes at the Whitney, Donald Kuspit asks if the artist was a closet Cubist.
Hopper is an ironical intimatist, perhaps most obviously in his interiors. They are as geometrically barren and alienating as his exteriors. Intimacy is impossible in them, only loneliness, as the figures who pass through them -- often leaving their luggage unpacked -- suggest. The interiors convey the false intimacy of mass culture. It involves the need for the organically exciting and enlivening -- and the socially perverse transformation of it into boring lifeless kitsch almost as soon as it is experienced. This expressive reduction is evident in the fake ornament and homogenizing color that routinely adorn Hopper’s buildings and rooms. They are deceptive tokens of superficial difference on indifferent facades. There is no escape from life-draining anonymity and banality in Hopper’s world. There is only false uniqueness hiding radical sameness.
