Ravished by sunlight

Ravished by sunlight Two exhibitions this week: Tamara de Lempicka at the Royal Academy of Art, and Edward Hopper at the Tate Modern. Having admired Hopper’s brooding melancholy all my life I was surprised to find de Lempicka’s work is what I would rather hang. Hopper turns out to be a one-trick pony, good though the trick is.

De Lempicka made her reputation with society portraits. Her subjects’ bodies are massive and listless, like Lucian Freud’s inert sitters. They are framed by Vorticist icons of energy: ships, skyscrapers, power stations, the idols of Fascism. But the eyes are distracted, remote, providing, one suspects, a cheap simulacrum of spirituality.

Hopper’s subjects are also immobile, but not, as de Lempicka’s, drowned in dreaming flesh. For Hopper is fascinated by the junction of private and public spaces. And his public spaces are vast and inhuman, typically a clear morning sky above vast blank walls and roofs. The light — or dark — is immanent, transcendent, and leans in to pin his subjects like butterflies in a glass box. Sometimes they are unaware of this, as in Night Windows, or House at Dusk, but more often they are transfixed, staring through a window into immensity.

In the famous Nighthawks, he redoubles the trick: the diner’s counter echoes the structure of the darkened street, the animated interchange between the well-lit couple and the soda jerk, a stepped-down immanence observed from the private space defined by the hunched coffee-drinker’s cup and elbows. In the preparatory sketches this figure, the pivot of the painting, is elaborated — he has weight and presence despite having his back to the viewer. But in the finished picture he is smudged, erased.

Often the private space is represented simply by an open window or doorway leading to a dark interior, as in Early Sunday Morning. In Summertime he doubles the trick again. Breeze disturbs the net curtain guarding the private space behind an open window, but his subject stands in full sunlight on the front stoop, from her clothes and posture apparently waiting to be met. But her summer dress is unexpectedly sheer, and the harsh light reveals more of her legs than we might suppose she means to show, erotically invading her private spaces. She is as much invaded by the light as his other subjects revealed naked or half-dressed in their rooms.

Hopper’s light is divine — in the classical Greek sense, inhuman and demanding. It is tolerable in his near hyper-realist landscapes, like Captain Upton’s House. Like a neutron bomb, it does little damage to land or buildings. (Though the Upton house does bravely sport a couple of open windows.)

But the girl in Summertime is as ravished by sunlight as Leda was by Zeus. If Hopper’s paintings are suffused by melancholy it is because his subjects are confronted with the transcendent and merely confounded by it. Even when his pictures are set in large cities, it is this missing response that binds Hopper’s reputation to small-town America.